The mysterious nature of power remains one of the most elusive and least understood phenomena in all of sports

Deontay Wilder’s chiseled ebony frame is aglow with sweat as he methodically circles the perimeter inside the cramped ring at Gleason’s, landing punches on trainer Jay Deas’s mitts that ring out like gunshots above the faint whistle of jump ropes and steady thwap-thwap of leather on heavy bags in the bustling gym.

It’s a muggy Tuesday evening in Brooklyn’s Dumbo neighborhood and the unbeaten WBC heavyweight champion from Alabama widely regarded as boxing’s biggest puncher is going through his final preparations ahead of Saturday’s title defense against Dominic Breazeale. The focus of tonight’s workout is technique as trainer and fighter work on his four basic shots: the jab, the straight right, the left hook and the uppercut.

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Deas spends one three-minute round on the mitts with his 6ft 7in pupil, then a second, before calling on another member of the coaching team for relief and descending from the apron drenched in sweat. He then peels off the mitts to show a dark-blue tracery of veins bulging through the pale skin along the insides of his forearms like something from a Cronenberg movie.

“The veins pop out like this every time because of the shock trauma,” the 50-year-old trainer says, beaming with adrenaline and wonder. “I’ve got three mitt men. He needs three mitt men. One is never going to last very long.”

Power, or what’s known in the fight game as being heavy-handed, is one of the least understood phenomena in all of sports. There are boxers with the exaggerated physiques of bodybuilders who couldn’t crack an egg. There are lean, modest-looking fighters capable of knocking down anything they touch with even a grazing blow. Speed or technique or body type alone can’t account for it, nor can the simple immutability of Newton’s second law. It exists in a place beyond rhyme or reason and in defiance of unifying theory.

Deas, who began training Wilder when he first walked into the Skyy boxing gym outside Tuscaloosa three days before his 21st birthday, believes it largely to be a God-given trait.

“To a huge degree you’re born with it,” he says. “You can improve power about 10% through conditioning and technique, so you can take a guy who’s a nothing puncher and make him at least respectable, and you can take a guy who’s a pretty good thumper, and make him a 10% better thumper. But the best I’ve ever seen anybody improve is about 10%.”

Evidence of Wilder’s “Alabama country power”, as he’s called it, can be plainly seen in a cursory survey of his ledger, with all but one of the Olympic bronze medalist’s 40 professional victories ending inside the distance. But the stories from his coaching staff, which includes Damarius Hill and Olympic gold medalist Mark Breland, tell a fuller story.

There was the time a Wilder punch rocked the mitt hard enough to cause a two-inch fracture all around the baseline of Hill’s thumb. Or when he separated Breland’s shoulder with a right hand. Or when he managed to catch Deas just below his body protector with a shot just below the ribs. That one didn’t hurt at first, the trainer recalls, but the pain mounted over the next few days until a doctor’s visit revealed he had suffered a hernia and required surgery.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jay Deas works the mitts with Deontay Wilder during a workout on Tuesday night at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn. Photograph: Michael Owens/Getty Images

Jameel McCline, a four-time heavyweight title challenger who’s worked as a sparring partner in several of Wilder’s training camps, says the heavyweight is the hardest puncher he’s ever been in with.

“Jameel said getting hit by Deontay, even with headgear and 20oz gloves, is not like getting hit by a human being,” Deas says. “But he can also thread the needle. So where there isn’t space, he can find space. When you add that to his otherworldly power, he’s never out of any fight ever, because in one second everything can change.”

Not unlike a thunderbolt serve in tennis, power is the equalizer that can compensate for average marks in nearly every other category. That’s proven critically important for Wilder, whose late introduction to the sport left him without the technical foundation ingrained in many fighters during their teenage years, leaving him to depend heavily on a preternatural knack for separating opponents from their senses. Surely it’s saved his skin a few times down the years. He was trailing on my scorecard entering the later rounds against both Artur Szpilka and Luis Ortiz before ending both of those fights with one-punch stoppages. Same with December’s thriller with Tyson Fury, where he was able to scratch back for a split draw with a pair of concussive knockdowns in the ninth and 12th rounds, nearly ending the fight with the latter.

Trainers from Cus D’Amato to Freddie Roach have insisted a fighter either has it or doesn’t, while others believe it can be taught or cultivated. Generally it’s believed to be the last thing to go in a fighter when everything else has faded away, an old chestnut spectacularly writ large when George Foreman regained the heavyweight championship aged 45 with a thudding right hand that knocked out Michael Moorer.

“I think it’s just something you’re born with, I really do,” Foreman says. “If you have it, a trainer can develop it and exploit it. The worst thing in the world is to have it and not have a trainer to explain to you what you have.”

A big puncher also has the effect of creating a sense of urgency in the fighter on the other side. Foreman recalls a number of his fights when he was surprised by an opponent’s power enough to alter his tactics.

“Once he lays his hands on you, you know: I’ve got to get this over with!” he says. “I was in the ring with Gerry Cooney and I thought he was beefed-up talk. He’d never fought anybody. I was going to jab and mess around and take my time. But he hit me once with a left hook and I said: ‘Oh no, this isn’t happening again.’ It just separates you, your head from your legs, all that comes apart.”

Evander Holyfield, a four-time heavyweight champion after moving up from the cruiserweight division, disputes the notion that power can’t be taught, insisting it’s more a matter of technique, leverage and precision, all of which can be drilled.

“Power is balance,” Holyfield says. “The person who’s got balance, they run faster, they stronger and they hit harder. You can teach power. You can’t teach people confidence.”

That’s one category were Wilder is not lacking.

“I put my power up with anybody, period,” the champion says. “And it’s natural, I don’t have to lift a weight, period. I don’t have to go to a weight room, I don’t have to go to a gym period and my athleticism, my body frame, my build will be what it is. Ask the people that’s around me. It’s in living color.”

For Deas, the truth underlying boxing’s essential mystery is somewhere in between, but you know it when you see it.

“Some guys when you they hit things,” he says, “something just happens.”