Roll over, Muhammad
Oliver Bateman
Sports fans demand superlatives. It is not enough to agree that a particular hometown hero is among the all-time greats — if you don’t admit he or she is the best to ever play the game, you might wind up losing a friend. That said, there are a handful of inarguable GOATs plying their trades among us: NFL quarterback Tom Brady, NBA forward LeBron James, Portuguese soccer forward Cristiano Ronaldo, and WBC and lineal heavyweight champion Tyson Fury, to name four.
That last name likely gave you pause. Surely Fury, strangely proportioned at 6’9” and 280-plus pounds with long, gangly arms, slender legs, and enormous love handles regardless of his level of conditioning, doesn’t warrant inclusion among those finely tuned performers. Yet it’s possible that he’s the best of any of them after accounting for his era, sport, and level of competition. Fury, named after ferocious former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson and descended from a long line of Irish Traveler bare-knuckle boxing champions, has won 33 fights, lost none, and been part of a single controversial draw he almost certainly should have won.
In 2015, Fury ended the heavyweight-title reign of seemingly unbeatable Ukrainian boxer Wladimir Klitschko, the younger and better of the Klitschko brothers. Making a comeback in 2018 after a three-year battle with weight gain, drug use, and mental illness, he fought to a draw and then twice knocked out hard-hitting Deontay Wilder — the Joe Frazier of his era, the unquestioned second-best boxer, a 6’7” giant of a man who has put all of his other foes on the canvas and gave Fury the sort of beating that would retire lesser men. Along the way, Fury thrashed a number of solid contenders and near-greats, making short work of skilled fighters such as Joey Abell, Dillian Whyte, and Derek Chisora. Fury’s story will likely conclude this year when he fights the masterly, albeit undersized, Ukrainian Oleksandr Usyk to unify all of the sport’s assorted world title belts. The odds of dominating boxing’s most prestigious weight class are quite good for a man trained almost from birth in the sport’s fundamentals by his skilled father — until said father landed in prison in 2011 for gouging out a rival’s eye.
But his success story makes little sense. Here was a man who weighed a measly 1 pound at birth, hailing from one of the United Kingdom’s more disadvantaged ethnic groups. “No one wants to see a Gypsy do well,” he said in 2016. He’s a man who had grappled with bipolar disorder since his teenage years and spent nearly all of 2016 and 2017 in the throes of drug and alcohol addiction while also dealing with the specter of a failed pre-fight steroid test dating back to February 2015. Written after the first Wilder fight, Fury’s 2019 autobiography Behind the Mask is light on fight and training details, as is often the case with ghostwritten celebrity sports stories, but heavy on the description of Fury’s mental health struggles. The stories of Fury at 28 stone (nearly 400 pounds) snorting coke and hobbling around “like an old grandad,” wearing shirts that don’t cover his navel and pants he’s unable to button, are genuinely harrowing. At one point, Fury, famous now and in his youth for his endurance, confesses he was unable to walk 500 yards without gasping for breath.
After vacating his titles in 2016, Fury arguably suffered the steepest and most rapid physical decline of any former boxing champion. Always a lively talker, he became a true loose cannon, letting off a manic torrent of abrasive comments about friends, foes, and various minority groups (including the LGBT community) with which his strongly held religious beliefs, described by The Guardian as a “mixture of traditional Roman Catholicism … and a particularly literal interpretation of evangelical Christianity,” put him at odds. Fury, on the receiving end of a good deal of prejudice for his Traveler roots, felt slighted by the media. He remarked in 2016, “I will always be fat and white, and that’s it. … I am the champion, yet I am thought of as a bum.”
By the time Fury returned in 2018 to face Wilder, he was fat, white, and considered by many to be a bum — but considerably less fat than he had been, down 150 pounds from his 2016 peak. He recovered from Wilder’s best shots, which landed him on the canvas in two separate rounds, out-punching Wilder in the other rounds, only to be awarded a draw. Their two rematches were much rougher affairs for Wilder. Fury, tipping the scales at close to 280 pounds, bullied and then finished his opponent in both. From there, Fury (who often serenades the crowd with surprisingly in-tune renditions of radio hits such as Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” following his victories) breezed past Whyte, a top-five talent, and racked up a third lopsided win over Chisora.
None of the previous great boxing comebacks went this smoothly. In his second fight after spending 1967 to 1970 in limbo after he refused to enter the armed forces, Muhammad Ali, already slightly past his prime, took loads of punishment in a decision loss to Frazier in 1971. Paroled in 1995 after three years in prison, Fury’s namesake Mike Tyson easily regained two of his heavyweight titles from less-than-worthy champions before former champion Evander Holyfield stopped him in the 11th round of their first meeting in 1996. Ali would have his peaks and valleys, while Tyson would begin a rapid descent that continued for over a decade — but neither was ever the same again. Fury, by contrast, sits atop the sport he was raised from birth to conquer, arguably better than ever.
When rattling off various “greatest of all time contenders,” few of their stories contain such highs and lows. Ronaldo and James have been exceptionally fit and productive throughout their careers. Brady was a late-round NFL draft pick but has gone from strength to strength throughout a two-decade career. And then here is Fury, “always fat and white and that’s it,” who is one superfight against Usyk away from making his case for prizefighting immortality — not merely the greatest heavyweight, but perhaps the greatest boxer. You can’t make this sort of thing up. If you did, no one would believe you.
Oliver Bateman is a journalist, historian, and co-host of the What’s Left? podcast. Visit his website: www.oliverbateman.com.