The closest we get to truly understanding a fighter is watching them in the ring. The time before a boxing match is too primed for psychological warfare to really trust anything anybody says. It’s only during the fight that the physiques and styles answer the questions we asked repeatedly beforehand.
This is especially true when it comes to a fighter as mercurial and unpredictable as Tyson Fury. His strategy for his rematch with Oleksandr Usyk was difficult to decipher prior to the fight – first he claimed he would maintain his emphasis on boxing from the first fight, then he weighed in (at least officially) at 281lbs.
You could argue that Fury’s strategy for the rematch is hard to outline after the event, too. He never seemed to wholly commit to any one gameplan. He boxed sharply, and on the front foot, for the first couple rounds. He let Usyk walk onto uppercuts in the fifth. He clinched and leaned on Usyk throughout the 10th. He fought off the back foot in the face of a rampaging Usyk in the 11th.
Fury did all these things well, but a cynic might argue that he did a little bit of everything and not enough of anything – too uncertain a tactic to unsettle an operator as skilled as Usyk.
A different theory: Fury’s main priority was to avoid getting knocked out. Fury was uncharacteristically disciplined on defense – Usyk cracked him cleanly a few times, but never managed to hurt him like he did in round nine of their first fight. Fury also took the punches better when Usyk did land solidly. Perhaps the weight gain wasn’t an offensive gambit, but a defensive one – the mass was intended to help him weather Usyk’s blows rather than add power to his own.
Fury did gas out before Usyk, but hey, it’s not like Fury’s stamina is uniquely bad for not matching Usyk’s. “The Cat” outlasted Fury in the first fight too, along with almost all of his professional opponents. Plus, as BoxingScene contributor Stephen “Breadman” Edwards put it on Twitter, “For all of the BIG heavyweight fanatics. No 280lb man will have the endurance of a 220lb man. Period.”
Did Fury have the wrong gameplan, then? I don’t think so. Since Usyk arrived at heavyweight and particularly since he appeared to struggle with Derek Chisora in the early rounds of their fight, people have been clamoring for Usyk opponents to just bumrush him and try to get him out early.
I’m not surprised that no heavyweight has managed it, though. For one thing, Usyk has never been dropped as a pro, much less stopped. For another, that plan requires a boxer to completely abandon the skills that carried them through their whole career. It’s no coincidence that only Chisora really tried to rough Usyk up – that’s Chisora 101. Anthony Joshua isn’t that kind of boxer, at least not since Wladimir Klitschko decked him in 2017, and aside from a single bout with Deontay Wilder in 2020, Tyson Fury certainly is not that kind of boxer.
Considering Usyk’s stamina – and what happened to Chisora when he couldn’t finish Usyk early (or come especially close, let’s be honest) – that strategy is a very hard sell. You’d be telling Fury, who has lost all of one fight and very closely, that he has to take an enormous risk to try to knock out a man who is hard to even hurt. Hardly shocking that he didn’t go for it.
Perhaps Fury knew his limitations, tried to work within them, and didn’t quite have enough to stay with Usyk. Given all the evidence at this point – that fighters gas out quickly against Usyk, that they are so reluctant to throw the kitchen sink at him despite everybody demanding it, that Usyk is so hard to hurt – nitpicking Fury’s strategy seems churlish. After all, he did better than all of Usyk’s other opponents.
Owen Lewis is a former intern at Defector media and writes and edits for BoxingScene. His beats are tennis, boxing, books, travel, and anything else that satisfies his meager attention span. He is on Bluesky.
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