Who Needs Him: The Michael Hunter Story
(Photo by Richard Heathcote/Getty Images)
Michael Hunter would be forgiven for thinking he’s a bit overlooked by the Heavyweight boxing crowd. He is. A man with only one loss on his record- at cruiserweight, to the all-conquering Oleksandr Usyk- he has, since stepping up to heavy, put in a series of poised, sharp and tough performances, fighting to a draw with Alexandr Povetkin- back in 2019, where a pre-Covid Povetkin was still, though past his best, a credible top-level opponent - and in his debut at the weight upsetting Martin Bakole at his York Hall backyard (a fight infamous for Bakole’s trainer Billy Nelson begging and forcing him to go out for the final round, not for his own sake, but to protect Nelson’s dignity having overhyped him on twitter). And yet he’s never really talked about, never pushed into the title picture. He just offers a little bit too much trouble with not enough actual hype for anyone to think he’s ‘worth’ fighting to the top contenders while they wait on each other.
He’ll be fighting soon, against the untested former cruiserweight Mike Wilson, on Tuesday August 3rd in New York, a card also featuring Chris Algieri. This will be a fight local bettors will hope to be able to wager on online with rules slated to change at the end of July - for the latest information on online sports betting in NY, check out this resource. So let’s take the chance to even the scales a bit and highlight why he’s a problem (while also taking some time to talk about his limits for potential future tests).
Tough To Pin Down
First things first, Hunter’s biggest asset is that he is a comfortable all-terrain fighter. One can argue about his technical ups and downs in any given situation and we will do so in a bit, but there aren’t too many fighters- in any division, not just heavy- who are happy in any situation and style of fight their opponent might put them in; Hunter is. It was one of Bakole’s big problems in that infamous loss that putting the American on the back foot never really gave him an advantage, since Hunter would just lay back, make him miss and counter, whereas on the occasions Hunter stepped forward, he was not only happy going toe-to-toe but would occasionally push the bigger man back, at which point Bakole just didn’t have a response.
We can see this in reverse order in this sequence: Hunter initially pushes Bakole back, which sees the bigger man square up uncomfortably thus lose power even on shots he lands. When he does managed to force Hunter off him, he nonetheless has little success as Hunter is immediately comfortable stepping off, dodging, weaving, and landing a jab on the move.
Related to this is a strength that comes out of a weakness- Hunter can be very sloppy with his balance and frequently falls past or into his opponents when throwing shots, but no matter where he is or how he’s positioned he is almost always ready to throw. Thus, if an opponent isn’t careful, a mistake becomes a creative angle to throw a shot from, and Hunter becomes difficult to plan a defence for.
In this sequence, Kuzmin leaves his jab hanging out and Hunter just kind of walks into it and knocks himself off balance. This doesn’t put the smaller man off at all, and instead of resetting he just accepts the position and lands a 1-2 while off balance and leaning back, which Kuzmin doesn’t expect at all. Notice that the more conventional follow-ups miss when Kuzmin does see those coming.
Hunter’s other big strength at heavyweight is quite simple- he’s fast, his reflexes are good and let him get away with things he otherwise wouldn’t. This puts something on a limitation on him- we already know those reflexes weren’t enough for Usyk, and they’d be unlikely to get him over the line against an equally-fast Tyson Fury either- but against the chasing pack of heavies, many of whom are either huge slow guys or basic hitters without much follow-up craft, it’s enough to not just keep him out of trouble but allow him to pursue varied approaches knowing that, often, he’ll be able to get out of there if things go wrong. This is very obvious in his fights against Bakole, Kuzmin and even Povetkin, where even though he drew, he had a lot of success when he was simply able to beat the older man to a punch or anticipate a movement.
Notes of Caution
This isn’t to say he’s unhittable. He is, sometimes very- Hunter sometimes displays a lack of concentration that makes him far more vulnerable than he really needs to be. This ranges from sloppy footwork putting him on the ropes for no good reason, to sometimes quite evidently just forgetting to move his head, resulting in getting tagged. The aforementioned balance issues don’t help here, as when he doesn’t just fall past his opponent, he takes longer than he should need to get out of range as he needs to set his feet.
Here’s a simple case of Hunter stepping around lazily and walking onto a very obvious right hand.
Probably the biggest limitation in his game though is a reflection of what I referred to as his biggest strength: while he is comfortable in any situation, he (perhaps as a result of this) rarely seems to have gameplanned at all. He takes any situation as it comes to him and while this makes him a tough guy for opponents to nail down, it also means he boxes almost exclusively reactively, rather than trying to take away his opponent’s best looks and making them react to him. This is a shame, because if he did actively prepare more often to nullify his opponent’s best side, rather than rolling with it and occasionally just finding the right spot his opponent can’t work in, he’d be an even tougher out than he already is. We can go to the Povetkin fight for this- this went to a draw rather than a comfortable win in large part because, although he had the aforementioned ability to react on the fly to Povetkin’s changes, he never put together an actual plan to leverage his speed advantage into something Povetkin couldn’t close down.
The Prognosis
Still, though, even with those limitations, there are only a few at heavyweight who’d be favourite against Hunter, and only two (Fury and Usyk) who I’d give him no serious chance against. He should win quite comfortably on Tuesday night in New York - Wilson’s been around, but he’s rarely fought above regional level and never above cruiserweight, though a 12 round decision loss to Dennis Lebedev suggests he may have the endurance to stick around a while at least, and curiously enough, this fight is a rematch of an amateur bout way back in 2007 for the national superheavyweight championship, so there’s some storyline here- and if he does, we’d hope to see him in the ring against someone near the top of the division sooner rather than later.