By Scott Gilfoid: It looks like we won’t be seeing unbeaten heavyweight Hughie Fury (20-0, 10 KOs) stepping it up in the near future against any quality opposition.
His trainer/father Peter Fury says young Hughie has a skin problem that is effecting his health, and causing fatigue. Hughie is now getting treatment for the problem to take care of it. But in the meantime, it doesn’t look like we’re going to see the 21-year-old Hughie put in with anyone good in the ring.
Hughie had a chance to fight for the vacant British heavyweight title against the hard hitting Dillian Whyte, but Peter turned down the fight. At the time, Peter mentioned that they wanted to go in another direction due to Hughie being on the verge of getting pushed up the world rankings. But now Peter is also saying that Hughie has a skin problem that is causing him problems from being at his best. As such, I guess it’s a little of both as to why Hughie can’t fight Whyte.
It works out well for Hughie that he doesn’t have to fight Whyte because based on how Hughie looked in his last fight against journeyman Fred Kassi on April 30th of last month, I wouldn’t give Hughie a ghost of a chance against Whyte. I mean, Hughie could only run so much in a fight against Whyte before he would likely get stopped. Of course, if we saw a fight-
saving cut stoppage like we did in Hughie’s fight against Kassi, then maybe Hughie could get lucky if he builds up a small lead in the first six rounds and the fight gets halted due to another cut.
Frankly, I think Hughie’s cut against Kassi came at the right time for him in the 6th because Kassi was getting to Hughie with his big power shots to the head and was wearing him down. Hughie looked exhausted and totally stressed out from the pressure and the power on Kassi’s shots. I don’t know how many more fights like that Hughie can have though. You can’t count on fights being stopped each time you start to tire and struggle with it going to the cards to cause the fight to be halted. It would be sad if we kept seeing that kind of thing from Hughie.
“You couldn’t go into a fight with someone like Dillian Whyte at only 30% and not carrying a lot of power. That’s suicide,” said Peter Fury to skysports.com. “We took him to a Harley Street doctor and they told us he needs at least five months of medicine to fight this because the immune system is so busy fighting the infections on his body. It’s putting him in a ‘down’ state and he’s only fighting on 30 or 40 per cent.”
Well, I’ve never heard of athletes being weakened by a case of bad acne. I wonder if Hughie and Peter have gotten a second opinion on this? If I were them, I’d go see several other doctors to make sure that Hughie is truly being weakened by having acne. I mean, I think it’s good that Hughie is taking medicine to treat the problem, but I can’t imagine how it would weaken him to the point where he’s only 30 percent of normal.
That’s hard for me to believe. Taking five months or more out of your career because of one doctor telling you that Hughie is being weakened 30%, I just don’t know. I think Hughie needs some other doctors to weigh in on this because he doesn’t need to miss out on fights because of what one doctor said. It may turn out to be that Hughie isn’t being weakened. It could be that he just naturally isn’t a strong puncher. I’ve seen tons of Hughie’s past fights and he’s never been a big puncher. It’s the same with Tyson Fury.
The power just isn’t there with those two. They can slap with the best of them, but neither of them can punch for some reason. In looking at how tired Hughie appeared in his last fight against Fred Kassi, it appears that he was tired because he was running the entire time.
That’ll do it to you. Hughie looked stressed from the big punches that Kassi was landing, and he was running from him. In hindsight, Hughie should have stood his ground and used his skills to try and beat Kassi instead of running all around the ring 24/7.