By: Sean Crose
He’s back. Former WBC heavyweight titlist Deontay Wilder is going to return to the fight game on October 15h. His opponent will be fellow heavy Robert Helenius. Their fight will be a scheduled 12 rounder and will be the main event of a Fox Sports/PBC pay per view broadcast. The Wilder-Helenius battle will be going down at Brooklyn’s Barclay’s Center and will mark the first time the 42-2-1 Wilder has fought in over a year. The man’s last battle ended in a knockout loss for the Alabama native, as arch rival Tyson Fury stopped him for the second time in three fights.
As for the 31-1 Helenius, he’ll be coming fresh off an impressive victory – his second in a row – over the game Adam Kownacki, which went down on the undercard of same Wilder-Fury fight. While the bearded native of Finland certainly knowns how to turn out the lights, he’s lost to Gerald Washington and Johann Duhaupas by knockout. Wilder, for those who don’t know, may well be the hardest hitting fighter in heavyweight history. Just how hard a puncher is Wilder? All but 1 of his 22 wins have occurred within the distance. Even Fury, who bested Wilder twice (their first fight ended in a draw), has been dropped a whopping four times by the man known as The Bronze Bomber. Whether or not Helenius can handle that kind of power remains to be seen.
Then again, it will be interesting to see how Wilder composes himself in the ring after dual losses to Fury. Such large scale defeats can take a lot out of a fighter. On top of that, Wilder has not handled his losses as well as he could have. With that being said, the future will be bright indeed should he return to form against Helenius. It would be unwise to write Wilder off if he were then to face the likes of top heavyweights Anthony Joshua or Oleksandr Usyk…and no one knows what Fury might be up to from one moment to the next.
Former IBF super middleweight titlist Caleb Plant will also be on the Wilder-Helenius card. The 21-1 Plant, known as Sweet Hands, will square off against former WBC super middleweight titlist Anthony Dirrell in a scheduled 12 rounder. Plant’s last fight was against the one and only Canelo Alavarez. That battle last November ended with Plant being stopped in the 11th. The 34-2-2 Dirrell’s last fight was a successful affair against Marcos Hernandez, who Dirrell stopped in 4 on the Canleo-Plant undercard.