“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?’”
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.’”
The unbeaten Fury nods intently. “That’s me. It takes a lot of emotion, guts, physicality, spirituality, to keep going even when you’ve been knocked down twice, like I was in round four. Every time he hit me clean I was getting hurt. I looked at my brother and I was like: ‘This is not over. I’m getting him, 100%.’ Then, round 11, bang! Chinned him. Get up from that. That’s my favourite knockout because I knew it was a perfect shot. I ran away and jumped on the ropes, looking at him on the floor.”
The big man is thoughtful when I ask about the times he has been hit so hard that, as against Wilder in 2018, he was actually unconscious before he struck the canvas. Incredibly, Fury still got up before the count reached 10. “Against real punchers like Wilder you don’t feel the power. You wake up on the floor and then, if you’re lucky enough, you open your eyes as [the referee] says: ‘Four, five.’
“I remember the referee looked at me like he’s an alien and he said, in an alien voice: ‘Are you OK?’ I was like: “Yeah! C’mon, let’s go!’ But obviously I didn’t know what had hit me. It was a crazy experience, all of it, and if I’m not a blessed man, I don’t know who is. I don’t know anyone who’s been knocked out cold, got up and got stuck right into him.”
Saturday night will be very different. It feels like a charade of a fight as Ngannou is a boxing novice whom Fury should beat with ease. “I hope you’re right,” Fury cackles. “I’m intent on punishing him for a while, enjoying it, putting on a show, then bang! Chinning him. He might be tough as a brick. He’s never been stopped. But he’s never been hit by a proper puncher before. There’s MMA punching and boxing punching. It’s different.”
I’m far more interested in Fury’s next bout, again in Riyadh, when he faces Oleksandr Usyk, the IBF, WBA and WBO champion on 23 December. The winner will become the first undisputed world heavyweight champion since Lennox Lewis held all the belts in 1999. “It’s the fight of the century,” Fury says. “So it’s obviously a meaningful fight.”
Usyk is also a masterful boxer. “Is he?” Fury asks me evenly. “Is he any better than the rest of these people? I’m not sure he is. He had a 50-50 fight with Del Boy [Derek Chisora]. Even Daniel Dubois had a lot of success against him. Without being rude to those guys, they’re little more than a heavy bag on legs walking forward. Even AJ [Anthony Joshua who has lost twice to Usyk] had a lot of opportunity and he didn’t do anything. Just walked forward with his hands up around his head, terrified of what’s coming back and didn’t use his advantages. Do you really think, after all these years of knowing me, I’m going to be happy to lose on points against a guy like that? Oh my God. Please.”
This is typical Fury – a showman capable of describing the “daunting” challenge of facing a man who has never boxed before and then trashing an outstanding and brave champion in Usyk. He has already gone into amusing detail about his daily routine at home: “I wake up every morning at 6am, having gone to bed at 9pm. From the moment I wake to the moment I close my eyes, I’m busy. It’s not stuff you think the heavyweight champion of the world will be busy with. But it’s Groundhog Day and keeps me very grounded.”
Fury lists his schedule of tasks – showering, shaving, dressing and feeding the kids, taking them to school, getting down on his hands and knees to collect everything that the dogs have shredded overnight, picking up teddy bears and cushions before going to the tip to dump the rubbish his seven children have collected. “I go to the tip four times a week. It’s like a second home to me. Then I’ve got to feed the dogs, pay the bills, gas, water, electric, council tax. I’m in charge of it all. Then I go to the gym at 4pm every day.”
As a way of cutting down his chores, Fury recently sold more than a hundred properties in the north-west. “Too much headache,” he says, “although the rents are good. Imagine dealing with your own family’s problems. Times that by a hundred. ‘This is broken, that’s not working, this needs fixing.’”
And so Fury will remain locked inside boxing. He suggests that he won’t box anywhere apart from Saudi Arabia as he has signed a rumoured contract for three or four fights worth £200m. Fury insists again that the one that really matters, against Usyk, is a certain victory.
“He won’t be able to move away from me in a 20ft ring. He might run away, but I’ll chase him down. I’ve got fast feet and I will hit him and hit him. I’ll stop him. I guarantee it.”
Fury grins again, looking less like a madman than a world champion who is utterly at home in the circus of boxing.
