Don’t blink, they said. Whatever you do, don’t blink.
It wasn’t original, as far as taglines go, but that was how last night’s WBO heavyweight title fight between Fabio Wardley and Daniel Dubois was sold, the implication being that it would be short and explosive. By blinking, of course, one ran the risk of missing something quick and devastating. One might, for instance, have missed Wardley dropping Dubois with the first punch he landed – a right hand thrown just 15 seconds into the fight – and have to then replay the action to be certain it had happened.
If nothing else, that first punch of Wardley’s was your warning; your reminder. If lagging on account of the fight’s late start – 11pm local time – the image of Wardley flooring Dubois in round one would have surely been enough to have you rub your eyes, whether owing to tiredness or surprise. Either way, you were now wide awake. Now “don’t blink” was not just a suggestion, or a promotional tagline, but a necessity. Now it was not even a choice.
In fact, by the time Wardley had knocked down Dubois for a second time in round three, once more with a right hand, only then did you realise that your eyes had been out on stalks for almost three rounds. Now you had to blink. Now you rubbed your eyes again, no longer due to tiredness or even surprise, but in the way one does when waking from a dream, eager to differentiate as quickly as they can between what is real and what is not. Now the rubbing of the eyes was an act of disbelief.
Later on, when one of Wardley’s eyes – his right one – was horribly swollen, we watched through our two good eyes him touch his bad one with his glove, clearly distressed by it. We then watched Wardley have the eye, and also his nose, inspected by a ringside doctor before round nine and again before round 10. The second of those inspections, prior to the start of round 10, felt different than the first and not just because the damage done to Wardley’s face – his eyes, his nose – had inevitably worsened due to the passing of time. It also felt different because the fight had changed in that short period. It had gone from a fight Wardley appeared destined to end early, thanks to two knockdowns, to a fight in which Wardley had a puncher’s chance of winning, to a fight in which the only possible victory for Wardley was a moral one, dependent on his survival.
Don’t blink, they said, and we didn’t, but now, having refused to blink, we were feeling tired again. It wasn’t the fight that was making us tired – that could never be the case – but instead we were tired of seeing Wardley take punishment round after round. By round 10 it was becoming harder and harder to watch. Blinking, you see, was not the issue anymore. Watching was the issue.
Alas, that became the challenge in round 10. Rather than watch, you wanted to now close your eyes, or turn away. You hoped that in Wardley’s corner the men responsible for his safety were seeing what we saw, seeing it the way we saw it, and had their eyes open. Forget anyone else. It was now they, the corner team, for whom the phrase “don’t blink” really applied. It was his corner team, as well as the referee Howard Foster, who needed to take a long look at Fabio Wardley and see something more than just a heavyweight with a puncher’s chance and a warrior’s heart. See him as he is, you wanted to shout, not as he was. If you need a reset, please blink twice, erase your memory, and treat Wardley as you see him now, standing in front of you: the flat, broken and bloodied nose, the grotesque eye, the hematoma above it. Don’t ignore it. We have seen enough.
We had too, all of us. That’s why, when Wardley was somehow okayed to proceed following his second inspection, the roar that went up from the Manchester crowd was nowhere near as vociferous as it had been following the first successful inspection. The ones that could still bear to look issued their approval, you could hear it, but many more were seen shaking their head, no longer in disbelief but displeasure. If seeing the fight stopped before round nine would have been anticlimactic, now it felt about right – too late if we’re honest.
True as it was that Wardley always had his punch, the chances of that punch landing diminished round by round and now, as we entered the 10th, the danger was putting the fight ahead of the fighter. Already we had seen a fight of the year frontrunner, and only our greed and the inherent bloodlust we all channel on fight night had us rubbing our hands and licking our lips as Wardley and Dubois were reunited in round 10. We didn’t deserve it, but we were getting more, it seemed. We also knew that what was good for us was bad for Wardley. And yet still each of us – fan, referee, corner team – pressed “continue” on the off chance that the ending would not be as predictable and ugly as we knew, deep down, it would be.
In some ways each of us could be forgiven for losing sight of the reality of the situation. After all, it had happened in the blink of an eye, this turnaround, this shift in perspective. One minute Wardley was hurting and dropping Dubois with every wild right hand he threw and the next Dubois, having suffered two 10-8 rounds, was backing Wardley up with his jab, landing heavy rights of his own, and disfiguring the WBO champion’s face. In the space of only a few rounds, we had gone from expecting Wardley to finish the fight early, perhaps with his next right cross, to watching Dubois’ better foundations and footwork become a factor in the fight and essentially help him win every round in which he managed to stay upright.
The more the fight progressed, the more it became apparent that Dubois’ early troubles owed more to shock than anything else. The shock of Wardley’s power, perhaps, or the shock of his angles. Whichever it was, Dubois was caught cold in much the same way he himself caught Anthony Joshua cold in the early rounds of their fight in September 2024. Every time Wardley landed flush Dubois seemed on the cusp of unravelling, and on two occasions he did, the first time getting up too quick following the knockdown, and the next time electing to take a knee voluntarily after feeling a heavy shot. From one knockdown to the next, we wondered whether Dubois’ resistance was on the wane, or whether he would simply become disheartened in the presence of a puncher who wouldn’t stop throwing powerful shots in his general direction. Each time he went down Dubois would shoot a what-now? glance at his corner, as we have seen him do in the past. He then did the same when rising.
Such was the concern, Don Charles, his coach, said to Dubois between rounds three and four: “I’ve got to ask you, how are you feeling?” To which Dubois, hard to read at the best of times, stared into space and said, “I’m feeling good.”
Only nothing about Dubois was “good” after three rounds, hence Charles, upon hearing his response, took it not as reassurance but as permission; permission, that is, to tear into Dubois and point out to him everything he was doing wrong and all the ways he could improve. Not one to hold back, Charles even motivated his man by slapping him around the cheek on more than one occasion throughout the fight.
Still, it had the desired effect. In the next round, the fourth, Dubois found a home for his own right hand with increasing regularity and one of them, thrown short, stiffened Wardley’s legs for the first time in the fight. He was also able to back him into the ropes on a frequent basis and following one exchange Wardley could be seen touching his eye, having been wounded in that area. If Dubois required visible proof of hope, and reason to believe, now he had it.
With this renewed hope, Dubois started to settle down a bit more. His heavy shoulders relaxed and so too did the punches he fired at Wardley to begin his attacks. Whereas before he was all about matching Wardley with Hail Mary right hands and proving his power, suddenly now Dubois remembered he had one of the best jabs in the heavyweight division and began to use it. In fact, in round five the Londoner put on something of a jabbing clinic, constantly knocking Wardley off-balance with the shot and occasionally shaking him up.
The jab from Wardley, which he offered in riposte and threw from the hip, wasn’t a bad shot, either, yet the key difference was that Dubois’ jab – so powerful and so relaxed – carried all the weight of a right hand. Bit by bit, it started to do its work. You could see it on the face of not only Wardley but the man throwing it. No longer did Dubois carry a look of concern.
His confidence then only grew in the sixth, a round in which he added to the jab rights and even a left uppercut, which caught Wardley up close and caused his legs to sag. After that came a left hook, which again landed clean, and by the round’s end Wardley was having to rely on all his powers of recovery to stick in the fight and not go under. It was brutal, relentless action, and only the courage, belief and perennial threat of Wardley’s right fist stopped it from being viewed as one-way traffic.
The second half of the fight followed a similar pattern, with Wardley now fighting on instinct most of the time and relying too much on his heart. In rounds seven and eight Dubois continued to find the champion’s face an easy target to hit with jabs and rights, but still Wardley refused to cower, or yield, or even give Dubois, and us, the impression that the fight was over. It had turned, definitely, but as shown in round seven, when he paid homage to his white-collar days by windmilling with abandon, Wardley was, for as long as he was upright and punching, always in with a shot.
This feeling was of course strengthened by the fact that Dubois, dropped twice already, has a reputation for coming apart at the seams out of nowhere. Whether that is fair or not hardly matters. That is how we have all come to judge Daniel Dubois and his fights and therefore Wardley, upright and punching, had every reason to maintain belief and keep taking his licks. We, too, had every reason to keep watching, keep enjoying it, and keep smiling the smile of the well-fed.
Truth be told, it was only when the ringside doctor emerged before round nine and introduced a dose of reality to the fun that we did indeed blink. Until then it had been quite easy to get carried away and see these boxers not as men but two trucks in a demolition derby. Their damage could be seen, yes, but the engines still roared and, besides, Wardley wanted this, he loved it, and we in turn loved him for it.
Did he need protecting from himself? Absolutely. But it wasn’t until the doctor – an unwelcome guest at a party like this – had been called to get involved that we were finally able to extricate ourselves from the fun of it all and acknowledge the actual damage being done. Once that happened, both the fight and our overall enjoyment of it was on borrowed time.
As great as it was, between rounds 10 and 11 you wanted them to end it – for Wardley’s sake and your own. To let him go on was a dereliction of duty, you felt, and by the time round 11 arrived not only was his demise inevitable but you were forced to watch it either through fingers or from behind the sofa. For many of the same reasons why nobody wanted to stop it, you couldn’t look away, but that didn’t mean you were loving it necessarily. If anything, it was now a test. A test of conscience. A test of tolerance. A test of good taste. Even if you perhaps wanted to blink or turn away, you couldn’t. Your lids were now pegged back; your eyes open wide. You were Alex DeLarge undergoing the Ludovico Technique in A Clockwork Orange. This wasn’t boxing anymore, it was ultraviolence. It was exactly what had been advertised and demanded and now, in front of your wide-open eyes, you had it. You had it and then some.
For a moment, as they came out for round 11, we all feared that a great fight – the year’s best by a distance – would be redefined as something else, something grim, something tragic. But thankfully, and to our collective relief, just 28 seconds into that round Howard Foster, the referee, intervened and we were able to feel good about ourselves again. In an instant we were clean again, human again. We could now rank Dubois dethroning Wardley among the very best heavyweight fights we have ever seen and do so without our memory of it being soured or feeling in the least bit guilty.
“We came through the sticky moments and it was a war,” said Dubois, a man of few words but on this occasion capable of finding the right ones. “Thank you, Fabio, for that. Thank you.
“I know I’ve got heart, bundles of heart, and I’m a warrior in there.”
With both their reputations enhanced, and our memory of the fight preserved, each of us now had permission to blink. The difficulty now was getting to sleep.
