This has been a year like no other for Tyson Fury. He has again earned vast fortunes but, as he prepares to climb into the ring to once more face Oleksandr Usyk in the early hours of Sunday morning in Riyadh, 2024 has until now been defined most clearly by loss. In May, Fury endured the first defeat of a professional career which began 16 years ago this month. Usyk won a split decision over him to become the first undisputed world heavyweight champion this century.
Far more significantly, and in a devastating personal tragedy, Paris Fury suffered a miscarriage the day before the fight. When a visibly moved Fury revealed the news to a few of us in October he urged us not to imply this was a reason for his defeat: “I am not making excuses but she was six months pregnant. It’s not like a small miscarriage at the beginning. You have to physically give birth to a dead child, on your own, while your husband is in a foreign country.”
Fury recalled that: “When she said she couldn’t come over, I asked her what was up and to tell me – but she wouldn’t. I knew there was a problem. I said to my brother: ‘She’s lost that baby.’”
When Fury sat down with just four of us in Riyadh on Monday evening, the first question we asked was very simple. How is Paris? “I’ve not spoken to her in three months,” he replied. “I’ve not said one word to her in three months. That’s a headline, isn’t it? I’ve been away in camp and I’ve been locked away from everybody, not even had the phone on at all.”
The 36-year-old stressed that he and his wife usually spoke often while he was in training for a fight but that his new strategy of complete seclusion and silence was “special for this one. No distractions, no loss of focus.”
He added that he won’t see Paris, who is now in Riyadh, until after the fight. When I said it must be really hard, for both of them, Fury nodded: “Difficult, yeah. It’s difficult timing but, you know, life’s difficult and the fight’s even harder. I’ve got to give myself the best opportunity to get the victory.”
Fury is a complicated man, who often contradicts himself, and so he has also said that he got over the pain of losing to Usyk on the flight home to Manchester. But his immersion in such a rigorous fight camp, with just his trainer SugarHill Steward, his sparring partners and his brother Shane for months on end, tells a different story.
“It’s been a different camp, for sure,” Fury says. “I’ve done a lot of 12-round sparring. I did more sparring in one week than in my full camp last time. So I’m really, really ready. I know people always say they’ve had a good fight camp but trust me on this: it’s coming home.
“Shane’s been with me – we’ve had 60 days together, in each other’s company – and he’s called me more useless things than ever before. And that’s it.”
Do he and his brother have deep and meaningful conversations? “Heart-to-hearts? We do. We just cry. Sob up the shit, you know what I mean? We’re very soft. We talk about feelings and emotions and it brings me to tears.”
Fury made a crying face before resuming. “I’ve just been focused on the fight and doing my job in camp. I was in Malta, it was decent weather, dry, and I went to the gym in the morning, came back, had my food, went to the gym in the evening, came back and had my food. Then I’d watch TV, go to bed early, wake up early. The only time we left was to go to the gym or to church every Sunday.”
Does church provide a sense of peace? “It’s a sense of fulfilment, belonging, everything.”
On Thursday evening this deeply religious man said very few words at the final press conference with Usyk. But they were all loaded with profanity and malice. “I’m going to dish out a whole lot of pain,” he promised while Usyk sat a few feet away from him. “I’m going to put this fucker into the hurt locker… I am going to do some fucking damage here.”
It seems that Fury is intent on channelling the kind of destructive intentions that fuelled his fight camp before he fought Deontay Wilder for a second time in February 2020. Fourteen months earlier, Fury had been knocked down twice by Wilder while outboxing him comprehensively for the rest of a gripping fight. It was ruled a draw even though everyone outside the Wilder entourage seemed to regard Fury as the clear winner.
Fury set about righting that wrong, which had resulted in the only blemish on his previously perfect fight record, and his preparations for the rematch were fiercely concentrated. I remember spending a few hours in a Las Vegas gym with Fury, Steward and Andy Lee – the brilliant Irish trainer who is Fury’s cousin. Lee often works in the Fury corner, and will do so again on Saturday night, and he had briefed me weeks earlier. He had urged Fury to hire Steward, whom they both knew so well from the Kronk gym in Detroit, where ferocious and chilling knockouts were revered.
The three men sat down with me and explained, in simple detail, how they had hatched a plan to attack, dismantle and knock out Wilder. They did not care that Wilder had hit Fury so hard in the 12th round that it looked as if he wouldn’t be able to get up in 10 minutes let alone 10 seconds. Of course, miraculously, Fury climbed back to his feet and ended the fight throwing heavy leather at Wilder.
So they were prepared to risk a lot against Wilder in the rematch – buoyed by the conviction that the explosive American would collapse beneath a vengeful onslaught from Fury. It seemed a plan full of jeopardy.
But, rather than dance his way out of danger and try to steal a win on points, Fury beat up Wilder with methodical precision. I watched the fight unfold in the exact way in which the three friends had told me it would. Fury dropped Wilder in the third round, as a heavy right hand sent the intimidating champion to the canvas for the first time in 10 years.
Then, Fury made Wilder sag when he knocked him down with a body punch in round five. Blood poured from Wilder’s ear and he looked vanquished long before the referee ended the contest midway through the seventh.
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Their third fight, in October 2021, was even more dramatic. Wilder again knocked Fury down twice but he was also battered three times to the canvas. The last time, in the 11th round, resulted in a knockout so conclusive that the referee did not even need to count over the stricken figure of Wilder.
Fury said this week that Usyk does not engender the same “terror” as Wilder. When reminded that the Ukrainian had come close to knocking him out in the ninth round in May, after nailing him with 14 unanswered blows, Fury shrugged. He said this showed that Usyk, being a smaller man, lacks the shattering force of Wilder.
Yet to compare Usyk and Wilder seems a rash gamble. Wilder, for all his freakish power, often boxed like a raw novice. Usyk, in contrast, is an Olympic champion who had over 350 amateur fights. He has yet to lose a professional bout in becoming the undisputed world champion in both the cruiserweight and heavyweight divisions.
Fury brushes this aside. “I finished stronger than Usyk in round 12. He got carried back to the changing room, believe it or not. He was smashed to bits. I’ve got a picture on my phone. Three days later I never had a mark on me. Three days later he was butchered, broken jaw, broken eye socket, the lot. And that happened with me not even me at my best, nowhere near. I feel sorry for the lad, honestly.
“They’re talking about trilogies, but the beating I’m going to put on him on Saturday night means he’s going to be moving back down [to cruiserweight]. I’m sure of that. But then again, money talks all languages, doesn’t it? There’s a lot of dough involved, so he might want to take another good hiding.”
Fury has mostly avoided such swaggering talk in the buildup to this crucial test. So I asked him if Usyk was in his head when he lay awake in bed at night. “Sometimes you think about the fight. It would be a lie to say you don’t. But most of the time I don’t think about it until the night before.”
Will he feel nervous on Friday night? “It’s not like being nervous for the fight, because obviously I’ve had a lot of fights. I’m not bothered about anybody. But you feel nervous about performing to your best ability or not.”
Fury stroked his big bushy beard thoughtfully. “This is the wild man beard,” he said as our conversation shifted again, as it always does with Fury. “It’s proper wild mode. I’ve shaved my head, but I’ve not touched the face in 12 weeks. After the fight it’s coming all off.”
It might seem strange, after talking about pain and loss, and looming violence, but I asked Fury if he had done his Christmas shopping. “Not done nothing. I’ll probably get home the day before Christmas Eve. We only ever shop in Morecambe anyway. We’ve got Home Bargains there, an Aldi, Asda. If it’s not in any of them shops, we don’t want it. I know Paris has probably already done it all. She’ll buy ‘em, wrap ‘em, give ‘em out, everything.”
What gift has Fury asked for this Christmas? “Usyk as a Santa present, that’s all I want. He’ll be back in Morecambe with me.”
These knockabout Christmas crackers could not have been more different to the near 12 minutes when Fury and Usyk stared into each other’s eyes during their Thursday evening press conference face-off . They were deadly silent for the first nine of those minutes and, sitting just two rows behind Paris Fury and her children, I wondered what thoughts raced though the minds of her and her husband.
After the year they have had, it seems as if the rematch with Usyk will define 2024 for them and for so much of Tyson Fury’s whole career. Victory will offer a sweet release from loss while a second straight defeat to Usyk would be another grievous blow to Fury’s image as the biggest and most outrageous heavyweight on the planet.
The admirable Usyk, meanwhile, carries the hopes of Ukraine, alongside his private quest for boxing greatness. He had also spoken to us about how his victory in May had offered elation to Ukrainian soldiers on the frontline – and remembered how, an hour after beating Fury, he had wept when talking about the death of his father.
The excruciatingly long and menacingly intense silence between Fury and Usyk, as they gazed at each other, suddenly made sense. This fight is about much more than boxing. This is about something much deeper and more personal.
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