Tougher test awaits ‘serious again’ Fury
For some of the eccentric and troubled characters that boxing attracts, the safest place is inside the ring. A confined space where a trained combat athlete hurls punches at you may not sound much like a haven, but for the likes of Britain’s Tyson Fury it is benign compared to the threats of the wider world.
Fury, the undefeated former world heavyweight champion, made his much-trumpeted return to competition last weekend in Manchester in a contest which was about as safe as it gets within the context of the sport.
He toyed with an unknown Albanian trier named Sefer Seferi for a few rounds before the visitor — a boxer so obscure that even Fury and his promoter Frank Warren struggled at times to remember his name in interviews — aborted his futile mission.
The contest always looked a foregone conclusion. The only thing more obvious than the gulf in pedigree was the physical mismatch.
Fury towered over Seferi by 23cm, outweighed him by 30kg and was 10 years younger. He could have squashed his opponent like a bug, but instead chose to pull his legs and wings off over four protracted rounds.
Fury, if we’re honest, did not impress. He was inaccurate and looked cumbersome, and his failure to conclusively stop an opponent so much smaller was a disappointment.
Perhaps this was to be expected, given he’d been out of the ring for two and a half years — a hiatus which saw him gain massive amounts of weight — but when fans buy into a mismatch, they want to see their favourite make short work of it. They want to see their man drop bombs, not poke and prod.
Still, the first steps in a boxing comeback are the most important, if not typically the most dangerous. The point
of the exercise was obvious — Fury was never going to be in danger of defeat, so the objective was to see how he coped with the rigours of a training camp after so many ill-disciplined months, and how a man who by his own admission has struggled with the pressures of fame coped with a return to the spotlight.
On the first point, Fury’s return to something approaching fighting shape was laudable, even if clearly he would benefit from shedding another 15-20kg.
The performance on the night was a far cry from a prime which saw him ingeniously dethrone Wladimir Klitschko in 2015, but it was a start, and if he can maintain focus and fight regularly for the remainder of the year, he may yet regain his better form.
On the latter point, Fury thrived. He appeared genuinely happy to be back, both in the build-up and during the contest, and insisted during post-fight interviews that he was taking the sport seriously again.
More importantly, he is taking himself seriously again. The years away were spent gorging on food, alcohol and drugs after he stood down from the sport while occupying its very highest tier, disillusioned with the harsh glare that is beamed upon such territory.
Fury will fight again in August. A tougher test will hopefully await on that night, and if he can move back towards title contention then the danger level will increase exponentially with every step.
But given the self-inflicted damage Fury wreaked upon his own body and reputation while he was away from the ring, it is probably just as well he’s back in it.