DeGale Looks to Rebound to British Boxing Stardom After Early Career Loss… Like Amir Khan
James “Chunky” DeGale captured the European Super-Middleweight Title from undefeated Piotr Wilczewski on Saturday, restarting his career after experiencing a major hiccup in the form of an upset loss. By coming back in such a high profile bout, the obvious parallel for DeGale is fellow Briton Amir Khan, but is the parallel accurate?
DeGale won middleweight gold in Beijing in 2008, and in February 2009 he started a pro career that instantly made him one of the UK’s top prospects to watch. By December 2010, Chunky was the British Super Middleweight Champion. Going into 2011, it looked like DeGale would make a smooth progression up the ladder and enter his first world title fight as an undefeated contender. Then he met undefeated George Groves, in a British-Commonwealth title unification bout, and after a spirited tactical boxing match, Groves just barely edged out DeGale to win a Majority Decision.
Pundits began immediately writing DeGale off, just as they had Amir Khan before him. Like DeGale, Khan had an Olympic pedigree, having won a silver at the Athens games, and was touted as the future of British boxing. Khan won the Commonwealth title, and all was going well for him when he ran into undefeated and unheralded Breidis Prescott. In what was arguably the biggest upset of 2008, Prescott knocked out Khan in a single round.
That, however, is where the parallels diverge, at least so far. In the wake of the Prescott loss, Khan hired Freddie Roach as his trainer. Under his tutelage, Khan has improved and thrived (sparring with Manny Pacquiao helps as well, no doubt). DeGale is still trained by Jim McDonnell, and DeGale and McDonnell have shown no signs of correcting DeGales defensive deficits.
All of DeGale’s strengths and weaknesses were on full display against Wilczewski. While I think the Pole was a tougher opponent than Groves, DeGale was basically the same fighter and just barely managed to prevail. Having stepped up to the level of fighting national contenders in Europe, DeGale’s current bag of tricks is only good enough to earn a narrow win and narrow loss. DeGale is a tough customer with solid athletic gifts, but if guys like Groves and Wilczewski can find him and put hurt on him, then an Andre Ward, Mikkel Kessler or Carl Froch would eat him alive.
