Tyson Fury Acquires Sport's Crown Jewel

Insipidity’s end: Tyson Fury acquires sport’s crown jewel By Bart Barry- Saturday in Germany, England’s Tyson Fury became the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world by decisioning Ukrainian Wladimir Klitschko by official scores of 115-112, 115-112, 116-111. What few American aficionados could be bothered to interrupt their Saturday afternoons with the live telecast expressed nearly universal disgust for Klitschko’s iffy comportment and Fury’s very existence. This reaction did little but solidify the heavyweight championship as a European estate, and if it must be that, frankly, Fury’s victory brings an intriguing improvement to the terrible dullness of Klitschko’s sovereignty. We’ve been led by a machine for 10 years. Why not try a madman? Let’s begin with a confession: I’ve not made it to the end of a Wladimir Klitschko fight since he pattycaked his way to a ban from Madison Square Garden 7 1/2 years ago. In that forgettable match, Klitschko, four inches and 20 pounds larger than Sultan Ibragimov, moved like a man weighing with his adversary’s every twitch the primal choice between flight or fight. It was nearer an embarrassment than any defense of a heavyweight title I’d theretofore seen, and I pledged to avoid such queasiness again. Surely I’ve written about Klitschko since, boxing’s schedule being emptied as it was, is, will be, but I’ve not made it to the end of his fights. A bit more about the choice of queasiness: There’s something perfectly awful about the way Klitschko fights. He is enormous and scared, subverting most of his inevitable advantages in size with a buttersoft chin and a tiny heart. To those who claim any man stepping between the ropes is a paragon of courage, there’s this: When Klitschko stepped between the ropes against Eddie Chambers in 2010, he enjoyed a preposterous, five-inch, 35-pound advantage and still needed 35:55 to finish Chambers. To call that courageous is to stretch the word to snapping. Odder yet were the pound-for-pound lists that included Klitschko, as if, stripped of his extraordinary natural size advantages, his timid, jab-jab-flee-jab gambits would hold up against a dynamo like Manny Pacquiao or a time-and-space master like Floyd Mayweather – both of whom spent their primes fighting men structurally much larger than themselves. The assumption, of course, was boxing would never unearth a man big as Klitschko who could fight even a little bit, and who was not brother Vitali, allowing the myth of Klitschko as an all-timer, and it nearly happened like that. Bless Tyson Fury for what he did Saturday. Fury is not a good fighter – that is, shrunken to, say, Miguel Cotto’s dimensions, Fury’s fighting skills wouldn’t have allowed him to turn pro – but he is a very good modern heavyweight. As a matter of fact, he’s now the very best heavyweight fighter in the world, a phrase begging to be followed by an emoticon like or Fury is also a fighter, in the modern-British sense of the word. He wants to mill, the way Ricky Hatton and Carl Froch did, even while being less athletically gifted than his tenacious, smaller countrymen. Saturday’s match, then, featured a very limited fighter against an enormous and handsome robot programmed with a logic loop like: IF condition=perfectly safe THEN feint with jab ELSE retreat and flail. It was a wonderful exclamation point on the Klitschko Era, one that banished heavyweight prizefighting from America’s collective consciousness, enchanting only those whose passion for precision machinery brought tingles of pleasure every time their giant robot dismantled grossly overmatched untermenschen without jarring its shaky CPU. Setting aside patriotic and ethnic enthusiasms, Klitschko, in the tradition of young and stat-obsessed fantasysports fans, pleased best those who value most being right. To borrow a tasty thing American comic Doug Stanhope once said about New York Yankees fans, cheering for Wladimir Klitschko was like going to a casino and cheering for the dealer (and then browbeating fellow spectators about how good you are at calculating probability). Klitschko was most beloved by those who entirely miss the point of competition, if not fighting itself. Back to Great Britain. The BBC has a motorsports program, Top Gear, that is perfect as television can be. Its three hosts brazenly test and often undo very expensive automobiles, while hatching fantastic driving analogies such as: “It’s like trying to do a crossword puzzle while being eaten by a tiger!” A few years ago Top Gear featured theMcLaren MP4-12C, an extraordinary engineering feat that, in every scientifically measurable way, was superior to any car you’ve likely heard of, including a Ferrari. But as host Jeremy Clarkson noted: “There’s no zing.” For all its perfection, it wasn’t fun to drive, or at least not fun as it should have been; obsessed as it was with perfection, it verily suffocated the human element, the sort of messy vitality that marks life’s richest experiences and sells Lamborghinis. Tyson Fury is a 6-foot-9 stack of messy vitality. By his own admission he is at least manic and perhaps berserk – an abusing product of abuse no sane person should wish to see angry or drunk. He is amusingly tacky, like many things British, and relentlessly selfpromoting. But he is also selfaware; he is not a polished fighter and doesn’t try to be. Too, he enjoys the same surfeit of confidence as his countryman Froch: Until Fury stood a meter from Klitschko’s raised fists and danced with his gloves behind his back, Saturday, few had seen a delta between talent and confidence to rival the Nottinghamshire Cobra’s. But there it was. Legend has it, winning a title makes a prizefighter 20-percent better. But Fury didn’t just win a title; he won the title. He is now the undefeated, undisputed, unified heavyweight champion of the world. That ought to make him at least 30- percent better, which should make his reign engrossing if not majestic..

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