The Fleshy School of heavyweight boxing brings its next member to Germany this Saturday night when Tyson Fury challenges Wladimir Klitschko for his heavyweight baubles at the Esprit Arena in Dusseldorf. Having variously opposed homosexuality and supported steroid abuse in the run-up to this fight ? all in the name of God, too, apparently ? Fury is certainly the least stable challenger Klitschko, arch stability himself, has faced in some time. While this shouldn?t translate into anything other than brutal Klitschko predictability, it at least explains why this fight has gathered steam outside boxing?s typical circles. The shame is that Fury would likely make a better leader of a cult than heavyweight champion.
This tends to be how big heavyweight fights get made these days. Klitschko, who could be anything from the best to the worst to the most mediocre thing to happen to boxing this century, beats up a few stiffs, frustrates some more, then chooses every few years a loud (often British) opponent to beat up as well. David Haye (remember him?) mostly talked himself into a 2011 fight, then slid from engagement over twelve dull rounds, while Dereck Chisora twice signed to face Wladimir before big brother Vitali eventually dealt with him also over twelve. Fury has not created quite the same buzz as Haye, who sold his go at Klitschko like the proverbial used car salesman he so resembles, but he has had the busy folk at Sky churning out the promotional carousel, with enough adverts, infomercials and power ballads on British TV at present to convince anyone Fury can win it.
Well, he can?t, and he won?t. Despite debuting almost seven years ago, Fury is still a remarkably under-developed fighter, part the consequence of a career spent taking large footsteps forward (Fury is nothing if not large) and then larger ones back. His two best wins, after all, came against the same opponent, and those over three years apart: beating a fat Chisora in 2011, then a shot one a few years later, says little for Fury?s chances. For all his talk and toughness, Fury, 24-0 (18), still gets his feet tangled beneath him, lingers with his jab, and leaves himself within hitting range with his hands down and chin up. Only two years ago Steve Cunningham of mild cruiserweight fame (and frame) almost knocked Fury senseless in his American debut. Sheer size pulled the Manchester fighter through.
Size won?t help Fury much come Saturday, even if he has, like Swinburne and Morris in Buchanan?s account of the Victorian Fleshly School, buffed himself up to play the Fool(s) as in some post-modern performance of Hamlet. In that essay Buchanan winces at the thought of any Horatio or Osric, any Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, indulging ?in soliloquies and business strictly belonging to Hamlet himself.? Like Hamlet, one finds with Klitschko that he is always center stage, that he always overcomes his stage fright and starts jabbing in the end, and also that, like Hamlet, over time he can prove occasionally a little dull.
The difference with Klitschko, 64-3 (53), is that even Hamlet stops soliloquizing eventually, something the Ukrainian seems belligerently unwilling to do. No matter the paucity of the division around him, no matter the mundanity of routine, outside fights but also within them, Klitschko continues to deliver the same overlong lines with a conscientiousness so unfaltering it?s begun to seem charming. Klitschko is self-evidently the best fighter in the division, the best athlete, the hardest hitter. Despite all this he continues to stick steadfastly to a method ? tried and tested, yes ? that yet hardly befits a boxer of such attributes. Has any fighter in history ever punched so hard and fought so safe?
Fury, 27, will not fight safe, just as he will not talk sensibly. But all fighters are made to see sense with Klitschko in the end, even if the moment of awakening comes the moment one sleeps. Though Klitschko did not stop Bryant Jennings last time out, he should find Fury?s chin with something approaching abandon. Fury tends to look good against men he can dominate; against Klitschko, should he switch-hit, uppercut wildly from mid-range, retreat backward with hands down, he?ll be doing so at his peril. Klitschko should bring Fury to his senses by knocking them out of him first.
And that will ultimately be that. Fury will return to fighting at a roughly provincial standard on British shores and Klitschko, 39, will continue glacially to persist as heavyweight boxing?s great unsolvable floating iceberg of a problem, somehow both the opposite and yet the same as the buildings which fill David Antin?s essay ?Fine Furs?, a fully-functioning piece of architecture that nobody quite wants to stay up. ?The problem of architecture?, Antin writes there, ?is not how to make it, but how to get rid of it.? So too with Klitschko. But how to do it? How does one get rid? This is Antin?s answer: ?My solution was soluble architecture?buildings with a plumbing system into which you could drop catalytic pills that would cause them to dissolve and run out through their own pipes into the sewer where they belong.? Well, the catalytic pill it is.
