‘Retirement – the action or fact of ceasing to work.’
There has been much talk about retirement in recent days, with Tyson Fury uttering the word for the umpteenth time to more fanfare than it will likely turn out to merit. Sitting in a car, which already suggested more impulsion than consideration, the former heavyweight king told his followers that he was leaving boxing behind.
One shouldn’t doubt the sentiment. When Fury says things on social media, nine times out of 10 he fully believes in them, at least in the moment. Yet it’s hard not to think back to footage of him in the Netflix series, At Home With The Furys, when he reached for his phone every time an idea popped into his head. In one episode, as boredom raged during a previous ‘retirement’, he sent out a request on social media for a music teacher to show him how to play the piano. In another, the Morecambe resident decided he was going to buy nearby Blackpool airport because he was “sick of all this not being able to fly and stuff when I want to.” Three years later he still doesn’t play the piano – nor does he own an airport. He should not be judged too harshly, either. He was merely trying to take his mind off the only thing he’s ever been able to do well.
However, after countless promises to stop fighting only to start fighting again, his latest address has largely been written off as just another hoax. Eddie Hearn, coming to terms with the failure to make Anthony Joshua-Fury during a period in which he was one of the major powerbrokers in British boxing, has suggested this is merely a ‘play’ to hike up his price tag when he inevitably returns. Kinder observers like Fury’s promoter Frank Warren, whose accounts in recent years have been boosted by having the Gypsy King on his books, have wished him well – and he’ll need all the luck he can lay his hands on if he’s to successfully navigate the long and winding boxing afterlife.
Fury is 36 years old and has taken myriad blows to the head; the chances of him growing old without suffering any deterioration to his brain are slim. That grim prophecy might seem harsh, or even hard to believe given our freshest memories of the heavyweight center around him giving the brilliant Oleksandr Usyk another exceptionally difficult tussle. But be sure that suffering of some kind is in the post.
Sunday marks 40 years since Donald Curry took his hands to the nose of Colin Jones and nearly removed it from the Welshman’s face. Curry, then the world welterweight champion, was in such sumptuous form that night in Birmingham, England, that anyone who bore witness would have struggled to imagine the possibility of him ever losing a fight, much less what he ultimately became.
Jones, a revered and deserving contender, sat on his stool at the end of the first round after sampling Curry’s fistic brilliance. “How good is he?” asked the challenger’s trainer, Eddie Thomas. “He’s good, yeah,” Jones replied. “He hits fucking hard, mind.”
The Briton would only return to that stool twice more. As the punches got even harder, the bruising on his face worsened before Curry tore a hole in the bridge of his nose in the fourth which persuaded the doctor to advise the referee to stop the fight. Seeing little point in continuing to box with savages like Curry blocking his route to the very top, Jones – then only 25 – would never fight again. Count Jones among the lucky ones.
The champion marched on, however, winning four further bouts before he was matched with another British challenger, Lloyd Honeyghan, in September 1986. By then the “Lone Star Cobra” was widely regarded as the best in the entire sport, Marvelous Marvin Hagler being his only feasible rival in the pound for pound charts. For context with more recent times, Curry was the equivalent of Terence Crawford (following his win over Errol Spence) or a peak Vasiliy Lomachenko. The notion that Curry might lose to Honeyghan was so plainly preposterous that the outcome of their bout remains one of the biggest upsets in history, 39 years on.
Curry, for so long convinced he was invincible, was never the same again.
There are few things in sport as sobering as a boxing superhero losing their powers. One minute they’re high on confidence and the next they’re suddenly so vulnerable they struggle to comprehend the extent of their fall. Today, in the midst of an increasingly taxing retirement, Curry suffers from severe brain trauma and his family struggles to care for him. Nobody could have predicted this for Donald Curry, so untouchable was he in his pomp.
Even more depressing is that, in 2025, Curry barely exists in the boxing world he once ruled. Imagine the same being true of Crawford, Lomachenko – or even Tyson Fury – in years to come. Where was Curry’s invite to the recent Ring Awards? Why isn’t he paraded ringside at the major events? Why is it only those we know to have found success in retirement that we get to see? The chosen few who for now have made it out unscathed, all bowties and smiles thanks to the appearance fees they can still command. There is no place in the group photographs of champions for those who are now unrecognizable as such, however.
Curry is far from the only one. Honeyghan – who enjoyed a brief spell as a bona fide British superstar after beating Curry – is also a shell of who he used to be, his health deteriorating with each passing year. Not that you’d likely know about Lloyd, nor about all the others who’ve fallen face first on hard times; their physical and mental deterioration means they’re no longer fit for public consumption in a sport hellbent on ignoring the damage it can do.
Not every ex-boxer gets a gig as an analyst or commentator, nor do they all have the mental dexterity to carve out a new existence. Retiring is the hardest part of any boxing career and, for too many, the transition from fighter on the biggest stage to civilian navigating everyday life is such a jarring contrast that everyday life becomes impossible. It should therefore be no surprise that retirement announcements rarely stick when the definition of the word, and for how little it stands, comes into sharp focus.
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