Fury channels destructive intentions into deeply personal Usyk rematch | Boxing

This has been a year like no other for Tyson Fury. He has once again made huge fortunes, but as he prepares to climb into the ring to once again face Oleksandr Usyk in the early hours of Sunday morning in Riyadh, 2024 has so far been most clearly defined by losses. In May, Fury suffered the first defeat of a professional career that began 16 years ago this month. Usyk won a split decision to become the first undisputed world heavyweight champion of this century.

Far more significantly, and in a devastating personal tragedy, Paris Fury suffered a miscarriage the day before the fight. When a visibly moved Fury revealed the news to some of us in October, he urged us not to suggest this was a reason for his defeat: “I’m not making excuses but she was six months pregnant. It’s not like a small miscarriage at first. You have to physically give birth to a dead child on your own while your husband is in a foreign country.”

Fury recalled: “When she said she couldn’t come over, I asked her what was wrong and to tell me – but she wouldn’t. I knew there was a problem. I told my brother: ‘She’s lost that baby.’

When Fury sat down with just the four of us in Riyadh on Monday night, the first question we asked was very simple. What is Paris like? “I haven’t spoken to her in three months,” he replied. “I haven’t said a word to her in three months. It’s a headline, isn’t it? I’ve been away at camp and I’ve been locked away from everyone, not even had my phone on.”

The 36-year-old stressed that he and his wife usually spoke often while training for a fight, but that his new strategy of complete seclusion and silence was “special for this one. No distractions, no loss of focus.”

He added that he will not see Paris, who is now in Riyadh, until after the match. When I said it must be really hard, for both of them, Fury nodded, “Hard, yes. It’s hard timing, but you know, life is hard and the fight is even harder. I have to give myself the best opportunity to win.”

Fury is a complicated man who often contradicts himself, and he has also said that he got over the pain of losing to Usyk on the flight home to Manchester. But his immersion in such a rigorous fight camp, with only his trainer SugarHill Steward, his sparring partners and his brother Shane for months, tells a different story.

“It’s definitely been a different camp,” says Fury. “I’ve done a lot of 12-round sparring. I did more sparring in one week than in my full camp last time. So I’m really, really ready. I know people always say they had a good fight camp, but trust me on this: it comes home.

“Shane has been with me – we’ve had 60 days together, in each other’s company – and he’s called me more useless things than ever before. And that’s it.”

Do he and his brother have deep and meaningful conversations? “Heart to hearts? We do. We just cry. Sob up, you know what I mean? We’re very soft. We talk about feelings and emotions and it makes me cry.”

Fury made a crying face before resuming. “I’ve just been focused on the game and doing my job in camp. I was in Malta, it was good weather, dry, and I went to the gym in the morning, came back, got my food, went to the gym in the evening, came back and got my food. Then I would watch TV, go to bed early, wake up early. The only time we left was to go to the gym or church every Sunday.”

Does the church provide a sense of peace? “It’s a sense of fulfillment, belonging, everything.”

On Thursday evening, this deeply religious man said very few words at the final press conference with Usyk. But they were all filled with profanity and malice. “I’m going to dish out a whole lot of pain,” he promised as Usyk sat a few feet away from him. “I’m going to put this bastard in the hurt closet… I’m going to do some damn damage here.”

Fury seems intent on channeling the kind of destructive intent that fueled his fight camp before he fought Deontay Wilder for the second time in February 2020. Fourteen months earlier, Fury had been knocked down twice by Wilder while he boxed him out extensively for the rest. of a gripping battle. It was ruled a draw, although everyone outside the Wilder entourage seemed to regard Fury as the clear winner.

Fury set about correcting the mistake that had resulted in the only blemish on his previously perfect fight record, and his preparations for the rematch were fiercely concentrated. I remember spending a few hours in a gym in Las Vegas with Fury, Steward and Andy Lee – the brilliant Irish trainer who is Fury’s cousin. Lee often works the Fury corner and will do so again on Saturday night, and he had briefed me weeks earlier. He had encouraged Fury to hire Steward, whom they both knew so well from the Kronk gym in Detroit, where ferocious and chilling knockouts were revered.

The three men sat down with me and explained in simple detail how they had hatched a plan to attack, dismantle and knock Wilder out. They didn’t care that Wilder had hit Fury so hard in the 12th round that it looked like he wouldn’t be able to get up for 10 minutes let alone 10 seconds. Naturally, miraculously, Fury crawled back to his feet and ended the fight by throwing heavy leather at Wilder.

So they were prepared to risk a lot against Wilder in the rematch – backed by the belief that the explosive American would collapse under a vengeful attack from Fury. It seemed like a plan fraught with danger.

But instead of dancing his way out of danger and trying to steal a victory on points, Fury pounded Wilder with methodical precision. I watched the fight unfold exactly as the three friends had told me it would. Fury dropped Wilder in the third round when a heavy right hand sent the fearsome champion to the canvas for the first time in 10 years.

Fury then sent Wilder down when he knocked him down with a body blow in the fifth round. Blood was pouring from Wilder’s ear and he looked defeated long before the referee stopped the fight midway through the seventh.

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Their third match, in October 2021, was even more dramatic. Wilder again knocked Fury down twice, but he was also knocked to the canvas three times. The last time, in the 11th round, resulted in a knockout so decisive that the referee did not even have to count over the hit figure of Wilder.

Fury said this week that Usyk does not inspire the same “terror” as Wilder. When reminded that the Ukrainian had come close to knocking him out in the ninth round in May, after battering him with 14 unanswered punches, Fury shrugged. He said this showed Usyk, who is a smaller man, lacks Wilder’s crushing power.

But comparing Usyk and Wilder seems like a rash move. Wilder, for all his freakish power, often boxed like a raw novice. Usyk, on the other hand, is an Olympic champion who had over 350 amateur matches. He has yet to lose a professional fight becoming the undisputed world champion in both the cruiserweight and heavyweight divisions.

Fury brushes this aside. “I finished stronger than Usyk in round 12. He was carried back to the locker room, believe it or not. He was smashed to pieces. I have a picture on my phone. Three days later, I never had a mark on me. Three days later he was slaughtered, broken jaw, broken eye socket, the lot. And it happened to me, not even me at my best, not even close. I feel sorry for the boy, honestly.

“They talk about trilogies, but the beating I’m going to give him on Saturday night means he’s going to drop back down (to cruiserweight). I’m sure of that. But then again, money speaks all languages, doesn’t it ?There’s a lot of dough involved, so he might want to take another good hide.”

Fury has mostly avoided such giddy talk in the build-up to this crucial test. So I asked him if Usyk was in his head when he lay awake in bed at night. “Sometimes you think about the game. It would be a lie to say you don’t. But most of the time I don’t think about it until the night before.”

Will he feel nervous on Friday night? “It’s not like being nervous about the match, because of course I’ve had many matches. I am not bothered by anyone. But you feel nervous about performing to the best of your ability or not.”

Fury stroked his large bushy beard thoughtfully. “This is the Wild Man’s beard,” he said as our conversation shifted again, as it always does with Fury. “It’s a pretty wild state. I’ve shaved my head but I haven’t touched my face for 12 weeks. After the match, it all goes away.”

It might seem odd after talking about pain and loss and looming violence, but I asked Fury if he’d done his Christmas shopping. “Nothing done. I’ll probably be home the day before Christmas Eve. We only shop in Morecambe anyway. We’ve got housing offers there, an Aldi, Asda. If it’s not in any of those stores we won’t have it. I know , that Paris has probably already done it all. She wants to buy them, wrap them, give them out, everything.“

What present has Fury asked for this Christmas? “Unsick as a Santa present, that’s all I want. He will be back in Morecambe with me.”

Those knockout Christmas cookies couldn’t have been more different than the nearly 12 minutes Fury and Usyk stared into each other’s eyes during their Thursday night press conference. They were dead silent for the first nine of those minutes, and sitting just two rows behind Paris Fury and her children, I wondered what thoughts were racing through her and her husband’s minds.

After the year they’ve had, it looks like the rematch with Usyk will define 2024 for them and for so much of Tyson Fury’s entire career. Victory will offer sweet relief from the loss, while a second straight defeat to Usyk would be another serious blow to Fury’s image as the biggest and most monstrous heavyweight on the planet.

The admirable Usyk, meanwhile, carries Ukraine’s hopes alongside his private quest for boxing greatness. He had also spoken to us about how his victory in May had inspired Ukrainian soldiers on the front line – and recalled how, an hour after beating Fury, he had cried when talking about the death of his father.

The excruciatingly long and menacingly intense silence between Fury and Usyk as they looked at each other suddenly made sense. This fight is about much more than boxing. This is about something much deeper and more personal.