CARVILL'S NOTES: The Aftermath of Itauma-Whyte

Independent

3 hours ago

Last week, I was the sole predictor on the DAZN and The Independent teams that picked Dillian Whyte over Moses Itauma. Whyte was too experienced, had fought too much at the highest level, I thought, while Itauma was too new and raw with only twelve fights, none of them going past six rounds.
It was too soon, I reasoned. And a mistake is being made.
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Well, I was wrong. Brutally.
Itauma dispatched Whyte within a round, in fewer than two minutes.
It was hard, near impossible, to escape the sense from Whyte that he is completely shot as a fighter. For such a formidable, big man, he looked almost frail in the ring, flinching even from the initial punches. And once the fight was over, it looked like he wanted to continue, trying to look as if he had instead been caught cold before his engine had had time to properly start on a winter morning.
He was probably remembering something. In some ways, we all were when we thought he may have presented a challenge on Saturday night.
Itauma looked an echelon or two higher, and the chattering monkeys of the hype machine have begun immediately writing and pushing for a showdown with Oleksandr Usyk. That fight would, if made, be a win-win for Itauma and a lose-lose proposition for Usyk.
If Itauma were to take that fight and win, then he is a champion within fourteen fights, the vanquisher of a feared, undisputed, almost-peerless performer. If Itauma loses, it is a fight that came too soon, but his name is varnished if he goes some rounds, especially if he goes the distance.
For Usyk, there are no good outcomes from a fight against Itauma. If he were to win, then he has beaten a novice who came into the ring with only thirteen fights and who had never gone past six rounds. Losing would be much the same – defeat against an inexperienced, fledgling opponent.
It is much the same in predicting the outcome of a fight. Boxing is so complex, and lines of decline are so singular and personalised that it is hard to predict accurately how a fight will go, unless the fighter is so far gone that the result is a foregone conclusion.
Pick right, and you are at best a sage. At worst, someone waiting until the easy answer is apparent.
Pick poorly, and you are a know-nothing, someone who missed the obvious. An armchair critic who throws worded missiles, some of which miss.
Prediction is a harder game than judgement.
But here is something I do know. When I was writing Death of a Boxer around two years ago, I went to the Brain Bank in Boston, US, where I was given a tour of the facilities. I also went to see Dr Robert Cantu, arguably the US's leading neurologist when it comes to sports injuries.
He gave me the talk about head injury in sport, as did Dr Ann McKee. They knew the numbers, the likelihood of damage, and of how that damage increases as you get older.
Here is something else – not long after I went to the US, I visited Poland to watch the first Usyk-Dubois fight. A buddy of mine went there and, landing at Wroclaw Airport, he ran into a heavyweight fighter, a household name in boxing.
The fighter, he told me, was so out of it that he did not seem to know which city he was in.
'I spoke to him,' my buddy said. 'You would need a weekly planner to measure the delay in his response times.'
There will be murmurs for Dillian Whyte to retire at this point. Those rumbles may even rise up, if there is no money involved, to become calls.
There is no moral edge in calling for someone to retire. But retirement may be on the cards for Whyte. He may reason that he was injured or caught cold or did not train right, and so he may try once again to fight.
Or he may see the writing on the wall and rightly call it a day.
And on that note:
· If you ever need one more example of how brutal the business of boxing can be, here is one for you. I know the names of all involved, but am not publishing them because it is both hard to confirm and the matter was entirely been dealt with privately. There was a former champion from decades ago, a fairly well-known name, who badly needed an operation to fix their arm. A problem with the nerve had caused the arm to atrophy and become useless. This former boxer approached their former promoter, a man worth untold millions for help in affording the operation to save his arm. The amount he asked for was somewhere in the region of $25,000. The promoter's answer? 'Go ---- yourself.'
· German heavyweight Agit Kabayel recently, according to Instagram, welcomed a new baby into the world. Heartfelt congratulations are on order from the Independent and DAZN boxing teams.
· Last week, I was talking about Jonathan Rendall, author of This Bloody Mary Is the Last Thing I Own. Rendall moved on in 2013. Calling his writing 'fresh' would be inaccurate, given the seedy world of gambling, drinking, and boxing that he wrote about, but it stands up magnificently in 2025. It would be of great service to boxing literature if somehow his articles, spread out across so many publications, could be collected and presented to the world.
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