THEY say the last thing to go is a fighter’s punch. It’s one of boxing’s oldest and most seductive half-truths — part adage, part anaesthetic. We tell it to each other and to ourselves, not just to soothe the decline of our heroes, but to preserve the myth that violence, properly delivered, can still conquer time. And few have lived that myth more completely — or more precariously — than Deontay Wilder.
He is a man who has lived by the gospel of the right hand, a preacher in the Church of Deliverance by Detonation. And in that sacred cathedral of leather and sweat, few have summoned salvation as violently or as dramatically.
Wilder’s career has often resembled a fairground ride built by a madman with a taste for spectacle — wild, rattling, and always teetering on collapse, only to be rescued by the kind of punch that rearranges futures.
He is not so much a technician as a demolitionist; a man who doesn’t solve problems but blasts holes in them. In his prime, he was less a boxer than a consequence — the living, looming threat that no matter how well you boxed, no matter how many rounds you’d stacked like poker chips, one mistake could wipe the table clean.
But now the roulette wheel spins slower.
There is something haunting about an ageing puncher. It’s not just the creak of limbs or the slightly delayed reflexes — it’s the stubbornness of belief. They don’t just train their bodies; they train their delusions. And why wouldn’t they? Power is the cruelest gift.
It stays long enough to keep the dream alive, yet just capricious enough to get you hurt chasing it. For Wilder, who once wielded his right hand like a court summons from the gods, the question is no longer whether he can knock a man out, but whether he can do it before he’s found out.
He cuts an almost mythic figure, now — the last gunslinger in a sport that used to be full of them. In a more romantic era, he would be carried into battle by trumpets and epics. Today, he’s ushered in by murmurs of concern and asterisks beside his name.
Yet still, he fights. Still, he searches for that moment — the one that could make us believe again. Because that’s what punchers offer us: belief. Not in the scorecards or the strategy, but in the power of one defiant act to rewrite the narrative.
Wilder, you sense, still believes. And that belief is as thrilling as it is terrifying.
Denial, in boxing, often masquerades as confidence. A fighter doesn’t tell himself lies — not outright. He tells himself stories. That his bad night was just a bad camp. That the timing will come back. That the critics are just bitter men with dull hands and empty notebooks. The puncher, most of all, becomes a novelist — spinning fiction out of hope.
He’s not the first to do it. Boxing’s graveyard is filled with punchers who overstayed their welcome — not because they couldn’t see the signs, but because they thought the punch would silence them. Multiple faded champions thundered through opponents even as their legs gave way beneath them.
Too many clung to the myth until it outlasted the flesh. Even Foreman, who pulled it off, needed a decade and divine patience to make the miracle work. Wilder’s name sits among them now — not yet buried, but already echoing.
Watch the Zhang and Parker fights closely — if you can bear to. The right hand still whistles through the air like a bomb dropped from a clear sky. But the set-up is slower, the rhythm off-beat. His feet don’t carry him into position so much as stumble him toward it.
The eyes still see it, the hands still want it — but the body delays just long enough for the opening to vanish. Both Parker and Zhang, clever and cruelly patient, didn’t outfight Wilder. They simply let Wilder prove what he could no longer do.
The danger is that the punch remains powerful enough to make a man almost believe again. And belief is what keeps ageing punchers lacing up. Not just theirs — ours too.
We want him to land it — not just because we admire the fighter, but because we envy him. Because he still gets to believe in something final and spectacular. We watch, secretly praying for the thunderbolt, because if he can still deliver it, maybe we’re not as far from our own redemption as we fear. He lets us pretend, for one more night, that willpower trumps wear and tear. That defiance trumps decline. That endings are for other people.
That’s the power of the puncher. He carries our belief, even as his own body betrays it.
Wilder still walks with the slow menace of inevitability. But boxing is merciless in its truths. It exposes time like a harsh light on a faded photograph. The legs wobble before the fists fade.
The chin goes before the fire does. And sometimes, heartbreakingly, the final punch never lands — not because it can’t, but because the opportunity to throw it is no longer there.
So here we are. Watching. Hoping. Bracing.
Maybe Wilder has one more explosion left — one final detour from destiny. Or maybe, like all punchers before him, he’ll discover that time is the only opponent no power can repel. Either way, the spectacle is profound. Because this isn’t just about Deontay Wilder anymore. It’s about every man who’s ever believed that redemption could be delivered on a single punch.
And it’s about the rest of us, too — leaning forward, eyes wide, waiting to see if the last roar still has teeth.
If it comes, it won’t arrive clean or cinematic. It’ll be a desperate flare from a collapsing star — not the start of anything, but the end with fireworks. And if it doesn’t come, we’ll mourn the moment, not the man.
Because not every thunderclap gets its storm.
