Tyson Fury has retired and un-retired so many times that it’s hard to know how seriously to take his latest attempt.
Fury has proven too mercurial and too reliant on the fight game to inspire much faith in his ability to keep it at a distance. His previous efforts to leave the sport behind before – even promising his wife, Paris, that he would – resulted in swift relapses.
Most likely, this drug isn’t done with Tyson Fury just yet.
This time might just be different, though. Fury remains competitive at the highest level; his unanimous decision loss to Oleksandr Usyk in their December rematch did nothing to make me think otherwise. And the prospect of a gargantuan event with Anthony Joshua continues to glimmer – knowing the vampiric nature of the boxing business, promoters will keep pushing for that fight until one of the prospective combatants enrolls in assisted living.
Still, Fury prolonging his career has risks.
Fury’s body has been through a lot. He’s ballooned up to twice the cruiserweight limit, shrunk back down to 250 or so, added and dropped a couple dozen pounds for practically every fight, battled drug addiction, suffered eight knockdowns in his career (and several of them from flush, heavy shots), suffered God knows how many more in sparring, and eaten left hands from Oleksandr Usyk while half-conscious in round nine of their first fight.
“The Gypsy King” might already have some health difficulty waiting for him later in life, and he is vulnerable to sustaining more at 36 years old.
Fury’s career is just about complete, too. No, he hasn’t fought Joshua, and that’s a fight that people have wanted for ages. But from a legacy perspective, it wouldn’t prove much. Their respective performances against Usyk, the Ukrainian’s affirmations that Fury is the best fighter he has faced, and their careers in general suggest fairly clearly that Fury is the better man than Joshua in the ring. Fury is a near-certain Hall of Famer and has reigned as the lineal champ; Joshua is probably 40-60 to get in and never quite seized and held onto the top spot in the division.
I’ve taken my share of shots at Fury’s resume. He didn’t rematch Wladimir Klitschko. His third fight with Derek Chisora seemed like the most unnecessary fight imaginable – until he fought Francis Ngannou in his very next bout. He took too long to get in the ring with Usyk. He tested positive for the banned substance nandrolone for his 2015 fight with Christian Hammer, one fight before he faced Klitschko.
But Fury also mixed it up with Klitschko once, Usyk twice, and a truly fearsome puncher in Deontay Wilder three times. He showed an uncommon willingness to entirely change his identity as a fighter for the second Wilder fight. He made an astonishingly improbable comeback to the sport after a years-long layoff of depression and drug addiction. And he beat everyone he ever fought, besides arguably the greatest active boxer in Usyk – whom Fury was one point on one card away from edging in their first fight and tested severely in their rematch.
Fury didn’t author the all-time-great CV boxing observers once projected for him. But he still had a great career and established a lengthy highlight reel.
Now that Usyk has established himself as the heavyweight king, returning to the ring offers little further embellishment to Fury’s legacy. But the physical danger looms larger than ever. It’s easy enough for us to say that Fury should just fight Joshua for the enormous payday and then hang up the gloves, but who is to say that Fury wouldn’t feel compelled to fight on after that?
Even the best fighters tend to hang around the ring too long. It’s not at all hard to imagine Fury prolonging his career in search of that pugilistic high until his skills and extraordinary recuperative abilities crumble completely, leaving behind yet another broken body that continues to fight.
The Gypsy King is liable to change his mind on a dime. Recently, he has changed it in a way that will surely be more beneficial to his health than another saga of fights. I hope he won’t change it back.
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