The sun is sinking behind Kentuck Park and the hoots and cheers of parents watching their kids at a Little League game perforate the heat of the Alabama evening.
A red and black Dodge sports car decorated with the gold letters of religious slogans grumbles past and stops in front of one of the line of lock-up garages that squat in a low row across the road from the baseball diamond.
Deontay Wilder gets out and slings a bag over his shoulder. His face looks set and grim. He is getting into character. His mood is always better at the end of a training session or a spar than it is at the beginning.
Deontay Wilder has admitted he wouldn't feel remorse for killing someone in the ring
He complains about something to his long-time trainer, Jay Deas, who knows as well as anyone how to defuse the self-appointed leader of the 'Bomb Zquad'.
Wilder skips rope for a while in the car park outside the Skyy Gym and then sits on the ring apron as his hands are wrapped, his head bowed. He talks as if he is in a trance as he stares at the floor and embarks on a stream of consciousness.
'You in trouble now,' he says. 'You in big trouble now. You going to be eating hospital food. I heard that's terrible. I'm almost starting to feel sorry for you.
'The only way you can hurt a man severely and get paid for it. I get paid for my work and I love it. Best job in the world. Some people say it is a sin to hit that hard. If this man goes down and he does not wake up, it will be you guys' fault. You asked for it. I am not going to feel no remorse, no sympathy, no sorrow. Tick, tock. Another fight, another day, another time, another place.'
Wilder floored Fury with a devastating right-left combination in their fight back in December
Someone rolls up the garage door to let in the night air and the WBC world heavyweight champion climbs into the ring. From outside in the darkness the brightly lit gym looks an enchanted place.
Wilder stretches out on the canvas, doing some exercises with his conditioning coach. The man wears a T-shirt that says 'Champ Camp Checkmate'.
The heavyweight division has become a game of chess moves again. The three kings that rule it — Wilder, Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury — have signed with three different broadcasting companies and agreed to fight three different opponents rather than continue the round of super-fights that seemed to have begun with Wilder's dramatic draw with Fury last December.
Wilder is in the third week of training camp for his May 18 fight against Dominic Breazeale in New York — his first contest since he fought Fury in Los Angeles and retained his WBC crown — and the build-up is already awash with bad blood.
Wilder set the standard by suggesting Breazeale should bring his young son into the ring so he can behold the man about to cripple his daddy.
Like many fighters Wilder, 33, alternates between calm, intelligent, eloquent language and sudden explosions of extreme invective. After he has spent an hour in the ring, shadow-boxing and slamming punches into the thick pad Deas has strapped around his own chest and stomach, he sits on the apron again and his mood has lightened.
The Bronze Bomber says that the fight against Fury, which he was losing until he knocked the Englishman down in the final round, and for the second time in the contest, won him a legion of new fans and has left him in a more powerful position than either Joshua or Fury, who destroyed hopes of an immediate rematch with Wilder when he signed a multi-fight deal with ESPN.
The WBC champion believes it would be 'a piece of cake' for him to beat Fury in a rematch
He mentions as evidence the fact that when he went to Minneapolis last week to watch the climax of the men's college basketball season, the Final Four, he was mobbed by fans shouting 'Till This Day', the catchphrase that punctuates much of Wilder's speech.
'The rematch with Fury would be a piece of cake for me,' Wilder says. 'At this point in my life and my career I have the world's attention. I am on the rise. I don't know about these other heavyweights. It seems like everybody else is standing still but Deontay Wilder is doing this. It's amazing how the tables have turned.
'I wanted to end that fight with Fury with a devastating knockout, something that I always do. I got too excited. Everything he did was slow to me. The man had some kind of gypsy magic on me, that's for sure. It was very easy, the way I saw it in my head.
'The second time around it would be a piece of cake. Fury and his people know that. That's why they didn't take the rematch. I gave Fury a concussion that night. He don't even know how he got on the ground. And when a man don't know how he got on the ground or got up, he's in a bad place. How can a man win after being put on his ass twice? I have never seen a challenger beat the champion having been put on his ass twice. The referee helped him out big time. If he beat me so dramatically, if he outpointed me so much, then why not a rematch? Surely it would be easy for him, the way he's talking. But that's not the case.'
Wilder has been accused of ducking a fight with Joshua after he rejected a £100million multi-fight offer
