Rich Power was sitting on his porch in California in 2010 in the midst of preparing for a fight — an MMA fight — when he received a call from his manager. Known to be a fighter up for anything, and one always in shape for a scuffle, Power was intrigued by his manager’s question.
“Do you want to fight Tyson Fury?”
This was years before Fury would become one of the most well-known names in the sport — an “American Pie”-singing, Tom Jones-loving heavyweight champion of the world.
Back then, he was Tyson Fury, an up-and-coming undefeated British boxer. Power was undefeated, too, so he made some calls and asked for advice. Three days before the fight, Power and his coaches jumped on a plane to England.
“We just went in there,” Power said. “Knowing he was a giant.”
There’s really no other boxer like Tyson Fury. He has a combination of size, speed and skill, plus reach, instincts and talent. He also has the mouth and the gift of being able to cut a promo. Add it all together and it’s next to impossible to deal with.
Just ask the people who have fought him — and lost — over the past decade.
“There are three parts to it for anyone who is going to fight him,” said Lee Swaby, who lost to Fury in 2009 and later became a sparring partner. “You have to be a master of PR, you have to be a master of self-belief and you have to be a master in the ring.
“Otherwise, you are going to fail.”
Fighting Fury begins well before an opponent is even in the ring. It really begins when Fury decides he might want to fight you. As good as Fury is in the ring, he might equal it in his ability to create prefight hype. He’ll start taking digs, trying to bait his opponent into getting into verbally sparring.
“His ability to get in somebody’s head is his biggest strength, because right off the bat he starts on that and he works his way in,” said Joey Abell, whom Fury knocked out in 2014. “He knows, outside of the ring, it has nothing to do with boxing. He connects with a lot of people.
“He knows what to say, knows what to do, knows how to act, all that kind of stuff.”
While verbal back-and-forth is common in boxing — some of it is part of the show to help build hype for fights — Fury is better than most. Notable examples: saying in 2019 he lives in Deontay Wilder’s head “rent-free” and calling Wladimir Klitschko “boring” and saying he had “about as much charisma as my underpants — zero, none” in the lead-up to their 2015 fight that gave Fury the WBA, IBF and WBO titles.
Fury gets his opponent to start thinking about him more during training which can, in theory, be a distraction. Fury can do that by not talking, too. Abell went into their first news conference the Thursday before the fight expecting Fury would talk a lot. He didn’t say much at all. Then at the weigh-in, he quickly said “I’m going to knock you out,” and it caught Abell off-guard. And there’s a difference, too, in how fighters do it. Power, who lost to Fury in 2010, said with Fury the talk is never disingenuous. That can be sniffed out quickly.
But when it is real — or is convincing enough to seem real — it can alter how an opponent handles it. The two best Power has seen? Fury and Conor McGregor, whom he compared to Drake and Jay-Z as line preparers.
“They believe that if [he] can get under your skin and make you angry, or if [he] can make you worked up or have you constantly thinking about [him] in any manner, it’s better,” Power said. “And it’s going to mess with you more.”
What it does, Power said, is create doubt. You see Fury — all 6-foot-9 of him — up close and realize it’s going to be a different type of fight.
Then he might come out of nowhere with another verbal joust — like when he told Power, “Do you know I’m going to break your jaw?”
Power responded: “Hey, brah, 32 people turned this fight down. I’m the only idiot who said yes and came over here on three days’ notice. I’m going to punch you in the f—ing face and see what happens.”
“Just to give you an idea of how big he is, we’re both standing up and when I go to wrap my arms around him, I’m hugging his booty. I’m like, ‘This can’t be real. Like how is this man this large?'” Rich Power on Tyson Fury Power felt he learned the key to dealing with Fury’s fury: Push back. Don’t be nice about it. Respond with the best you’ve got. If you don’t, Power said, it can gnaw at you like when a relationship ends and you know it’s your fault — the feeling in your stomach that just doesn’t sit right.
That’s what Fury is aiming for. Fighting back correctly alleviates that.
“If you don’t match fire with fire a little bit, you’re at risk of fading into nonexistence with the press and the fight fans and everybody,” Swaby said.
