Tyson Fury sounds obsessed with not allowing Oleksandr Usyk to battle his way through Great Britain by defeating him this Saturday night. WBC champion Fury views himself as the guardian of British boxing.
Usyk has already schooled Anthony Joshua twice and recently defeated Daniel Dubois. According to Fury, he feels he’s the last man standing in the way of Usyk finishing the job of defeating the best Great Britain has to offer.
Fury’s Fading Glory
Fury (34-0-1, 24 KOs) says he’s the last man standing in the UK keeping IBF/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Usyk (21-0, 14 KOs) from collecting the final belt, leaving his country beltless without a champion.
It’s bound to happen anyway. The 35-year-old Fury is getting old, and the 34-year-old Anthony Joshua, who has twice lost to Usyk, is no spring chicken either.
Fury’s game has been slipping for years. He got lucky in his fights against Deontay Wilder not to be knocked out twice under suspicious circumstances. The motivation and activity that Fury once had have gone downhill with all the money he’s made since 2020.
With a bank account stuffed with millions, Fury is no longer the hard worker that he used to be. Yeah, he lost a lot of weight for this fight, but it took him three training camps to do it and a mysterious injury that bought him another three months of preparation.
The $10 Million Reason Fury’s Finally Fighting?
Fury looked flabby last February, and he clearly hadn’t worked hard in camp, even though he was fighting Usyk. Now, what could make the difference this time is His Excellency’s $10 million pull-out penalty. If Fury pulled out again, he would lose that cash, and who knows if there would be another rescheduling.
With so much on the line in terms of the money that’s at stake for an all-British clash between Joshua and Fury, hopefully, we don’t see Usyk robbed this Saturday night in Riyadh as we did in Tyson’s last fight in that country against Francis Ngannou.
Practically, the whole world saw Fury lose that night, but the judges gave him the win, keeping alive the odds for a Fury-Joshua fight. With all that’s at stake for an all-British bash between Fury and Joshua, color me skeptical.
I don’t have much faith in the judges giving Usyk the decision on Saturday night, no matter how one-sided he makes it. Fury will likely have his hand raised unless Usyk knocks him out, and he might need to put him out cold for the match to be stopped.
We all saw Fury’s first and third fights against Wilder, where many saw him getting knocked out, but the referee didn’t stop the contests.
Fury’s Confidence in Overcoming Usyk
“He’s beaten the majority of the heavyweights. The only person that is standing in front of him now is me, and then he will have battled his way through Great Britain, and we can’t be having that. We can’t. We can’t be having that,” said Tyson Fury to DAZN Boxing, talking about Oleksandr Usyk.
“I went to Germany to beat a Ukrainian [40-year-old Wladimir Klitschko] to win all the belts apart from the WBC, which his brother had; otherwise, I would have got that as well. I’m going to do the same again against nowhere near the same puncher as Wlad Klitschko. Nowhere near the size, and someone on top for 11 years. Nowhere near the same achievement either,” said Fury.
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