Vegas Insider<\/a> Wilder\u2019s surprise choice reaches back more than a decade \u2014 and to a country not typically associated with heavyweight punchers.<\/p>\n\u201cWhen I think about the hardest, I can remember that the feeling in the ring was Johann Duhaupas, the Frenchman. Every time he hit me with his jab, I kept thinking in my head, \u2018God damn, he hit hard. He got grits in his gloves.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
In the second defence of his WBC title, Wilder was matched with \u2018The Reptile\u2019, who had gone the distance just nine times in his previous 34 bouts. A partisan crowd of more than 8,000 in Wilder\u2019s hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, watched their man systematically break Duhaupas down, leaving him battered and bloodied by the time the fight was stopped in the 11th round.<\/p>\n
The challenger did have his moments, however, most notably in the second round, when Wilder\u2019s left eye began to swell noticeably.<\/p>\n
\u201cI kept saying, \u2018I can\u2019t keep taking these jabs.\u2019 He was the only fighter that made me really think like that. If I got hit, I was like, \u2018Dang, that hurt.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s the one I remember. So I always give him that gratitude and that acknowledgement. Salute, bro. I still think about you. He hit me so hard, I still think about him!\u201d<\/p>\n
Wilder went on to conquer the heavyweight division with a right hand that became his calling card<\/a>, but even the sport\u2019s most feared punchers remember the nights they felt it coming back at them. For Johann Duhaupas, it was one brutal defeat \u2014 and an unlikely place in heavyweight folklore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Deontay Wilder has shared the ring with some of the heavyweight division\u2019s biggest punchers \u2014 yet the opponent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":389624,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,49,48,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-389623","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/389624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}