By Scott Gilfoid: Tyson Fury STILL maintains that Anthony Joshua has his three titles [IBF, WBA, and WBO] and that they don’t belong to him because he didn’t win them properly by beating him for the belts. As far as Fury (30-0-1, 21 KOs), he’s still the IBF/WBA/WBO champion despite the fact they belts were vacated and stripped from him during his 3-year period of inactivity.
Fury is still drunk on his success from his recent toppling of the boogeyman of the heavyweight division in WBC champion Deontay Wilder, and the victory has gone to his head. Instead of Fury looking at the victory as partially a product of Wilder’s legs being weakened from the heavy ring-walk uniform he wore, he’s ignored that excuse and believes that it was all him.
Fury appears to be falling into the same trap that Ingemar Johansson fell into when he pulled off a huge upset in knocking out World heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson in the third round in June 1959.
After Johansson’s victory, Patterson was written off by many boxing fans, and they assumed that he would be destroyed by the Swedish heavyweight Johansson in their rematch. When they did finally face each other a second time in June 1960, Patterson obliterated Johansson by a 5th round knockout.
Tyson claims Joshua’s belts are his
“That’s so true. I’ve already been the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world when I beat [Wladimir] Klitschko,” said Fury to This Morning. “I had all the belts, so as far as I’m concerned, Anthony Joshua has only my leftovers because I never lost those belts. I had to vacate them due to mental health problems.
“Yeah, they’re my belts,” Fury said of the IBF, WBA and WBO belts held by Joshua. “Until a man is beaten inside the boxing ring, how can you claim to be a champion? I beat the dominant heavyweight of our era [Wladimir] with 26 title defenses.
“I went to Germany to do it, and then I went to America and beat the guy [Deontay Wilder] that nobody wanted to fight. And then I’ll come back and have two more fights and then sail into the sunset,” said Fury.
In sports when you forfeit, you lose your titles. That’s just how it is. Fury seems to be having a hard to understand that concept for some reason, and it’s unclear why. A Super Bowl champion can’t continue to call themselves the champs five years later when they haven’t competed in any of the subsequent Super Bowl games. Fury was briefly the IBF/WBA/WBO champion, but he lost those belts outside of the ring with his personal problems.
So for him to be still thinking he’s the rightful unified champion, it’s a wrong-headed view. That’s just now how it goes. What would fans think of the retired Lennox Lewis if still called himself the IBF/WBC heavyweight champion? When Lewis retired in 2003, he still held the IBF and WBC belts. No one took those titles from him. How would Lewis look if he still called himself the champion?
Tyson talks about Wilder’s excuses
“I knew I could do what I was saying,” said Fury to This Morning. “Otherwise I’ll be a breach of contract,” said Fury in talking about him not being able to walk away from his contract. “He [Deontay Wilder] says he trains in a 45-lb weighted vest every day. I can understand where he’s coming from because in every fighter’s mind there has always got to be a reason of why they lost.
“It can never be the simple fact that ‘I wasn’t good enough on the night. I lost to the better guy.’ ‘The count was wrong, it was the trainer’s fault, it was the suit, it was my toe.’ It was always something that was the problem,” Fury said in talking about Deontay. “With me, if I’m injured or whatever, it was ‘my performance wasn’t great,” said Fury.
It’s interesting how Fury is invalidating what Wilder is saying about his uniform weakening his legs and his complaints of having been hit with rabbit punches. If Wilder was someone that had a history of dreaming up excuses for his performances, then you could dismiss his inform excuse as just a poor attempt to explain away his defeat. The fact is Wilder has always been a straight shooter when it comes to talking about his past fights.
Fury: I’ll beat Wilder a THIRD time
“I’m going to move on and crack on.’ I beat him the first time, I beat him the second time and I surely will beat him the third time,” Fury said of Wilder. “One thing I’ll say about Deontay Wilder is he’s a very worthy opponent and a very dangerous opponent and he has that eraser power of 41 knockouts with only one defeat. So you can never write off a guy like that.
“It’s always one punch away from disaster with Deontay because like he famously says, ‘They have to be correct for 36 minutes, and I have to be correct for one second,'” said Fury.
The way that Fury is so confident now, he could be walking into a trap when he faces Wilder a third time. From what Gilfoid saw of the second fight, Fury’s best asset was his right hands that he was hitting Wilder with behind his head. If you don’t believe Wilder is going to be ready for Fury’s rabbit punching, you’re kidding yourself. It’s very likely that Wilder will be fighting fire with fire by going after the back of Fury’s head with rabbit punches in the rematch.
Tyson’s rabbit punching needs to be controlled
That’s why it’s important that a good referee work the fight to make sure that the trilogy match doesn’t evolve into a street fight. We don’t need a rabbit punching brawl where Fury and Wilder are trying to outdo each other with fouling. Fury clearly got the better of Wilder with rabbit shots on February 22, but that doesn’t mean those illegal shots will work for him in the third fight.
Wilder and Fury will be fighting in a trilogy match on July 18 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, which is the same venue that they fought their second contest. If Fury wins, he’ll have his second victory over Deontay. It won’t be his. No matter how much Fury wants it to be viewed as his third, it won’t be. The first fight was a draw, and it’ll stay that way in the record books.
Is Fury embellishing his credentials?
Fans DON’T share the same view on Fury as he does about himself being the unified heavyweight champion. In the eyes of the boxing world, Fury holds just the WBC title that he recently won against Deontay Wilder on February 22.
Until Fury defeats Joshua (23-1, 21 KOs), he’ll continue to be viewed as just a one-belt holder. Fury has a habit of embellishing his credentials by calling himself the ‘Lineal champion,’ and saying that he won the first fight against Wilder.
He didn’t. That fight was scored a draw, and if anything, Wilder was the one that should have been given the victory after he knocked Fury out cold in the 12th round.
To this day, many boxing fans still believe that the referee Jack Reiss gave Fury a long count in the 12th. So if Fury is going to make up his own fight results by saying that he WON the first fight with Wilder, you can certainly argue that Wilder was the one that won.
It would be nice if Fury simply called himself the WBC champion, and bang on about how he’s the unified champion. It looks bad that Fury feels the need to pump up his credentials by giving himself honors that he doesn’t possess.