What it’s like to fight champion Tyson Fury
Rich Power was sitting on the porch of his California home in 2010 in the midst of preparing for a fight, an MMA fight, when he received a call from his manager. Known for being a fighter willing to do anything, and always in shape for a fight, Power was intrigued by his manager’s question.
“Do you want to fight Tyson Fury?”.
That was years before Fury became one of the sport’s best-known names: a heavyweight champion of the world who sang American Pie and loved Tom Jones.
Back then, he was Tyson Fury, an undefeated, up-and-coming British boxer. Power was also undefeated, so he made some calls and asked for advice. Three days before the fight, Power and his trainers got on a plane to England.
“We just went there,” Power said. “Knowing he was a giant.
There really isn’t another fighter like Tyson Fury. He has a combination of size, speed and skill, plus reach, instincts and talent. He also has the mouth and the knack of knowing how to cut a promo. Add it all up and it’s almost impossible to face and compare to him.
Just ask the people who have fought, and lost, against him over the past decade.
“There are three key parts for anyone who is going to fight him,” said Lee Swaby, who lost to Fury in 2009 and later became his sparring partner. “You have to be a master of public relations, you have to be a master of self-confidence and you have to be a master in the ring.”
“Otherwise, you will fail.”
The fight against Fury begins long before the opponent gets in the ring. It really starts when Fury decides he wants to fight you. As good as Fury is in the ring, his ability to promote a fight can be just as good. He’ll start talking, trying to provoke his opponent into verbal sparring.
“His ability to get into someone’s head is his biggest strength because at first he starts with that and works his way up,” said Joey Abell, who Fury knocked out in 2014. “He knows, outside of the ring, which has nothing to do with boxing, he makes a connection with a lot of people.”
“He knows what to say, he knows what to do, he knows how to act, all that kind of stuff.”
While verbal exchanges are common in boxing, some of them part of the program to help generate excitement for fights, Fury is better than most. From saying in 2019 that he lives in Deontay Wilder’s head “rent-free” to calling Wladimir Klitschko “boring” and saying he had “as much charisma as my boxers, zero, nada,” in the lead-up to their 2015 fight that gave Fury the WBA, IBF and WBO titles.
Fury has his opponent start thinking more about him during sparring, which, in theory, can be a distraction. Fury can also do it without talking. Abell attended his first press conference Thursday before the fight expecting Fury to do a lot of talking. He didn’t say much at all. Then, at the weigh-in, he quickly said “I’m going to knock you out,” and that caught Abell off guard. And there’s also a difference in the way the fighters do it. Power, who lost to Fury in 2010, said that with Fury the talk is never fake. That can be sniffed out quickly.
But when it’s real, or convincing enough to seem real, it can alter the way an opponent handles him.The two best Power has seen are Power? Fury and Conor McGregor, whom he compared to Drake and Jay-Z as line improvisers.
“They think if [he] can get under your skin and make you mad, or if [he] can get on your nerves or you’re constantly thinking about [him] in some way, it’s better,” Power said. “And it’s going to annoy you and it’s going to affect you more.”
What it does, Power said, is create doubt. You’ll see Fury, at six-foot-five, up close and you realize it’s going to be a different fight.
Then he can come out of nowhere with another verbal jab, like when he told Power, “You know I’m going to break your jaw?”
Power replied, “Hey, bro, 32 people turned this fight down. I’m the only idiot who said yes and came here on three days’ notice. I’m going to punch you in the face and see what happens.”
Power felt he had learned the key to dealing with Fury’s fury: punch back. Don’t be nice. Respond with the best you’ve got. If you don’t, Power says, it can affect you like when a relationship ends and you know it’s your fault, the feeling in your gut that it just doesn’t feel right.
That’s what Fury is looking for. Fighting back correctly alleviates that.
“If you don’t match fire with fire a little bit, you run the risk of disappearing in the eyes of the press, fight fans and everybody,” Swaby said.
No amount of sparring or preparation can prepare an opponent for what he sees across the ring on fight night.
“Imagine your first day at school. Imagine you’re a little kid in school and the one three years older than you comes up to you and says, ‘You and I are going to fight,'” Swaby said. “First of all, that’s how you feel because you’re small in comparison. Even though you’re a grown man right now, you’re essentially looking at a guy who’s three years above you in school.”
“And you’re thinking ‘Oh, my God.’
It may be less jarring for a fighter like Deontay Wilder, who is 6-foot-7 and has been in the ring with him twice before. But still, even a fighter like Wilder rarely sees a fighter bigger than him.
Size is something to get used to, both before the fight and when the fight starts.
“Just to give you an idea of how big he is, we’re both standing and when I go to grab him with my arms, I’m hugging his butt,” Power said. “I’m like, ‘This can’t be real – how big is this guy?’
Then there’s how Fury uses his size. Somehow, he makes himself look even longer because of his reach and how he’s able to throw combinations, which is rare for a heavyweight.
Fury also doesn’t move forward heavily like many heavyweights. He’s fast enough to throw punches like smaller fighters, while his size and reach are rare even for bigger heavyweights.
“I spent the first two rounds trying to figure out how I was going to get close enough to him to try to do some kind of damage because [he’s] throwing his hands all over the place,” Abell said. “Like showing off, but then halfway through that, he hits you with a jab and the next thing you know you’re thinking about that, ‘What the hell?’
Even if an opponent can last long enough to try to adjust, Fury continues to present different problems as the fight progresses.
“I felt pretty comfortable in the first six rounds, but I was surprised that Tyson was so fast in the second half [of the fight] as well,” Klitschko said after his bout. “I couldn’t throw my right hand because the advantage was the longer distance [he] had.”
And if things don’t go your way against Fury, that can cause an opponent to change his game plan and try different things that aren’t effective and/or successful.
Deontay Wilder didn’t connect with a power punch until the ninth round, when he knocked Fury down the first of two times in their first fight.
“I came out slow. I sped up my punches. I didn’t stand still. I was too tentative,” Wilder said after the first fight. “I started throwing my right hand too much and I couldn’t adjust.”
“I was rushing my punches. That’s something I normally don’t do. I was forcing my punches too much instead of being patient and waiting,” he added.
When Otto Wallin fought Fury in 2019, he felt his strategy was sound. Wallin created two cuts around Fury’s eyes and at 6-foot-6 he didn’t present a size difference like other fighters. Wallin had the hand speed to stay with Fury and decided before the fight that he couldn’t go in with too much of a defensive mindset.
The third round cut over Fury’s right eye led Wallin to think the fight might be stopped at some point. It wasn’t, and Fury rebounded to take a decision.
If a fighter thinks there’s an area he figured out, Fury figures out what works and what doesn’t, and changes strategies mid-fight. Usually, a fighter has either stamina or heart. Occasionally they have both. Fury coming back against Wallin, Wilder and John McDermott gave opponents at different stages of his career a window into what he will do to win.
“He has incredible courage,” McDermott said. “His eyes rolled five or six times when I hit him and most people would have grabbed, but he just fought back.”
Even if you hurt Fury, he’s making adjustments. If he timed you, it won’t matter what an opponent does because Fury will be able to counter it.
“Of course his reach is unbeatable, but it’s the way he throws,” said Jared Anderson, a rising heavyweight and training partner of Fury’s who will fight on the bill Saturday. “He can throw hard and fast. He can throw a strong jab. He has a variation of a jab and it’s a combination of punches.”
“He can go there boom-boom up, then back to the body and then up down. It confuses people,” he added.
His height also creates unconventional angles for punches. So, if a fighter is used to blocking a jab from a shorter fighter’s angle, Fury places it in a different spot. Reaching can also lull an opponent into a false sense of near comfort. During his fight against Fury, there were times when Abell thought he was at a safe distance.
Then Fury connected with a punch, not one intended to knock Abell out, but rather as a reminder that he could reach him there, too.
“Most people, when they get hit, they take a breather or take a step back,” Power said. “Fury moves forward and puts together massive combinations. You don’t even have a second to get into a mode, to get your brain to switch like ‘oh, I’ve got a chance here.”
“‘ He takes it away from you mentally, physically, quickly.”
And when Fury beats an opponent, it’s often something that sticks with the loser. For some, like Swaby and Power, it led them to work as Fury’s training partners. For others, it’s been an understanding that the fighter they fought, often in his promotion, was going to be something special.
In Abell’s case, it completely changed the way he prepared. It changed the way he thought about the whole sport. He had never faced anyone like that before. He hasn’t since. He decided to have more training partners for future fights to give him a different look. To help him anticipate anything a fighter might present.
That started with Fury.
“Expect to see a master class lesson,” Abell said. “Because no matter what it looks like, it’s teaching you. It’s like solving a math problem. You do it in an unorthodox way, but you still do it. He boxes in an unorthodox way, but he still gets the job done.”
