By Danny Flexen
A PILGRIMAGE encompassing three train journeys and a near-two-mile trek from a branch line outpost to a remote, rural estate in the North West allows plenty of time for quiet contemplation. As my long walk begins, the heavens open ominously, a leafy avenue offering only intermittent rain cover. However, with the world title challenger’s base only 15 minutes away, the heavy shower begins to abate, revealing a breathtaking blue sky – an apt metaphor perhaps for today’s subject illuminating a previously gloomy heavyweight scene.
The maps application on my mobile phone suggests I take a narrow public footpath cutting through lush, deserted farmland but the overgrown passage can barely accommodate my substantial frame and uncoordinated gait. I trudge on, until the dense bushes and trees render the track impassable and a horse, watching studiously from the adjacent field, inclines its head and snorts derisively at this latest example of human hubris. Suitably chastened, I turn back, although I fancy Tyson Fury would not have been so easily cowed (or ‘horsed’).
As I march along the alternative route towards a wide road with no discernible pavement I spy a tractor ambling forward in the distance and, more alarmingly, a solitary car lurking, silently, on the grass verge. I cannot in good conscience retreat for a second time, so I am relieved to identify Craig Brough, Action Images photographer and my saviour, as its driver. Together we arrive outside a wide, metal gate that guards what looks like an enormous barn and its surroundings from nosy outsiders like us. It already feels a lot like Deliverance, even more so when the screen slowly rolls back to reveal precisely no one.
We head left, to the front of the barn – later I find out it has been converted into a huge family home for the site’s owner – where the proprietor’s father-in-law is negotiating an industrial digger across the plain. We turn around and are confronted by a most bizarre juxtaposition. Rubbing shoulders with the unique mansion are three caravans, of various sizes and hues, though all appear small and basic.
Exiting the one directly ahead, trainer Peter Fury, bearded and faintly maniacal, jogs towards us. “The world champ’s just in there,” he enthuses, indicating to our right. The designated trailer door is open and, as we approach, I shout, “What’s Klitschko doing here?” before I notice John Fury, Tyson’s father, sitting on the sofa inside and immediately regret my impertinence.
Released just six months ago from a five-year prison stretch – for gouging a man’s eye out in a brawl – 6ft 3in John emanates raw strength and animal aggression despite the friendly greeting he bestows upon us. Tyson, fixing a drink in a kitchenette far too small for his frame, is, at an official 6ft 9ins, significantly the bigger man, but comparatively serene. He and John share this caravan – Peter’s son, unbeaten heavyweight Hughie, apparently inhabits the third, although we never see him – and it is one an estate agent would term ‘cosy’.
The vehicle struggles desperately to contain their combined bulk and I am acutely aware that the addition of Craig and myself may be considered pushing our luck, especially once Tyson sets himself down next to his father. After five weeks in France and a fortnight’s hiatus enforced by Tyson’s chest infection, the Furys have pitched up here, in the middle of nowhere, to prepare for the biggest fight of his life, a world heavyweight title shot against Wladimir Klitschko on November 28. As the rain starts up again, drumming into the caravan’s exterior, saturating its windows and making the intimate environment all the more cloying, Tyson’s gaze takes on a faraway aspect.
“Why would anybody want to train in the p***ing down rain and live in a trailer when you could be in France in 40-degree heat?” Fury asks bitterly, and without pausing for an answer. Sartorially, he is every inch the country gent; the ensemble of tweed gillet, checked shirt, casual slacks and brown brogues accentuate his height but offer no additional clue regarding his profession. “I’ve no idea but we do mysterious things. We train about two miles from here, in an industrial unit. Here, it’s p***ing in the bushes, s***ting in the bushes, just typical Gypsy life really.
“It doesn’t make a difference to me where I live. I’m still just a man made of blood and bone. I’ll get the same night’s sleep in that bed as I would in a million-pound mansion. I get up eight o’clock, have breakfast, be at the gym for 10 until 12. Come back, have dinner, relax, if I do a run, say 40 minutes at 3pm, then come back. I go to the gym again at eight o’clock,
so spending quite big periods of time in the caravan. It’s a typical life, just without the kids and family. It’s just training and me and me dad talking bulls*** all day.”
That dialogue, according to Tyson, consists predominantly of profanity and porn, standard practise when you house two testosterone-fuelled fighting men cheek by jowl and neck by neck.
Next – page 2 of 3: Fury, father and son
JOHN, like Peter more casually attired, leans forward from his vantage point, bristling with evident frustration at their confinement. Where his son is philosophical, moody even, John is animated and combative, keen to stoke a fire in all of them. He insists his son possesses the same instinct for violence that courses through the veins of their ancestors.
“This unbelievable burning desire to never lose,” he emphasises with a shrewd glint in his eye, perhaps measuring my worth as rapidly as he later affirms he can value antiques. If Peter radiates hushed menace, his older brother projects a coarse bravado. “Klitschko’s all man-made. With us, this has been going on for generations. It’s like them pitbull terriers in America, they’re bred to fight. If they’re fighting a dog what’s crossed, the cross dog will lose. People say, ‘They’re doing this wrong and that wrong, living in caravans’, but it doesn’t alter your ability to fight. We’re fighting people and Klitschko isn’t. Every time he fights, he’s nervous, tentative, terrified of getting hit. Getting hit don’t bother us. I’ve done jail, long stretches for fighting, so us and Klitscho we’re chalk and cheese, but we’ve got the edge on the fighting part because when it comes down to sheer grit, strength and determination never to wonder, you can’t match that.
“It’s like me, I could get out there now and have a fight for an hour, I love it,” he goes on in clipped, gravelly tones. “I wouldn’t care what happened to me; if I could get away with it. The law is cages for lions and we are lion-hearted people. When I was a young lad there’d be five or six different people and I’d be looking, ‘Which one’s gonna be cheeky? Which one’s lookin at me funny?’ You get this thing in you that you wanna have a ruck.”
A journeyman heavyweight in the 1980s and ‘90s, loath to train and more adept at trading blows on the streets, John Fury is well-placed to pinpoint the different qualities needed for fighting with and without rules. John believes Tyson has inherited his pure fighting heart and desire but allied it to the work ethic he never had, forming a potent package that will overwhelm Klitschko next month.
“I never trained,” he admits, though plainly without regret. “I couldn’t be bothered with the rigmarole when I was getting three hundred quid and had a family of kids. I used to drive three times a week to a gym and that would be it. If you’re messing with athletes you’re not gonna beat ‘em unless you’re training like athletes. You can have a belly full of beer and go out there and fight all day, because you’re not messing with skilled people. This fella here has the best of both worlds. He’s got that toughness – Klitschko could never be as tough as him.”
That assertion is open to debate, but the Ukrainian is undeniably well-schooled, experienced and powerful. It will take the performance of Tyson’s life to dethrone the champion and while I fail to sense any lack of belief on his part, Fury is currently downbeat and severely lacking in the passion that inflames his father.
We have been here before – Fury has several sides to his personality and you are never quite sure which mood you will find him in. One day Tyson could be all over social media, proclaiming himself the greatest man who ever lived, the next, like today, the 27-year-old swears nothing in this world could enliven him. Despite struggling with depression in the past, Fury denies a relapse.
“Depression’s for weak-minded divs,” he states. “You get up, sometimes you feel good, sometimes you feel s***, it’s no good worrying about it. I don’t care about anything. If they said to me, ‘You’ve got cancer and you’ve got two weeks to live,’ so what?”
This level of negativity would be shocking in anyone else preparing for such a momentous event, but Fury’s erratic nature has become almost predictable. His behaviour also constitutes a distraction, likely intentional, from tedious training camp life. Trying to better understand him, I ask Tyson why, if his existence really is pointless, he bothers getting out of bed in the morning to train, or goes running in all weathers.
“I do it for other people,” the Wilmslow giant muses, mildly surprised at this epiphany. “Me dad and me uncle Peter, they want boxing more than I do. I do it to make them happy, I do it to make me brothers happy, because they live for my boxing. I was talking to me brother recently and I asked him the five things he wanted in life. He said, ‘Health, strength, happiness, for everyone to be okay and for you to keep winning in boxing.’ It obviously means a lot to people. To me, if I get knocked out I get knocked out and if I don’t, I don’t. As long as I know I tried my best it’s all I can do. I know living life for other people is s***e but I do it, one, because I get paid for it, and, two, because I like to make people happy.”
I suggest that this is just a ‘down day’, that the storm will pass – although the real downpour, loud and conspicuous, undermines my argument somewhat.
“I’m like this 24/7, this is my outlook, I wake up just to go to sleep,” he tells me.
“He’s a bit of a crackerjack,” John Fury interjects, hoping, like me, to divert his son from melancholy.
“Nothing really turns me on or excites me,” Tyson adds.
“Your family?” I prod.
“Nothing. I’m living life day to day.”
“What about making other people happy, as you described?”
“Well, I’ve made them very happy,” he retorts, with a sincere and welcome chuckle. He is referring to wife Paris, five-year-old daughter Venezuela, son Prince (who turns four on October 1) and, more specifically, the lifestyle he has afforded them with boxing success.
“His wife never gets depressed,” John points out with a grin and now we all laugh. But the respite is only temporary.
“I’m the most negative person in the world,” Tyson summarises. “I’m not interested in being an ambassador for anything or holding titles for a long time. There’s nothing that makes me happy, I’ve tried everything.”
Next – page 3 of 3: Fury keeps the faith
“There’s my happiness there,” he suddenly blurts, abruptly interrupting his own train of thought and pointing to a nearby Bible which he proceeds to pick up and open at a pre-selected page. “God. I think I’m a very spiritual person and without this thing ‘ere, my life ain’t worth living. When I go down the wrong track, having a good time, driving fast, drinking, messing around with women, anything that feels good or you like is bad to this.
“I was gonna read you a little passage and I think this is why I’m not really bothered about nothing: ‘Do not value worldly success. Do not trust worldly wealth. Repent wherever you have done these things. Recognise that worldly assets have no spiritual or heavenly value. Return to a spiritual value system wherever you have departed. Do not adopt the world’s way of thinking or standards of behaviour.’”
Documenting the life and times of Tyson Fury, one is conditioned to expect the unexpected, but even I was startled as he began to quote scripture. A self-confessed sinner in his younger years, Fury now seems to derive much-needed stability from his faith, while the humility and fraternity it prescribes may yet develop. Beyond the bluster, introspection and maudlin outlook, Fury is striving to be a better man. A higher power may have placed him on that virtuous path, but someone much closer to home is encouraging Tyson’s adherence to it.
Peter Fury enters the trailer now and the rest of us inhale, almost unconsciously, as our space is further restricted. Peter took over from another brother, the late Hughie Fury Snr, as Tyson’s trainer seven fights ago. He has made a huge difference to his nephew as an athlete and – especially given the recent and lengthy absence of John Fury – as a man.
“I just want him to win the world championship for me,” Peter remarks, unwittingly endorsing Tyson’s selfless philosophy. “I’d like him to win it and then take stock of exactly what he wants to do. Because if he decides, ‘Well, I’ve won the world title, I’ve had enough of this s***, it’s too hard, I wanna be a family man’, ‘Do what you wanna do’, I’m fully supportive whatever he wants to do, like me own lad.”
Peter excepted, we have been talking for nearly an hour, minds perpetually engaged but our long-dormant limbs, increasingly stiff and aching, beg for mercy. We start to withdraw in order to commence the photoshoot, but Tyson, figuratively speaking, grounds us with one last profound pronouncement.
“I’m 27, I don’t want to be boxing late on in life and I want to enjoy what I’ve done really,” he says, at least offering a glimmer of hope for his post-retirement future. “Because when you don’t like what you do, you don’t like your job, you don’t wanna do it, do you? I hate being here, I hate being in this trailer or in a hotel. I hate every minute of training and every minute of boxing. I just don’t like it, I’d rather be out eating s***, going to the movies. I do this because I can and I can’t earn money any other way. I’ve got no education, I’m no good at anything else so I box because, fortunately, I’m bigger than everybody else and I’m blessed with a little bit of talent.
“We’re all gonna die anyway, so it is what it is. We’re all on a one-way ticket to the grave so whatever happens, we’re just killing time.”
A rather morbid if ultimately accurate note on which to conclude our interview, but I have thoroughly enjoyed ‘killing’ the last hour with Fury, who, even on his most sombre day, remains fascinating and intelligent company. As I jump into Craig’s car, eager to return to civilisation but equally sad to leave this strangely captivating triumvirate, I reflect on a purported nihilist, his fiery father and intensely focused uncle who may use their collective talents to devastating effect in five weeks’ time.
And, as the sun defiantly re-emerges from the clouds, I ponder a man who claims he cares for little but may soon own this sport’s most coveted prize.
