Boxing: has the Gypsy King landed his last blow?
Is that it? Have we seen the last of the Gypsy King, asked Owen Slot in The Times. On Saturday night at Wembley Stadium, Tyson Fury retained his WBC crown with a comfortable victory over Dillian Whyte – and then announced that he was done with boxing. “Enough is enough,” the 33-year-old boxer declared. “I’ve fulfilled everything I wanted to fulfil.” If Fury means what he says, he’d become the first heavyweight champion to retire with an unbeaten record since Rocky Marciano in 1956, said Rick Broadbent in
The Sunday Times. But there’s every reason to suspect his slippers will be “mothballed”. Fury is someone who changes his mind “as freely as he alters his stance”, and there’s also the small matter of a possible “date with the winner of Oleksandr Usyk’s rematch with Anthony Joshua” to consider. Whoever prevails in that would “become the first undisputed heavyweight champion since Lennox Lewis” – a prospect that would surely entice Fury back into the ring.
Although fought in front of a record UK boxing crowd of 94,000, Saturday’s fight was far from a classic, said Donald McRae in The Guardian. Whyte may be one of the world’s best heavyweights, but in truth he was no match for the 6ft 9in Fury, who enjoyed a “seven-inch reach advantage” as well as being a much more skilled boxer. For the first few rounds, the 34-year-old from Brixton kept Fury at bay with some “cagey” boxing; he even landed one “thudding body punch”. But he was powerless to resist when, in the sixth round, Fury “uncorked a vicious right uppercut”. Knocked to the floor by this devastating blow, Whyte “staggered to his feet” but then “weaved and stumbled” as he walked towards the referee, Mark Lyson. He’d lost a tooth, and had “been separated from his senses”. Lyson had no option but to “wave the fight over”.
Strange to think that seven years ago, when he “vanquished Wladimir Klitschko” to claim his first world title, Fury was still being “dismissed as leaden and one-dimensional”, said Oliver Brown in The Sunday Telegraph. First his trilogy of fights against Deontay Wilder, now this “brutal demolition of Whyte”, have caused those verdicts to be revised. From being something of a scrapper, he has turned into a “wrecking ball” of a boxer, who looks to floor an opponent with a single punch. And the man largely responsible for this transformation is Fury’s trainer since 2020, SugarHill Steward, said Daniel Matthews in the Daily Mail. A protégé of the legendary Kronk boxing school in Detroit, Steward has tutored Fury in the school’s central ethos – always look for a knock-out blow. That influence was clear to see on Saturday, as the Gypsy King floored his opponent with a blow straight “from the Kronk playbook”.