TWO SIDES OF TYSON FURY ‘When you stop living in a caravan, you don’t stop being a traveller’
He shops at the local Spar, does the school run and wants to buy houses for Morecambe’s homeless His dad made him leave school at 11, he served a drugs ban and he has abhorrent views on homosexuality
HE HAS all the trappings of fame now: the mansion in Marbella, the Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow and executive seats at Manchester United.
But Tyson Fury is complicated and the story of how he disappeared from the education system gives a clue as to why.
He was 11, progressing steadily through the idyllic village school at Styal, on a National Trust estate in Cheshire, when he became absent for long periods, later vanishing entirely from the lives of the friends he had made there.
Everyone knew he came from a traveller family and it was assumed that the Furys had returned to a nomadic life. They had not.
His father John had decided in the early 1980s that he would give up life on the road with all the slog, as he puts it, of ‘going back to a cold caravan after a day’s work and having to light a coal fire’.
He was building his own house at Styal and his view, embedded in the gipsy culture, was that when a boy is able to play a part in the work of the family, then he will.
‘I wanted the kids living the gipsy way,’ says Fury Snr. ‘They learn different things when they are not at school — more streetwise. He helped me build the house.’
The ties Fury had formed in the outside world were suddenly cut. ‘We stopped seeing him and never did again,’ says one contemporary from those early days.
There was no formal education beyond the age of 11 for a boy who, by then, had already shown he was the most intelligent in the family, good at arithmetic and English, according to his father. ‘ My reading wasn’t so good,’ admits Fury Snr, who worked on the roads.
‘I’d get letters and ask him, “What does that mean?” He’d tell me. He added up the money.’
A narrow, phenomenally successful life in boxing began, with Fury accompanying his father — whose boxing success as ‘ Gipsy John Fury’ belonged to a traveller boxing and bareknuckle tradition going back generations — to the trainer Francis Hand’s Oak Street Gym in Liverpool.
Fury Snr always felt his eldest son was born to box — the boy would write stories about himself as a world champion — and named him Tyson for a reason.
Young Tyson began spending time in Morecambe, on the Lancashire coast, with his father’s brother Hughie, who trained him. He slept in a caravan and trained in an old ring Fury Snr fetched from his native Ireland.
‘It was in a shed in Dundalk,’ Fury Snr says. ‘ We took our van, caught the ferry from Heysham to Belfast and drove to the border. We found some rusty weights
in the same shed and brought them back, too.’
The ring was set up in a corrugated iron shed and Fury trained in it when he won the EU Junior Championship representing England.
There were jolts. His father was sentenced to five years in jail for gouging out another man’s eye in a fight at a car auction — a measure of their deeply uncompromising world. ‘In the gipsy man culture, you defend yourself,’ Fury Snr says, while admitting that his son was devastated.
Tyson had tired of Hughie Fury’s harsh ways and considered leaving boxing before Fury Snr convened a meeting at Rochdale’s Buckley Hall prison in which another of his brothers, Peter, was entrusted with training the boy.
Fury moved from trainer to trainer, gym to gym, in England and Ireland — unusual in boxing, says former world champion Ricky Hatton, who also worked with him. ‘It’s the traveller way,’ says Hatton. ‘Always moving on.’
Andy Lee, the former WBO middleweight champion who also came from the traveller world and is Fury’s cousin, says the itinerant life never left either of them.
‘ When you stop living in a caravan, you don’t stop being a traveller,’ Lee reflects. ‘The culture remains. You stick to your own. You are labelled from a young age. Secondary school was a prison for me. I left at 13.’
Exclusion from mainstream society can have psychological consequences. The suicide rate in the traveller community is six times higher than in the general population — seven times higher among young men.
Fury Snr has mythologised the sense of being different with some extraordinary pronouncements that seem part of a deliberate effort to dramatise his son.
He described him last year as a ‘gipsy man, a travelling man, a crossbred mongrel race of a man that’s bred to fight’.
It seems a miracle Fury escaped this world to make a living from boxing at all. It is the gipsy way to marry young and have many children. ‘Boxing earns you so little until you break through,’ says Lee. ‘You can’t support a family.’
Fury, now 30, met Paris Mulroy, the woman who would be his wife, at the age of 15 at a friend’s wedding. In some ways he has since adopted something closer to a conventional way of life.
It will be to his upmarket family home near the village of Hest Bank at Morecambe Bay that the Fury clan will descend this Christmas. ‘They don’t want to be in our poky place when they have a proper place like that,’ says his father.
The couple have four children — Valencia Amber, Prince John James, Venezuela and Prince Tyson Fury II, with another on the way. He does the school run. They shop at the local Spar.
He has declared he wants to tackle the town’s social iniquities, stating that if Lancaster City Council provide land, he will pay to build homes for the homeless.
But he is still a product of his background. A few years ago he turned up at a health club to meet the mayor, having told The Visitor, Morecambe’s newspaper, that he would like to be the town’s MP. The mayor did not show and, according to one local: ‘Tyson got a bit upset. He knocked some things over in a temper.’
No one was sure if his anger was genuine or for show. Fury’s announcement that he had bought a Marbella mansion did not look convincing, either. It’s hard to avoid the sense that it is in Styal that he feels most secure.
The Christian faith he speaks of — and which feeds some deeply reactionary views — is embedded in his upbringing, too. Half-brother Tommy Fury, a light heavyweight who will make his professional debut at Manchester Arena this month, says Tyson is passionate about classic cars — like their father — and watching Westerns.
Fury uses the same lines as his father. ‘We are a different race. The only homage we pay is to God Almighty’, is a favourite.
At times, his views have made him deeply objectionable — as when likening homosexuality to paedophilia before his 2015 fight with Wladimir Klitschko.
‘We have our own beliefs,’ says the fighter who served a two-year boxing ban after testing positive for a banned steroid.
It was after the Klitschko fight that he ballooned to 28 stone and, he says, contemplated suicide because, with nothing else to aim for, there was a monumental hole in a life in which he had known nothing but boxing.
Hatton helped him get back. ‘I really thought he was too far gone,’ says Hatton.
Fury’s recovery from that low to what we saw last weekend — a bloodied boxer twice clambering from the canvas to go 12 rounds with Deontay Wilder, then staring into the camera to tell others who had suffered mental health problems that there was hope — looked like redemption.
‘People relate to him in a way very few can with Anthony Joshua,’ says Tommy Fury. ‘He’ll say what’s on his mind. Joshua comes across as someone playing the game — the poster boy.’
Lee says that only the traveller community can fully appreciate what it has taken for Fury to discuss mental health. ‘Our world is repressive,’ he says. ‘For a big, successful gipsy man to say what he said will have such an impact.’
No one knows what will happen next for a man who is in many ways caught between two worlds, though Hatton, who struggled with mental health problems after retiring, thinks it will not be easy.
‘What worries me is when he packs in boxing. What’s he going to use to keep himself going?’ he says. ‘It’s all he’s known. He has nothing else.
‘I’ll do anything I can to help him. He’s got my number.’