Watching a 17-year-old Lamine Yamal glide past grown men with a football at his feet, you would be forgiven for thinking youth conquers all and that so-called “man strength” is but a fallacy. So easy does the teenager make it look, you forget his age, you forget he wears braces, and you fight the temptation to call him the best footballer in the world. Not the best young footballer in the world, but the best footballer in the world, period.
In boxing, it is tougher for a teenager to thrive among adults, but still it is not impossible. Wilfred Benitez, for example, managed to win his WBA junior-welterweight title at the age of just 17. You also have Mike Tyson, who terrified the heavyweight division as a teenager before becoming the youngest heavyweight champion of all time at the age of 20.
That record endures to this day, which is no surprise when one factors in Tyson’s meteoric rise and the very nature of the heavyweight division. At heavyweight, the men are even bigger, manlier and scarier and therefore maturity and “man strength” is even more crucial. That Tyson managed to gain his at such a tender age marked him out as an exception rather than the rule – a freak of nature, if you will. Nobody, after all, has a neck quite like him, a back quite like him, or a punch quite like him. Moreover, the ferocity Tyson exhibited on the way to his title was that of a teenager forced to grow up quickly and become the man of the house earlier than he would have wanted. It was, alas, the ferocity of a young boy who had been forced against his will to have to fend for himself – typically, in the presence of older men.
Even now, with the proliferation of titles, and with the heavyweight division shallower than ever, no fighter has come close to replicating the speed at which Tyson reached the top. Some have spoken about it, and some have tried, but any attempt to match “Iron” Mike was invariably stifled either by a sudden loss or the realisation that it does nobody any good to rush things. For Tyson isn’t just the template for a lot of heavyweights, you see, he is also the cautionary tale. He is the example of what happens when you rise too quickly and burn out too quickly and what happens when you are programmed only to destroy and not sustain. This, for some, would be enough; perhaps the way they would prefer their career to go. Yet, for most, there is a greater value in biding one’s time and earning money consistently over a longer period.
To do that, of course, a fighter must take the right fights at the right time and they must resist the urge to run before they can walk. At heavyweight, especially, there is danger at every turn, and therefore it is vital that a prospect be guided carefully and with a degree of caution. Only then can they mature and improve and only then can they reach the summit at just the right time.
In the UK, the latest heavyweight to toy with the idea of breaking Tyson’s record only to understand its level of difficulty is Moses Itauma, now 20 years of age. Itauma, in the eyes of many, is not only the heavyweight division’s brightest prospect, but arguably the brightest prospect in the sport, which makes the task of guiding him both exciting and fraught with potential hazards.
So far Itauma has, since turning pro in 2023, amassed an 11-0 (9) professional record and struck the perfect balance between taking necessary fights against journeymen and taking the odd compelling one just to maintain interest. Indeed, having blasted out his first two opponents inside a round, it became clear that Itauma’s development phase would be anything but standard and that his diet would have to be tweaked ever so slightly to ensure he remained sated and that his early bouts were worth watching. His promoter, Frank Warren, was the man tasked with making this tweak and it wasn’t long before Itauma was fighting the likes of Mariusz Wach, whom he stopped in two rounds, and Demsey McKean, whom he stopped in one. Suddenly now, on account of those wins, Itauma is viewed as more than just a prospect. Now, as he prepares for fight number 12 this Saturday, he is viewed as somebody who can be fast-tracked and who could, by his 21st birthday (in December), have fought – and presumably beaten – a top contender or two.
He is, on the evidence to date, that good. He is not good enough – or perhaps impatient enough – to break Mike Tyson’s record, but he has shown enough already to have plenty suggesting he is the heir apparent and that his ascent is more a question of when and not if. In fact, of all the questions Itauma will inevitably have to face on his sprint to the top, it is the question of timing that could be the trickiest for him to answer. After all, given the extent of his talent, how much longer do you wait to capitalise on an ageing heavyweight division? Is it better, in this scenario, for a prospect like Itauma to bide his time and wait for these creaking heavyweights to retire, or should he instead pounce at the first sign of weakness and add their names to his record?
Matchmaking, for Itauma and any prospect, is not an exact science, nor is there a prescribed way of doing things. In Itauma’s case, you are dealing with a talent who would, in football terms, be described as “generational”; meaning there is no recent example to which he can be compared. That makes him a thrilling proposition for those involved in the Itauma business, but it also makes the Itauma business a difficult one to handle. Move too quickly, for instance, and you could mismanage perhaps the best young commodity in the sport. Yet wait too long, on the other hand, and there is the possibility that he stagnates, or loses the exuberance of youth, or simply loses a fight he wasn’t meant to lose.
If a few years older, there would be no such issue, of course, for his talent alone would guide him in both the right direction and at the right pace. However, because he is just 20, and because we know heavyweights tend to peak at around 30, the degree of talent and ambition Itauma possesses is always going to be negated somewhat by his age and the time he has to waste.
We have seen this before at heavyweight, particularly in Great Britain. In recent years there have been two which spring to mind: Daniel Dubois and Hughie Fury. Neither of those men were either as talented or as hyped as Itauma when turning pro, yet both carried a certain weight of expectation and both were so young they had no option but to be kept on a relatively short leash.
For Fury, this meant a series of low-key fights against journeymen, which he would use to work on his skills and follow the instructions of his father, Peter. Sometimes he impressed; other times he flattered to deceive. Always, though, it would come back to his age and how his age, whether 18, 21, or even older, explained certain deficiencies, as well as the rate at which he was being moved.
“This is a young man who has a massive future in boxing,” Peter Fury said in 2019, by which time Hughie Fury, his boy, was 25. “Age plays a big factor, especially with heavyweights, because he is nowhere near physically mature yet. He is just at the start of that process.
“But despite that, he still hasn’t been protected. We haven’t given him easy knock-over fights because of his age or tried giving him a padded record. He’s learned the hard way. He’s had setbacks, he’s had knocks, but he has dealt with the situations well.
“They haven’t knocked him back mentally, and he hasn’t ever been put in too deep over his head. The opponents aren’t giving him a hiding or a boxing lesson. He’s not coming out of there having been flattened. He’s just been falling short because he’s not doing enough. It’s not because of what the opponent is doing in front of him, it’s because of what he’s not doing himself.”
Peter Fury’s words were in response to his son’s first, second and third forays into the upper echelons of the heavyweight division and acted as an attempt to explain the process. Whereas before, when building him, he had been matched with patience and a certain caution, Fury, in 2017, found himself all of a sudden in a position to fight Joseph Parker for the WBO heavyweight title and the leash went a little slack. Sensing the time was right, Fury took the fight against Parker, only to end up disappointed when he was outworked and outpointed over 12 rounds.
That result, rather than lead to a retreat, encouraged the team behind Fury to push him to now prove himself at that level. In 2018, he fought Kubrat Pulev in Bulgaria, which was a fight he lost on points, and then, in 2019, he fought Alexander Povetkin and again, as with Parker and Pulev, Fury lost via decision. By then, as hard as it was for them to admit, Fury was already edging towards opponent territory or that of “nearly man”. He had never appeared out of his depth against any of the men who beat him, but in light of how he had been moved, mere survival was not the goal. The plan, if such things exist, was never to have Hughie Fury spend six years building himself up as a pro only to then fall short against three men who were still a distance away from the very top. Even now, at 30, the age at which most heavyweights peak, Fury is nowhere near returning to that level, much less winning a world heavyweight title.
Daniel Dubois, meanwhile, is the very antithesis of Hughie Fury in terms of style and attributes, but faced a similar conundrum when turning pro. He, like Fury, was a teenager when making his debut and therefore his manager and promoter kept him on the shortest of leashes. There were, for the first few years, easy fights and pointless fights, yet also title fights – domestic ones – which were expected to stand Dubois in good stead when the time came to step up. He won the Southern Area title in his fifth fight, the English title in his eighth, and the British title in his twelfth. Then, in fight number 16, he was matched against Joe Joyce, a man 12 years his senior but somehow still a prospect; or, more accurately, a mature student. Both were at the time unbeaten, and both had hopes of winning a world heavyweight title, yet on the night one of the two showed themselves to be vastly more experienced and assured than the other. That man, of course, was Joe Joyce, who took everything Dubois could throw at him before turning the screw and asking the kind of questions to which Dubois had no answers. He was, after all, just 23 years of age.
Too much, too soon, Dubois rebuilt himself in 2021 and won four fights on the spin, finishing each inside the distance. One of those, a fourth-round knockout of Trevor Bryan, even landed him a WBA “regular” heavyweight title. However, this, not to be confused with the real thing, proved a poisoned chalice, for it not only offered the illusion of Dubois achieving his goal, but also somewhat inconveniently accelerated his progress and ushered him, rather cruelly, towards the genuine world champions in the division.
This meant a 2023 world title shot against Oleksandr Usyk, owner of the WBA’s proper heavyweight belt, and the second stoppage loss of Dubois’ career. Few had given the Londoner much hope of winning the fight, in truth, but that didn’t make the defeat any less painful for Dubois, who was stopped in nine rounds and taught another harsh lesson by a more experienced man.
Still, if the mark of a good fighter can be found in their capacity to learn, Dubois has shown that he has learned plenty from his setbacks. Since losing to Usyk, in fact, Dubois has been on quite the run, beating Jarrell Miller, Filip Hrgovic and Anthony Joshua in consecutive fights. Now, to come full circle, he is preparing to re-sit the Usyk exam in July. That will again be an exam most will expect him to fail, but it is one for which Dubois, the current IBF champion, will be much better prepared the second time around.
As for Itauma, seven years younger than Dubois, the revision period continues this Saturday against Mike Balogun, an American with a 21-1 (16) record. Like Demsey McKean, Itauma’s previous victim, Balogun is a southpaw, though he is five inches shorter than McKean and was stopped inside two rounds by Murat Gassiev, a former cruiserweight, in 2023. It remains to be seen, then, whether Balogun will represent an incremental step up in class for Itauma or is instead an example of treading water and what happens when a prospect is almost too good for their age.
“If they are good enough, they are old enough,” we often hear, only in some sports the risk of finding out is considerably higher than it is in others. In some sports you must wait until absolutely certain.