Moses Itauma: The Making of a Heavyweight Star

Moses. A biblical name. Laden with promotional opportunity. This one is a southpaw with dynamite in both hands.

Moses Itauma could be the next special heavyweight… however “special” is defined?

Moses Itauma: Destined for Greatness or Mediocrity?

Natural Comparisons to Mike Tyson

It is a familiar path, a familiar sales pitch. Young, powerful, fast. Crashing through the professional losers, the part-timers and then the vaguely known, to the peripheral, the stout, the sturdy and the once were. Busyness is the business. Accumulating highlight reel knockouts, interviews and brand recognition.

Building a heavyweight from a youthful prospect to contender to challenger to champion is usually done from this tattered but trusted blueprint. Evolved, such as it is, for these times of reduced activity and our deficit of attention, it remains rooted in a century or more of match making.

A Roll Call of Heavyweight Greats

From Joe Louis to Rocky Marciano, to Floyd Patterson, then Muhammad Ali and eventually, Big George Foreman. The phenomenon of  Mike Tyson in the mid-1980s, a meteoric rise against which all subsequent heavyweights are benchmarked, and latterly through the Klitschko brothers and their successor Anthony Joshua.

Outstanding talents all.

Heavyweights, the cash generating juggernauts of boxing, are nurtured then tested through a curated procession of opponents.

Back to Itauma’s youth, he isn’t 21 until later this year, and it has been an insistent factor in comparisons drawn with “Iron Mike.” The goal is to encourage excitement and to offer a type of short hand for consumers who dip in and out of boxing to add to their own discourse. To stir those memories. To entice observers, ticket buyers and buzz.

Moses Itauma: More Hype Than Accomplishment at This Point?

The media channels change. Messaging doesn’t.

The southpaw is much more than a study in how to package a prospect.

Purring from former professionals can be bought, but it isn’t this time. Pursed lips. Sounds without words. Tells that something special is before them. The collective noise of a crowd when the finishing punches land is an organic response, it cannot be conjured artificially. It is as authentic as it is dramatic. Itauma has blazing hand speed. Is of different physical dimension to his contemporaries and when his punches do land it is the velocity and natural power, the surprise, that destroys what it hits. He has composure and efficiency on the counter that belies his years and a tsunami of combinations on the offence overwhelm if he doesn’t land with those precision right hooks and overhand lefts.

Opponents, the ones dismantled from a shot or two at distance, look like they’ve been hit in the dark on the way home from the pub, no torch to hand and a fast-moving floor beneath their feet. As an advertiser may one day write; Itauma – he just hits different.

Moses Itauma. It is still early. It could all go wrong.

But, his talent is not a mirage. And he may be the most exciting heavyweight since “you know who.”

No, really.