Fury Declares: “Not Every Man Is Built To Be Undefeated Only The Special Ones” – Tyson Fury
To be a fighter, you have to have a little screw loose,” Tyson Fury says calmly in a chaotic room in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where he will soon step back into the ring. His entourage are kicking up a racket but Fury is much more reflective. “Who on earth would want to go and fight against a highly trained athlete, time and time again? You have to be a little bit touched to want to do that.”
On Saturday night, Fury faces Francis Ngannou in a bout which could be the sporting definition of absurdity. Fury is the WBC world heavyweight champion and an indisputably great boxer. Ngannou, in contrast, has never boxed professionally even though he was a dangerous force in mixed martial arts as the former UFC heavyweight champion. So much money has been pumped into this dubious venture that Fury and Ngannou could be lauded as supreme businessmen were it not for the deeply troubling nature of boxing’s sudden veneration for Saudi Arabia.
“My oldest brother, John Boy,” Fury continues, “said to me yesterday: ‘You’re more at home in that ring than your front room. Why is that?’”
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Fury wears wildly patterned green trousers and a fawn-coloured waistcoat. He is shirtless and he pushes back his green cap as he tries to explain his strange obsession. “I just love everything that comes with this game. From a little boy to being a world champion, it’s always intrigued me. I don’t think there’s anything else where you can get all these emotions in one night. Happiness, sadness, fear, nerves, excitement. Going in there on Saturday night will be, for me, as daunting as going up against Deontay Wilder.”
His epic trilogy with Wilder saw him draw their first fight and win the two other bouts with brutal stoppages. But Fury was knocked down heavily four times across the three fights and, as he says now, “I give every man that gets in that ring 100% respect. But this is my time to shine, my time in the sun, my moment of being heavyweight champion of the world.”
I remind Fury of how, after the third Wilder fight, he leaned over the ropes and wept from the consuming and savage drama of it all. “There are two different types of fighters on this planet,” the 6ft 9in giant says quietly. “One is a man who has a go and he loses, gets chinned again. But there’s a special type that doesn’t know the meaning of losing or saying: ‘That’s enough.’”
