TYSON FURY strides into the room, sits his 6ft 9in frame on a wooden chair and looks at his watch.
“Right, I’m now three and a half hours deep,” he says of the day’s media commitments. “Answering the same questions but go on, fire away.
“That’s what I’m here for and that’s what I get paid to do.”
Over the course of his 16-year professional boxing career, there can’t have been many prizefighters that have done more talking than Fury. Be it good, bad or ugly, most of what he says is news. You can’t blame him, therefore, for growing weary of the trappings of the sport.
“The only thing for me which makes me want to retire is the s**t that comes with boxing,” Fury says. “It’s not the fight, it’s not the training camps, all of that is easy… and it’s not media or press.
“It’s just the problems it causes, the rows it causes with families and boxing people. Sometimes it’s not worth it. But as for boxing, going in there and having a fight and training for stuff, that’s easy.”
At the post-fight press conference in Riyadh, following Fury’s split decision defeat to Oleksandr Usyk – the Gypsy King’s first loss of any kind as a professional – promoter Frank Warren had suggested that the rematch was not a foregone conclusion and that retirement could be an option. But Fury, sitting to Warren’s right, already knew he would be going again.
“Before the first fight we had the rematch clause for a hell of a lot of money,” he explains, “I’d have to have no legs, no arms and half my head chopped off to not take the rematch. How’s that? No eyeballs. Actually, I’d do it if I was blind.”
Even so, it was a reasonably sombre Fury who faced the media in the early hours of that Sunday morning. His undefeated record gone at the hands of the former cruiserweight world champion and a ninth-round shellacking that almost forced a stoppage. Fury, however, says there was no period of soul searching. When asked how long it took him to get over the defeat, the 36-year-old fires back quickly. “The flight home,” he says.
“I’m not affected by it and I haven’t done anything different to what I would have done if I’d won. If it had been a split decision Fury, instead of Usyk – hooray! But I’m still back to Morecambe picking up dog s**t.
“It is what it is, at this level, at this stage, at this part of my career… what exactly can a man do? It’s not like I’ll go to move premieres or go to LA to hang out with celebrities, that ain’t me. I’m still in the Bay Area of Lancashire, I still do what I do so the defeat hasn’t really had any effect at all. You get straight back to reality. Straight back to doing what you do. Life goes on. I went out running straight away the week I got back. Straight into my routine life.
“And the fact that I thought I won the fight. It was a split decision, it was close but I thought I did enough to win it. I said it then and I’ve watched it about 100 times since – I’ll still say it today. But guess what? That’s just someone’s opinion. Just like a judge or just like you.”
Usyk, so says Fury, suffered a ‘broken face bone and a broken jaw’ during their 12 rounds on May 18, which prevented this rematch from happening until four days before Christmas. And, although he lost in the end, Fury was clearly in control early on in the fight and insists he only became complacent because it was all too easy for him. So, with all that in mind, what changes in the rematch?
“I haven’t changed anything and I won’t change anything,” says Fury, dully.
“Why would I change something when I had control of the fight for maybe 80 per cent of it? I was landing on him at will, head and body, left and right hooks, doubles at times. I don’t feel like I need to change anything. I don’t think he can change much either because his key to victory has to be coming forward like that. He ain’t going to outbox me on the back foot, it’s not possible. He has to come forward and make a fight of it and that’s it.
“I watched it straight back on my way back from the plane. I wasn’t even home and, listen, it’s all if I shoulda woulda couldas now. I can’t do anything because that’s what I did and I can’t reverse that now.
“But I need to be more focused this time and not as much showboating. I think one of the commentators picked up on it and said ‘has anybody ever seen Tyson Fury clown this much? Even against lower level opposition’. That’s how easy it was for me in there. You can get complacent because of that so if I don’t get complacent I should be able to do what I’ve got to do.
“It was probably my best performance of the last five years, maybe more. I thought I boxed unbelievable. You can’t help getting caught and that was my own fault but I think I did very well. I’ve seen reports saying ‘Tyson on the decline’. Well, I’m not showing it on that performance if I am.”
As always, Fury makes a compelling argument but the last five years included his seven-round destruction of Deontay Wilder in their 2020 rematch and then the heavyweight classic in their trilogy fight 18 months and one global pandemic later. There are similarities in the heart he showed by getting up against Wilder in their first and third fights and the way he dug deep to hang on under heavy fire from Usyk in that infamous ninth round. But, for Fury, the difference is quite stark.
“It’s a different animal,” he says. “Let me just say this and I’ll speak brutally because I fought both men: when you’re in the ring with a prime Deontay Wilder who is 44-0 with 43 KOs, you know you’re in trouble at any given moment whether it’s round one, round 10 or with two seconds to go. One mistake it’s game over.
“But with Usyk I don’t feel that much terror. There’s no fear there. After he hit me in round nine, in the 40 seconds before the end of the round, he caught me with quite a few good shots. But it didn’t do anything. He didn’t even knock me down. But if I had him in that position, I would have knocked him out. If I had been in that position with Daniel Dubois, I would have been knocked out cold.
“So he’s a good boxer and he’s a heavyweight who can punch you hard but there’s different levels to power. One man can switch you off like a television but one can hit you, hurt you and try and wear you down. It’s a different beast. When I got knocked down in round four of the third Wilder fight twice it was like ‘it’s f***ing fight or die now’. But in the Usyk fight I didn’t feel at any point, even in round nine, that I was about to be taken out.
“I just look back on that last 40 seconds of round nine…If you’ve done that but can’t get a man out of there, then I feel sorry for him in the rematch.”
Fury’s life changed that night in Riyadh, losing for the first time and losing his belts to a man he believed to be simply too small to trouble him properly. When he returned home to Morecambe it was also confirmed that his wife Paris had suffered a heartbreaking miscarriage while six months pregnant with their eighth child, a baby boy.
She had not been present at ringside and refused to tell her husband why so as not to derail his quest to become undisputed but he knew something was terribly wrong. “She has lost that baby,” he had predicted to his brother on the weekend of the fight. It still hurts him that he was not there for her that week but he will head back to Riyadh this December to look after his family the best way he knows how – by financially securing the Fury name for generations to come with the use of his fists.
“I could not be there for her, in that moment. And that is tough for me,” Fury said. “I have been with the woman for longer than I wasn’t with her, so it is hard that I couldn’t be there with her in that time.
“To go through that on your own, that isn’t good. But it’s not an excuse – hell no. I am a man of honour. I do what I have to do when I am in there. I don’t think about that sort of stuff when I am in that fight.
“Nothing outside the ring matters, there is no emotion.”
It is, after all, what he gets paid to do.
