FURY OF TYSON?
He is heavyweight boxing’s self-styled Gypsy King whose crude comments have provoked a storm around the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award. So what’s fuelling the...
TYSON FurY has talked about building houses for the homeless in Morecambe. ‘I want to be the people’s champion,’ he told those who joined him on a seafront run in his adopted hometown recently.
Meanwhile, the gym where he learned his craft clings to its meagre existence in suburban Manchester.
Wednesday night at Jimmy Egan’s Boxing Academy in Wythenshawe and a £3-a-boy club session is under way. In 35 years the gym has had six different names and 13 different homes.
Some things don’t change, though, as skipping ropes fizz through stale air and around the perimeter, gloves slap hard against the heavy bags.
At the centre of this chaotic, cheerful bustle is Steve Egan, the trainer who discovered the self-proclaimed ‘Gypsy King’ who, all of a sudden, is the most famous boxer in Britain.
‘I put him to work on the bag and you could pretty much tell straight away,’ Egan told Sportsmail. ‘A champion in the making.’ Thirteen years on and Fury, now 27, is indeed a champion, a world champion. Since beating Wladimir Klitschko in Dusseldorf, however, he has not always behaved like one.
At Egan’s — where an image of Steve’s late father looks down from the wall above the ring — they have a philosophy. It’s about ‘manners, forging friendships and enjoying life’.
In the wake of Fury’s comments about homosexuality and women, after his public threats to those who have criticised him, it is an uncomfortable fit.
‘I don’t know where his words are coming from,’ said Egan, who worked with Fury throughout his successful amateur career. ‘I am completely puzzled. He isn’t against gays or against anyone. I have never heard him say he hates anyone.
‘He likes getting in the ring and having a go and he certainly has a switch. I have seen him spar when he is being too relaxed and then he gets caught and he goes up three gears. Bang! Bang! Bang! But he’s not over-aggressive. He’s quite gentle out of the ring; a nice, nice lad.
‘All this stuff he is coming out with is making everybody against him and that’s wrong. It’s just bravado.’
Despite recent controversies, Egangan hopes Fury’s success will inspire those who seek to follow him. It’s in spartan environments like this — an old ring, bags held together by tape — where champions can still be born.
Now in middle-age, with shoulders broken by 35 years of glove work, Egan looks back on his chequered history with Fury with a resigned shrug.
Fury is coached and mentored now by his uncle Peter and his father John. Much is made of their travelling backgrounds — team Fury lived in caravans in an Ormskirk field in the run-up to the Klitschko fight — but Tyson was just another bored kid from a house in Cheshire when they met.
‘It broke my heart when he left,’ Egan said. ‘I sacrificed a lot. I gave up work so I could work with him twice a day.
‘I missed my son’s 21st birthday to be in Morocco for the World Championships with Tyson in 2006. But I wanted it for my dad. I wanted people to say a world champion had come from Jimmy Egan’s.
‘From 2002 I had him, until he was 20. The split was gradual. We won the ABAs and I went to meet people like Frank Maloney — or Kellie as she now is — to see who would sign him.
‘There was nothing said about splitting. It just drifted. I wasn’t going to chase it. I have pride. He knew where the gym was and where I was. We are still in touch. He says he will come here and bring the belts.
‘Back in January we had a 35th anniversary of the club and he came to that. So it’s a distant relationship but it’s still there. I just care for the club, that’s what matters.
‘This is one of the poorest wards in Britain. If Tyson feels the need to give something to Morecambe, then that’s up to him, but yeah, it would be nice if he gave us something, too.’ TYSON FurY’S wife Paris has described her husband as having ‘ 20 different personalities’. ‘He needs a straitjacket,’ she joked recently.
In another, more serious interview with the Lancashire Evening Post two years ago, she revealed that her husband had suicidal thoughts.
‘Depression seems to run in Tyson’s family and he and his brothers have a very depressed and jaded attitude to life,’ she said. ‘ Tyson has a bit of a split personality anyway. He is not loud and brash when he is at home. He is just normal.’
Fury has talked of suffering from depression and recent outbursts would appear to point to some issues, even if they were not obvious to close associates in the past.
‘I travelled all round the world with him and I never saw anything back then,’ said Steve Egan. ‘He would have dark moments, sure. I could always see it in his eyes. Nothing out of the ordinary, though.’
Born into a travelling family of Irish heritage, Fury had a stable childhood. By the time he was born in 1988, three months prematurely, the Fury family had settled in a house in the village of Styal on the Cheshire-Manchester border.
His mother Amber, a Protestant from Belfast, became pregnant 14 times but only four survived, all boys. A daughter, ramona, was born two days before Christmas 1997 but died two days later when Tyson was nine.
A former governor of the village primary school recalled: ‘There was a travelling community nearby and we used to fret because if they moved on it would leave the school seriously short of children. But Tyson was not one of those kids we
His mum Amber was pregnant 14 times but only four survived
worried about. His upbringing was much more fixed. The Fury family were fine. The scariest thing about them was their huge dog.’
Fury has not lived a travelling life — he has never had a bare-knuckle fight — but he did not attend secondary school, working instead on the roads with his father and later boasting: ‘I had £120,000 in cash by the time I was 18.’
He met his wife, who is from Doncaster, when he was 15 and married her six years later. ‘She is my hero and puts up with so much s*** from me,’ he said.
Undoubtedly, though, it appears his relationships with his father and his uncle are just as profound. The reason he now lives on the Lancashire coast is because his uncle moved there.
As Fury’s career has progressed, journalist Kugan Cassius has grown close to the family and has been granted access in pre-fight and post-fight periods.
His films — that run on the IFLTV online channel — reveal much of the relationship between Fury and those responsible for the second half of his fighting career.
On the tapes, Fury describes himself as an ‘uneducated slink’ but appears far more intelligent than he would like to admit.
Certainly his recent interviews with Cassius feature the occasional ridiculous moment. In one he talks about masturbation as his wife sits next to him. In another he describes promoter Frank Warren as a ‘d***head’.
Beneath the childish bombast, however, there would appear to exist a sportsman with a clear and intelligent grasp of his sport’s history and indeed his place in it.
As his trainer and uncle Peter said: ‘Tyson has got where he is because he wanted it. When he was a kid I would see him running past my window in the rain. Nobody was getting him out of bed, he was doing it on his own.
‘Yeah, he talks but he’s a very serious athlete and the only thing that will ever beat Tyson is Tyson himself because when you take boxing away he is a deep thinker. He will start running off the rails and think anything. Tyson has to fight his inner self and get happy. I don’t know what he does in his own time but he always seems depressed. Outside of boxing he needs to find a happy medium. I just want him to have a happy life.’
In boxing media circles, Peter is accepted as the more approachable face of Fury’s entourage. Peter’s brother John, Tyson’s father, has a more unpredictable temperament. A fine boxer himself in his day, Fury Snr has nevertheless served time for gouging a man’s eye out in a brawl at a car auction.
In one interview with IFLTV, he describes a moment when, during a father-and- son sparring session, Tyson broke one of his ribs at the age of 14.
Other interviews in the back half of this year take on an altogether more serious note, and it is tempting to wonder if Tyson shares some of this darkness. They hint at a sense of injustice and resentment that perhaps has roots in Britain’s decision not to select Fury for the 2008 Olympics and also reflect some of the racism he has suffered on social media during his rise.
‘We all have crazy days and say things that seem like a good idea at the time,’ said John Fury. ‘Tyson is his own man. I try to steady the ship. But he sees people for what they are. I am a man of few friends and it does not bother me, either.
‘ Sometimes people don’t like proper people, do they? They want you to say things to please other people but we don’t roll that way.
‘The gypsy man pays homage to nobody. It’s a cultural thing. Our culture is different to yours. We have our own beliefs and standards. This kid (Fury) has come up the hard way. He has poured his heart out for this mongrel race, this island in the middle of the ocean, this postage stamp that’s worthless, this dumping ground for the world.
‘ He has given his all for this country and what has he got in return? Someone says on Twitter, “I hope you die you pikey bastard”. What’s that all about?
‘Tyson is mixed-up and he knows he hasn’t got his just deserts for what he has achieved. I have taken nothing from this government. I have given them the most precious thing to come out of this island. Yet they can’t get behind him.
‘Tyson is a good lad, he has never been in trouble. But people don’t want to see a travelling champion. We are hated people.’
IN THe controversial days that followed Fury’s win in Germany, sanctuary has been the £650,000 family home on Marine Drive, a stretch of coastal road that runs through the upmarket village of Hest Bank, east of Morecambe.
The Furys, who now have two young children, have lived in the area for four years and their profile is relatively high.
A local in the well-appointed Hest Bank Hotel told Sportsmail: ‘He comes in here for a drink. He’s like he is on the TV, a bit cocky and all that. But he’s OK.’ At the VVV Health Club down by the water, they know the Furys, too. Paris is a member but last week her husband baulked at the £80-a-month fee and walked out, as he did from the adjoining cafe a few weeks earlier.
‘He was in here to meet the mayor at the time he was talking about becoming an MP,’ revealed a source. ‘But the mayor didn’t show up and Tyson got a bit upset. He knocked some things over in a temper.
‘It looked a bit for show, though. He’s still the same, still doing his runs along the promenade.’
In recent times the Fury family have had problems — an illness to their son Prince and an arson attack that destroyed two cars parked on their drive.
To those who know him, Fury’s endeavours to stay grounded appear to be well- intentioned. Those who took up offers to run with him as he trained for his recent fight tell of a man who seemed genuine and keen not to come across as fake.
One runner asked him to wear Morecambe FC shorts but he declined, citing loyalty to Manchester United. Fury does attend games at Old Trafford, always in a woolly hat, usually leaving 10 minutes before the end.
Since his victory over Klitschko, he has been in demand. entering into a Twitter conversation with a former friend from Styal Primary, he was asked to do an interview for a low-budget film project but said he would only participate for money. This is the world Fury inhabits now, a world where he must watch what he does and certainly what he says.
Back at the gym in Wythenshawe, they still remember the simple days when he would spar against five youngsters at a time. One of them — ‘Ginger George’ — used to run through the big man’s legs. He was there on Wednesday, 60 fights to his name now at the age of 19.
At egan’s, old photographs of Fury remain stuck to the gym walls with Blu-Tack. They will vote for him in this weekend’s BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards. But they worry for him, too.
‘I know he left me but I still love him,’ said Steve egan. ‘You get a bond and that doesn’t break. My only concern is that he is going to lose it all if he doesn’t stay focused now.
‘Boxing is a strict regime. It can be boring. Train, eat, rest. Train, eat, rest. Some people crack.
‘At the moment he can have his time out and he deserves it. He always liked his cake.
‘But he’s getting attention, from what he says, and that’s dangerous. If that spoils his concentration it would be a shame because it has taken a lot of time and hard work to get where he is.’
‘Our culture is different, we have our own beliefs’