After two and half years in exile, Tyson Fury returns to the ring on Saturday night in an expected mismatch against Macedonian cruiserweight Sefer Seferi in Manchester, England. In his last fight in November 2015, Fury toppled Wladimir Klitschko to become the legitimate heavyweight champion of the world. Then a toxic combination of fame, Class A drugs, sanctioning bodies, and born-again evangelicalism saw him tailspin into a depression that was played out on every tabloid front page and smartphone screen in the land.
Having become the first post-Klitschko heavyweight champion, Fury was clearly unready to be thrown from the outermost margins of popular celebrity straight into the mainstream. After being nominated for ?BBC Sports Personality of the Year,? Fury?s mixture of hyperbole, surrealism, and abjection attracted immediate scrutiny from cynical tabloid hacks. Previously well known only by sports fanatics and boxing aficionados, Fury became overnight a topic of conversation on opinion pages, morning television, and the Today program. The same papers whose front pages feature a daily blend of nativist resentment and racist fantasy subsequently rushed to dole out condemnation for his litany of sins, with the Daily Mail?whose editorial policy features significant overlap with Fury?s more retrograde opinions?calling him ?a bully and a bigot.? Plunged into depression, Fury had no sooner become heavyweight champion than his star was already burning out.
After nixing two money-spinning rematches with Klitschko, a two-year excommunication from the sport followed, in which Fury shuttled between seedy back alleys and boutique hotels in a seemingly random sequence of drug binges, weight gains, court battles, ?Evening with?? events, and Latter-Day-style prophecies. In between nights of joyless oblivion, there were moments of unsettling honesty: Fury surfaced from his personal hell in 2016 to tell Rolling Stone that he was depressed and suicidal in an interview both surreal and sad. As he said at the time, ?I beat the best man but I?m still shit.?
Now almost thirty, having shed one hundred pounds to prepare for his return, Fury remains the most interesting figure in British boxing. Both completely articulate and totally confused, Fury tends to oscillate between apocalyptic and confessional in a manner whose arbitrariness is legitimately unnerving. Not only is he a genuine outlier in the current era of hypersanitization, in which fighters tend to engage only in infomercial speak and clich?, Fury is also persistently surprising?if not always entertaining?between the ropes. Like Muhammad Ali, Fury has clearly modeled himself on smaller fighters, with a willingness to clown, switch stances, drop his hands, and dance around the ring betraying unusual stylistic influences for a man his size. Unlike Ali, whose impression of Sugar Ray Robinson was so perfectly executed as to become its own original style, Fury is confoundingly unorthodox, a bowdlerization of his own influences, whose patternless repertoire consists only in jagged diagonals and rougher edges. His fights swing wildly from the hideous to the hilarious?Fury might be the only legitimate heavyweight champion in history to have landed a punch on his own face.
