Will there ever be another Tyson Fury?
The fast-talking, hard-drinking boxing superstar lit up the anodyne world of contemporary sport.

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Have we seen the end of Tyson Fury? On Monday, the ex-heavyweight champion announced his retirement on Instagram in a video lasting barely 20 seconds. Like most boxers, Fury has retired, and un-retired, multiple times. But at 36, and after two comprehensive defeats, it wouldn’t be a shock to anyone if the Gypsy King was serious this time about hanging up the gloves.
If so, boxing, and in particular British boxing, owes Fury a debt of gratitude. He not only breathed life into a dormant heavyweight division, but also dragged boxing back into the British mainstream. In 2022, his fight with Dillian Whyte drew a record 94,000 people to Wembley Stadium, while his first bout with Oleksandr Usyk was one of the most-watched fights in history. For close to a decade, his fights have been livestreamed in pubs and living rooms across the country.
Fury’s retirement leaves a huge hole in the British sporting landscape. This tough, free-spirited rogue was a welcome antidote to the sanitised, sterile world of contemporary professional sports. He drank heavily, shot his mouth off, and was always apologising for his many erratic comments. He was unfiltered and, quite often, unhinged in his remarks. He weathered extreme highs and lows, both in and out of the ring. He was an old-school boxer in every sense of the phrase.
To describe Fury’s career as turbulent would hardly do it justice. He looked destined to fill his enormous potential in 2015 when, at the age of 27, he dethroned Ukrainian champion Wladimir Klitschko in Germany. Instead, it was the beginning of an excruciatingly public self-destruction. Fury admitted to binging on alcohol and cocaine for months on end. ‘I’ve been out drinking Monday to Friday, Friday to Sunday’, he told Rolling Stone in 2018. ‘Why shouldn’t I take cocaine?’, he asked. ‘It’s my life, isn’t it?’ He put on so much weight he became nearly unrecognisable (describing himself as ‘fat as a pig’), and he admitted to wanting to end his life. It looked as though we would never witness Fury fulfill his immense potential.
But his resurrection was as dramatic, and unexpected, as his downfall. In 2018, Fury took on feared US heavyweight Deontay Wilder in the first of their gripping three-fight trilogy. Despite being floored twice, Fury out-boxed Wilder for the majority of the fight, which ended in a controversial draw. Fury left nothing to chance in their next two encounters, both of which ended with the American on the canvas.
The Wilder fights revealed Fury’s remarkable physical and mental resilience. He was knocked down a total of four times across their encounters, but got up on every occasion. Fury attributes his grit to his upbringing: he was born to parents of the Irish Traveller community and left school at 11 to tarmac roads with his family. His father, who taught Fury the craft of boxing, was a bare-knuckle and unlicensed fighter. As Fury said after his final fight with Wilder: ‘I’m made of pig iron and steel.’
The one jar Fury was unable to open came at the end of his career. In December, he lost to Ukrainian champion Usyk for a second consecutive time. Fury insisted that Usyk had received a ‘Christmas gift’ from the judges, but few people were aggrieved by the result. In any event, both fights were enthralling. In a sport that has been poisoned by promoter rivalries, too often preventing the best fighters in each weight division from facing one another, it was a rare treat to watch the two best heavyweights, both in their prime, duke it out over 24 rounds.
Already, the conversation has turned to whether Fury will come out of retirement (again) to fight his long-term rival, Anthony Joshua. Given Fury could reportedly earn as much as £50million, few would blame him if he did return to the ring. But it would be a fight of little real consequence. Joshua was pulverised by Daniel Dubois in September, his fourth defeat, and arguably his worst. A fight between Fury and Joshua now, both beaten and demoralised, would hardly be worth it.
Fury has little more to prove in boxing. With the exception of Joshua, he has faced three of the best heavyweights of his generation in Klitschko, Wilder and Usyk, beating the first two and narrowly losing to the latter. Despite its ups and downs, his career is a testament to his powers of perseverance, and his outsized personality. In the words of famous promoter Bob Arum, Fury was the most charismatic fighter since Muhammad Ali. British sport already feels emptier for his absence.
Hugo Timms is an intern at spiked.
Picture by: Getty.
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