Trainer Ben Davison navigated his cruiserweight prospect Aloys Junior through 10 rounds with former world title challenger Ellis Zorro in Bournemouth.
The fight, two weeks ago, was nip and tuck and, by the end, some favored Zorro.
Aloys is an aggressive, heavy-handed fighter, who improved to 11-1 (9 KOs) with the win.
The 22-year-old has plenty of room to grow, and took the Zorro fight on short notice. Davison would have liked a longer camp, but Aloys does get to see a lot of talented fighters in the Davison gym. The Ben Davison Performance Centre is home to, among others, Leigh Wood, Moses Itauma, and Anthony Joshua.
“I think he's one of the most improved lads in the gym I think,” said Davison. “He’s in love with the sport. If you’re full time in anything, full-time isn’t, ‘I've spent two hours in the gym and in the morning and an hour in the gym at night,’ that's not full time. The time outside the gym you should spend studying, thinking about [the sport], watching a fighter they’ve been told to watch. He does that, to be fair. I think it’s showed in his improvement, and we’re really pleased.”
While more immediate comparisons can be made with Mike Tyson’s peekaboo style, Davison said the Queensberry promoted Aloys – who is ranked No. 4 by the WBA – studies a lot of Canelo Alvarez as he goes about improving.
“He watches a lot of Canelo, but sometimes we’ll say it’ll be about a principle, so ‘how do I deal with a scenario, if somebody’s trying to counter my jab with a counter right hand, how can I deal with that,’” Davison explained. “We might say to him, ‘Watch someone who, as a style, doesn’t correlate. Stylistically it doesn't look the same, but in principle how he’s stopping him from countering his jab, we’re able to do that, it’s the principle of how I’m stopping that from happening, so watch that for that reason.’”
Tape study is a key component for Davison’s fighters. With the help of Lee Wylie, they study and absorb habits of great fighters and future opponents alike.
“It’s not always what style,” Davison added. “You know, it might be someone that you think, ‘Oh that’s stylistically very different,’ but we don’t just watch him for an all-round thing. It might be a specific, ‘your opponent’s got a habit of this, how can you counteract that, here’s an example.’”
Aloys Junior possesses a different fighting style to others in the Davison gym.
Davison has worked with the rangy, twitchy Tyson Fury, the more textbook Anthony Joshua, comeback warrior Leigh Wood, and gifted prospect Royston Barney-Smith. They are all set up differently. Davison doesn’t teach his fighters to set up the same way regardless.
“Yeah, for sure,” he continued. “And I think you’ve got to [teach everyone differently]. Physically, straight away, when you look at him, there’s not many that look like he [Aloys] looks, so certain areas of his game that we’ve spent a lot of time working on, to counteract some weaknesses that some of his strengths might cover. It’s no secret he’s a massive explosive puncher. Sometimes people like that with the body type that can suffer by the later rounds, for example, and again that’s something that I feel like Canelo made an adjustment with early on, especially the first Golovkin fight. It was clear Canelo felt the pace in that and he had to make an adjustment going into the second fight to stop that from happening.
“So just teaching the boys about efficiency, how to recognize this might happen, ‘I’m prone to this if this keeps happening,’ for example. You’ve got to look at someone, how they are physically, how they are mentally, emotionally, what they’re good at, what they’re not so good at, and then shape their style around that. You can’t just go ‘this is my style as a coach.’ I don't have a style as a coach. I have a philosophy. I have principles, but not a style.”
