More than three years after his previous UK bout, Tyson Fury was a popular winner in what he claimed will be his final fightMoments after a discombobulating right uppercut sent Dillian Whyte deep into la-la land, Tyson Fury asked Wembley to proclaim his greatness in what he claimed might be the final fight of his career.“Dillian is a warrior,” said Fury. “And I believe that Dillian will be a world champion. But tonight, he met a great in the sport. I’m one of the greatest heavyweights of all time.” Continue reading...
From bad blood in Cardiff to Tyson Fury’s closest call, via a Stormzy ring walk, half a dozen British feuds settled in the ringThis was the first time two British boxers contested a version of the world heavyweight title, but the buildup turned ugly with a two-word insult: “Uncle Tom”. Lennox Lewis denied using the slur but Frank Bruno insisted it came from inside Lewis’s camp and it increased the bad blood between the aloof WBC champion and national treasure Big Frank. Continue reading...
The Wembley showdown is only a sideshow with attention focused on US law enforcement’s pursuit of the Kinahan cartelThe long buildup to next Saturday night’s world heavyweight title fight between Tyson Fury and Dillian Whyte, in front of a record crowd of 94,000 at Wembley Stadium, was strangely muted and even uncertain for months. An all-British showdown between the outspoken Fury and Whyte, who is such a raw and jolting talker, should have conjured up an entertaining prelude. Instead, the silence was broken only by complaints from the Fury camp about Whyte’s elusive absence from all promotional duties and rumours of constant bickering between the rival camps.Then, last Wednesday, there was a dramatic and explosive twist when the US Treasury...
Boxing has always been a flawed and dangerous game – the emergence of Daniel Kinahan is no betrayal of the sportThe footage is horrible, harrowing, traumatic. All the same, you can’t look away. The scene is the Regency hotel in Dublin in February 2016, the event a nondescript weigh-in before the big fight the following night. There’s terrible rock music playing. A couple of gormless-looking bald men standing on the podium bearing clipboards. A local cruiserweight called Gary Sweeney steps on to the scales in blue Superman briefs. The gormless bald men peer forward and write on their clipboards. Sweeney steps aside. All of a sudden, we hear the whip-crack of an assault rifle.At which point, a lot of things...
The heavyweight’s comments after his loss to Tyson Fury are best euphemised as misjudged – but he is not the first boxer to be pilloried for offering up a bizarre excuseCan anyone confirm whether there’s a possibility Deontay Wilder may have suffered a bump to the head of late? However outlandish that theory might initially seem, it is one we have to work on after the heavyweight addressed the circumstances of his loss to Tyson Fury in Las Vegas on Saturday night in an interview best euphemised as misjudged.According to Wilder, whose team threw in the towel in the seventh round, he has an entirely understandable excuse. “He didn’t hurt me at all,” this ran. “But the simple fact is...