Fury: Better to be skint than back in mental hell
THERE are some dark quarters of Sin City hidden away behind the glamour and the glitz and those run-down areas have been as much on Tyson Fury’s fertile mind as the arc lights under which he will fight here tonight.
When he goes to the glittering T-Mobile Arena to ‘have fun’ boxing Swedish underdog Otto Wallin, it will be his first excursion along the fabled neon Strip during this trip.
‘I’m enjoying Vegas again,’ he says, ‘but without going to the Strip once, I’ve just been training and thinking how I would rather be skint, living among the homeless in the underground sewers of Vegas than return to the mental hell I’ve come back from.
‘If all my achievements, all the properties, all the money, all the cars were stripped away, it wouldn’t matter as long as I am content. I’d be happier like that, skint, than if I had to go back to that bad place I’ve been but had a billion dollars in the bank.
‘None of those things make me the man I am. I would still be a man who can sip a cup of tea with kings or sit down with a pauper and share half a lager.’
The Gypsy King is in reflective mood as he discusses his forthcoming autobiography and prepares to defend his lineal world heavyweight title here in the boxing capital of the world. He says he has his demons under his management ‘on a day-to-day basis’.
But what would this 31-yearold Tyson Fury have told the 14-year-old Tyson as he was setting out on this road?
‘Relax kid, we’re flying to the stars,’ he says. ‘The day will come when we don’t need more. The day to enjoy the rest of our life.
‘I’m under no pressure. I can fight for fun and, if someone beats me, good luck because I’m being paid a lot of money to have fun entertaining people.
‘I was the guy who went to the gym but then went out and ate 25 fast food meals and downed dozens of pints and put on hundreds of pounds. Now I get up and my first thought is to go train all morning.’
The purification of Fury apparently stretches from body to mind. ‘Bitterness burns you up inside,’ he says. ‘I no longer resent any bad things that have been done or said to me.
‘I don’t know why other promoters, who play no part in my life (presumably a reference to Eddie Hearn), hate me for my success. Shouldn’t they be happy for me like I was happy for Floyd Mayweather when he got $500million for one fight?
‘But I’ve learned to forgive the haters because they are soon forgotten. Muhammad Ali had many haters but nobody remembers them. Jesus Christ had countless haters. If he could forgive them then I, a mere mortal human being, can forgive and forget.’
Fury denies that he is looking ahead to the world championship super-rematch with Deontay Wilder, which is programmed for February 22 in Vegas, assuming they both win their upcoming fights.
‘I don’t know if I will still be alive next year,’ he says. ‘I used to worry about the ifs but I pay no attention to that now. I am not interested in the word legacy either. It doesn’t matter what people who we don’t know think about us after we’re gone.
‘It’s enough for me to believe I’m a unique personality, to know that we lived in the time of Tyson Fury. Me? I’ll be sitting at home having a jam sandwich and a cuppa tea, looking out across Morecambe Bay.’
Wallin, a barely-known albeit undefeated Swede, feels inspired to emulate the late Ingemar Johansson, who has been idolised in that country since becoming its only world heavyweight champion by knocking out Floyd Patterson in New York 60 years ago.
After the sudden death of his father this May, Wallin also takes heart from how Buster Douglas drew on his mother’s death to KO Mike Tyson in the biggest upset of modern boxing history.
However, Wallin, as a 36-1 outsider, is unlikely to last much longer than the two rounds which Germany’s unheard of Tom Schwarz survived against the Gypsy King here earlier this summer.
Fury v Wallin will be televised live late tonight on BT Sport Box Office.