Tyson Fury’s career as a major player will be on the line tonight in his rematch with three-belt heavyweight champion Oleksandr Usyk at the Kingdom Arena in Riyadh.
Usyk may put the 36-year-old former WBC heavyweight champion Fury out to pasture, as he looks physically finished with his appearance. Tyson’s behavior has been odd, signaling that his defeat against Uyk last May took the best-remaining part out of him.
The Age Burst
Fury looks worn out, and it’s not just from hard training. That fight and the mental torture that he’s dealt with in the last seven months have pushed him into an age burst. That’s where a person suddenly rapidly ages. Fury has clearly undergone one since his loss to Usyk.
Rapid aging normally occurs in the 40s and 60s, but it can start earlier if a person experiences a high degree of stress.
Fury’s Career Survival
The ‘Gypsy King’ needs the victory tonight to not only put himself in position for a trilogy with Usyk (22-0, 14 KOs) if that’s the direction he chooses to go in but also to create interest in a mega-money all-British clash against Anthony Joshua.
The worst possible situation would be for Fury to be plowed by Usyk tonight, knocked out, and then slink into the fight against Joshua, who is coming off a knockout defeat. Fury (34-1-1, 24 KOs) looked terrible, losing his last fight and needing to be saved by the ref in round nine.
What I want to know is who Fury will blame after Usyk does him tonight. An obvious fall guy would be his trainer, SugarHill Steward, who masterminded his victory over Deontay Wilder with his mauling game plan. Regardless, SugarHill should have been dumped after Fury’s controversial win over Francis Ngannou last year. Tyson really lost that fight but was saved by the judges in Riyadh.
What was obvious was that SugarHill’s game plan built around mauling didn’t work, and he had no other ideas. He was a one-trick pony. I don’t know why Fury kept him after that rather dumping him on the spot.
Fury has looked poor in his fights since his one big win in the last nine years, and it’s obvious that SugarHill has no ideas about improving him other than using the tired-leaning strategy he devised for the Deontay clash. Fury has repeatedly used that Strategy in his fights against journeymen Dillian Whyte, Dereck Chisora, and the 0-0 novice Francis Ngannou.
If things don’t work out tonight for Fury, he can give SugarHill and Andy Lee the royal boot. Then he can tell the media that he’s going with a whole new team. The fans would buy into it, and Fury’s loss to Usyk tonight would partially be washed clean.
Matchmaking Magic
The reality is Fury is not that good, and he never was. He was always just a fighter who got over with matchmaking, living off his win over 39-year-old washed-up Wladimir Klitschko. Fury got A LOT of mileage out of beating up an old gunshy guy, who had already been knocked out in two rounds by Corrie Sanders before he ever fought him.
Other than that one win, Fury beat no one and was always a step above the British level, but his promoters matched him carefully to avoid the guys that would have exposed him to the light of day of being average.
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