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There has never been a heavyweight like Tyson Fury. He’s the size of an NBA power forward, has the wit of a stand-up comic, power that rivals that of boxing’s best ever punchers and the skills of a man 100 pounds lighter.
He’s a guy who less than five years ago was contemplating suicide and now, in back-to-back fights, has scored knockouts in heavyweight title defenses in which he’s drawn 94,000 for Dillian Whyte in April and then 65,000 for Derek Chisora on Saturday.
The WBC champion pummeled Chisora from beginning to end in a fight that should have been stopped much sooner than it was at 2:51 of the 10th round at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London. When it ended, Fury said the words that just about everyone wanted to hear when he called out unified champion Oleksandr Usyk.
He couldn’t help, though, reflect on the battles he’s fought with mental health to where he is now, sitting on top of boxing’s glamour division with at least four mega-fights that will pay him handsomely awaiting him. Whether it’s Usyk, Joe Joyce, Anthony Joshua or Deontay Wilder, Fury is going to get paid massively, building generational wealth in the process.
This is all for a guy who felt life wasn’t worth living five years ago.
“I didn’t see a way out,” Fury said Saturday of his dark days of depression, when he was over 400 pounds and not only contemplated but attempted suicide. “I thought my future was going to be in a room with padded walls. I wanted to die basically every single day. But now I know there’s sunshine and rainbows again.”
Fury fought Chisora after a brief retirement and efforts to make matches with Usyk and Joshua. He’d fought, and defeated, Chisora twice previously, and Chisora had done nothing in the interim to earn a shot at the lineal heavyweight championship.
Fury, though, has great personal affinity for Chisora and opted to give him a shot. He told Yahoo Sports before the fight that British fans knew and liked Chisora and would come out to watch him. Sure enough, 65,000 showed up in temperatures that hovered in the high 30s and low 40s to see Fury take apart Chisora a third time.
Fury said he’d injured his right hand on Chisora’s head during the fight, and he said he has a right elbow problem that may require surgery.
But during the nine-plus rounds the fight was on, it was a brilliant Fury who threw every punch in the book and bounced them repeatedly off Chisora’s head.
Fighting Fury is like fighting an octopus, and it’s hard to know where the shots are coming from. And since he teamed with trainer SugarHill Steward in 2019, he’s become a much bigger puncher.
“The best way to make sure you definitely get that win is by getting knockouts, so I’m programmed on training for knockouts,” Steward said.
The question that now must be answered is whether Fury will be able to knock out Usyk, the 6-foot-3, 220-pound former undisputed cruiserweight champion who now holds the IBF-WBA-WBO heavyweight belts after beating Joshua in back-to-back bouts.
Fury dubbed Usyk “The Rabbit” because Fury said Usyk was running from him. When Fury decided to end a brief retirement, he sent an offer to fight on this night to Usyk. Usyk, coming off those fights with Joshua, said he wanted to fight in the February-March time frame.
And so that eventually led to Chisora getting the gift of the fight. He paid for it, though, by getting his head pounded by massive shots repeatedly over nearly 30 minutes of ring time.
It wasn’t hard to guess Fury would do that to Chisora, but Usyk is a master boxer who won’t be so easy to hit. Fury opened the door to a fight with Joyce, as well, and said he’d like to see Wilder a fourth time at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas late next year.
Any of those fights will be terrific matchups, but the Usyk one makes the most sense. It will unify the division and have one man standing head and shoulders above the rest as the king.
As good as Usyk, Joyce and Wilder are, something will have to change dramatically for the guy who emerges from this as king not being the one who, at 6-9 with an 85-inch reach, literally and figuratively stands head and shoulders above the rest.