Moses Itauma – Heavyweight Boxing’s Rare 20-Year-Old Prospect

In a division populated with fighters born in the late 1980s, Moses Itauma is an anomaly. A heavyweight aged just 20 and blessed with hand speed largely unrivaled in the current landscape.

Already a contender by virtue of knockout victories over the always available Marius Wach and Kiwi Dempsey McKean, albeit the latter made famous for once being proposed as a Tyson Fury opponent and having an echo of a former great audible in his first name.

Itauma’s Place in Today’s Heavyweight Division

Moses Itauma: Early Wins and Hand Speed

Informed scrutiny would diminish both.

Nevertheless, it remains a valid pair of victories for a novice professional given the decisiveness of the finishes and the risk they were intended to present. It was easy. It was eye-catching.

Memorable.

Central to those wins was speed. The swiftness of the outcomes, yes, but of greater interest is the extraordinary hand speed that enabled Itauma to detonate those fight ending punches.

Oleksander Usyk is the division’s king, following conclusive double victories over Fury, Joshua and Dubois. As a former Cruiserweight he is mobile and crisp with his punches, but he uses timing more than speed to excel. Fury, once noted for his quick hands, is no longer the fighter he was and is, it seems, finally retired and contemporaries like Joshua and his predecessor Wladimir Klitschko were outstanding athletes but not possessors of hand speed of the type Itauma boasts.

Newer recruits to the bawdy vaudeville of boxing, excited to see what speed can do in a division so long dominated by size and power, until Usyk imposed acumen and mobility over heft, would need to seek out older footage to find heavyweights with the type of speed Itauma demonstrates.

Moses Itauma: Comparisons With Tyson, Ali and Patterson

The obvious omnipresent comparison is Mike Tyson of course. It is a reflection Itauma doesn’t yet merit and in all likelihood never will. Tyson was busier, probably faster and terrified all before him. Preceding Tyson, at the very peak of Muhammad Ali’s prowess, his hand speed was at its most conspicuous in the demolition of Cleveland Williams – a performance so perfect, so polished, so beautiful, it remains the benchmark for the potential his absence from boxing 1967-70 promised.

That pristine version of Ali was fast. Peppering Williams like a kid rattling a letter box.

Nostalgics Remember Floyd Patterson Before Tyson

Back further still, is arguably the fastest of them all – Floyd Patterson. A fighter moulded by the same Cus D’Amato that created Tyson thirty years later, Patterson was, in truth, little more than a Light-Heavyweight, but he had frightening hand speed in combinations. Blazing at opponents at his best. He had flaws too but his speed with his fists probably remains unrivalled among the big men.

Moses Itauma will never reach the zenith that Tyson did, or the sporting transcendence he shares with Ali, but he offers a refreshing new entry into the heavyweight picture, and it will be fascinating to see how far speed and the power that velocity provides can take him.