Aidan Smith: Deontay Wilder can dress it up any way he likes - he lost

It must go down as one of sport’s all-time-worst excuses for a defeat. After Deontay Wilder lost to Tyson Fury he said: “My management told me Saturday was the final of The Masked Singer so that’s why I was dressed up like a medieval warlord with the flashing helmet an’ all. Turns out the final was the previous Saturday! Someone’s gonna pay for this …”

Deontay Wilder enters the ring for the heavyweight bout against Tyson Fury at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Picture: Al Bello/Getty

Okay, not quite. But the beaten American still wins the prize for the lamest plea in mitigation. The ring-walk costume, he said, weighed him down, sucking the power from his legs. Nothing to do with Fury’s furious right hand, of course.

“Fury didn’t hurt me at all, but the simple fact is that my uniform was way too heavy for me,” Wilder claimed. “I didn’t have no legs from the beginning of the fight.” Weighed down by chainmail and batteries, Wilder must have looked on with envy – though illuminated red eye-slits – as Fury made his entrance. The Brit favoured a regal look, possibly drawn from recent royal affectations in sport. Was he perched on Bradley Wiggins’ throne from the cyclist’s gold-medal winning exploits at the 2012 Olympics? Was he wearing, on that big baldy heid, Jason Cummings’ crown from the ex-Hibernian footballer’s celebrations when Shrewsbury Town squeezed a FA Cup replay out of Liverpool?

No matter how ludicrously burdensome Fury’s outfit, he at least was carried to the canvas square, thus saving his legs.

Funny old game, boxing, as someone almost said. Especially these days.

No sport has fallen from the public consciousness in the pay-TV age quite so dramatically. Fallen like a horizontal heavyweight in old Harry Carpenter’s era.

To counteract this, the target audience is hammered into submission with hype and the promise of the latest mega-fight being absolutely unmissable.

Order up the Deliveroo, get in the beers, ring round mates – this is going to be epic. Until it’s over midway through the second and you’re left scouring Netflix for an old Jennifer Aniston movie you haven’t seen more than three times already.

To counteract the very real possibility of the clobbering lasting mere minutes, boxers are at least ensuring you can laugh at the clobber. Wilder puts a lot into his. He’s famous for his masks and a flair for big-budget dressing-up which might qualify him as the Stanley Baxter of pugilism. For the fight before Fury, his garb was studded with 90,000 gems.

The analogy with The Masked Singer – celebrities concealed under freaky costumes, at least one of which is the bastard offspring the Sugar Puffs Honey Monster and Partick Thistle’s mascot – is a valid one because Wilder and his eventual conqueror used the American version of the show to promote their fight.

“I’m always trying to be creative and do something different,” Wilder says of his outfits. Saturday’s was a tribute to Black History Month, a laudable idea, but maybe he has to re-think his fight strategy, restore emphasis to the fighting. Incredibly, he only found out the get-up was so heavy the previous night. “I wanted it to be good and I guess I put that before anything,” he admitted.

By the way, Wilder’s get-up wasn’t the only thing that might have been over-the-top.

Some commentators declared Fury’s triumph the greatest-ever by a Brit fighting abroad but I reckon Ken Buchanan might have something to say about that. In 1970 the Scot defeated not only Ismael Laguna to become world lightweight champion but also Puerto Rico’s 125-degree heat.

That’s even more extreme than sweating under synthetic fur to become champion of The Masked Singer, as Nicola Roberts (a match-up for Wilder next time, perhaps?) would surely agree.