Back off fun police, Fury versus Paul is the least of boxing’s problems
IDID not watch the Jake Paul-tommy Fury fight on sunday night. I was still on a train home from wembley with some Manchester United fans who had grown tired and emotional in varying degrees as the journey progressed.
It appeared that they might have had a few drinks during the course of the evening but I suspect, on reflection, that they had been adversely affected by a highlyelevated consumption of eggs.
that’s right. Boxing tells us that the British fighter Conor Benn failed a couple of drugs tests last year because, essentially, he’d had a few too many omelettes. we are supposed to accept that explanation with a straight face, apparently. It was good enough for the world Boxing Council anyway. they reinstated Benn in their rankings last week amid much hilarity about his eggstra-curricular activities.
so, no, I didn’t watch the Fury-Paul fight and I wouldn’t have watched it even if I hadn’t been on a train back from the Carabao Cup final. I’ve glimpsed some of the highlights since and seen Fury’s knockdown in the eighth round of his points victory but I had little interest in paying to watch two novices, whose celebrity far outweighs their skill, slugging it out in a boxing ring in saudi arabia.
You will have to excuse me, though, if I don’t express any moral outrage about the damage being done to the sport by the spectacle of a fight between a man famous for being on Youtube and a boxer who has gained more attention for his exploits on
Love Island than for anything he has done in his fledgling professional career. In the litany of boxing’s ills, FuryPaul is near the back of the queue. It has got far worse things to worry about.
Boxing is a noble sport peopled by incredibly brave and skilled men and women but it is being undermined every day by its failure to police itself. It is a sport that just this year has brought us the thrilling fight between unified light-heavyweight champion artur Beterbiev and anthony Yarde and the relentless wBa featherweight title battle between Leigh wood and Mauricio Lara.
But it is also a sport that has been — and perhaps still is — brought under the influence of a man like Daniel Kinahan, named as a senior figure in organised crime in the High Court in Ireland, but name- checked by tommy Fury’s brother, tyson, as a key part of his career. while boxing wrestles with issues like that and its impotence around performanceenhancing drugs, an occasion such as the celebrity scrap in Riyadh qualifies as light relief.
I don’t see the problem with Fury v Paul. If you don’t like it, don’t pay for it and don’t watch it. If you think it got more attention than it deserved, that’s fine, too. But it is impossible to deny its appeal to a younger generation, in particular, and that is something that should be celebrated.
There is no reason why a fight like Fury-Paul should not exist happily alongside Beterbiev-Yarde. sport has room for both of them.
I saw Fury-Paul denigrated as a ‘fight for the new age’ but there has always been an element of vaudeville about sport. It’s not new. when the former presenter Dickie Davies died earlier this month, it brought forth a festival of nostalgia about the World of Sport television show and the way it showcased wrestlers like Giant Haystacks and Big Daddy.
Usain Bolt raced against a bus in argentina once. Mansour Bahrami was not a great tennis player but crowds loved his trick shots. that was all more showbiz than sport, too, but it didn’t mean it wasn’t entertainment.
In the same way, I have no particular interest in watching celebrities run around in the soccer aid for Unicef football match but 54,000 people turned up to see it at the London stadium last year and it raised £15million for charity. why condemn that? Different people get enjoyment from different things. It’s still sport. It’s still entertainment. the fun police should stay out of it.
Noone has claimed Fury-Paul was a meeting of two skilled pugilists. no one was conned. Viewers wanted to see a white- collar fight between a guy they love to hate and a Love Island pin-up and that was what they got.
It didn’t have to be LomachenkoRigondeaux. People had other motives to watch it. Home Alone actor Macaulay Culkin tweeted: ‘there’s no better way to celebrate your half birthday than to watch Jake Paul get punched in the head repeatedly.’
Professional boxing is called prize fighting, don’t forget. It’s about the money as well as the glory. Former world super-middleweight champion Carl Froch made the point on the radio that the limit of tommy Fury’s abilities as a boxer is fighting for a southern area title or the British title and that he could never hope to earn anything like the money he earned for fighting Paul at that level.
Fury has got a young child now. Make some money in easy fights against people like Paul and then get out while he can. who is to begrudge him that? who is to begrudge viewers the fun stuff? Just leave the rest of us to keep our integrity intact by concentrating on the more serious side of the sport, covering fighters of renown whose reputations have been redeemed by the highly-elevated consumption of eggs.