Tyson Fury keeps calling Deontay Wilder a dosser. At first I thought he was saying tosser, but no, dosser. So I looked it up, and it means “homeless person” or “a city person who does not have a permanent home and sleeps in the streets or in very cheap hotels.” In other words, what we used to call a hobo, a bum.

And that makes sense. As long as I can remember, “bum” was an accepted boxing pejorative, along with palooka and mook.

But I like tosser. It means the same thing as wanker, one who plays with himself. And that will be Fury’s new title on this blog, the Tosser King. He wants to be recognized as the Lineal Champion, and calls himself “the Gypsy King” but for now around here it will be “Tosser King”, for him, the wanker.

“What”, you are asking, “has turned you against the big Brit?”

I wanted to be a Fury fan, really I did. After the Wilder fight I had to change my opinion of his boxing abilities. He is quick and slick and hard to hit. And I loved his demeanor after the fight. You could see that he was disappointed with the draw, but he kept smiling and being gracious. He did a similar thing after the Klitschko fight, where to settle a bet, he sang a song acapella into the mike, not afraid to make an ass of himself. He looked to be (in both cases) like a man on an adrenaline high who just loves his sport.

And he dropped all pretense of hostility toward his opponents, he hugged them, complimented them, thanked them, told them he loved them.

It kind freaked Wilder out. He went with it, but you could see him thinking “WTF?”.

And I LOVED it when he called out Joshua, flapping his arms and clucking like a chicken. That was both funny and charming.

At that time, I was a converted Fury fan, looking forward to watching him fight again.

But then, as I have theorized elsewhere, Slugworth got to him and convinced him to abandon reaching for the lofty goals of title belts, unification, etc., and sink down into the fetid swamp of maximum moolah.

So we got Fury / Schwartz. Not Fury / Ortiz or Kownacki or Rivas or Whyte. Schwartz. And we were treated the spectacle of a grown man being treated like a kitten treats a ball of yarn. It was sad. It was shameful.

And he went right back to the trash talk. I even heard him go back in time and throw shade at Klitschko, which makes no sense. The man is retired, he’s not going to come back and fight you again, let him be.

And now he’s chosen to fight Otto Wallin. Another “not-ready-for-prime-time player.”

Oy.

“Butt Otto Wallin is professional boxer, and he’s undefeated.”

Yeah, and Francesco Pianetta was a professional boxer and undefeated when Klitschko fought him, (I know, because being incredulous, I looked it up). He was 29-0 and his opponents up to that point in his career had a combined record of 448-273. He had victories over Oliver McCall and Frans Botha on his resume. Yet Klitschko made him look like some couch potato that fell asleep and just dream-wandered through the wrong door and found himself in a boxing match.

Otto Wallin is 20-0 and his opponents have a combined record of 271-259.

I expect he’ll get a rude awakening too.

As for his claim to the lineal championship:

Bitch, please.

He gave it up when he failed to show up for the rematch with Klitschko. Not getting into the ring isn’t the same as not being beaten in the ring. He gave it up, relinquished it, let it go. He refused to defend it. Sure, he had good reason, but that doesn’t change the fact that he didn’t show up. You don’t win championships on the kindness of others and you sure as hell don’t keep them that way either.

Then Joshua and Klitschko duked it out for all his hardware, and in reality the lineal championship as well. In the case of a gap in succession (like when the champ retires), the protocol is to award the title to the winner of a confrontation between the number one and number two fighters in their weight class. No, I don’t know where Klitschko and Joshua were ranked when they fought, but if they weren’t one and two I’d like to know who was.

So Joshua wins the fight, reels in all those belts and the moniker “Lineal Champ.” Subsequently he lost it to Andy Ruiz, so to my way of thinking, Andy Ruiz is now the lineal champ. Prove me wrong.

Sadly, I think Tyson Fury is a very talented fighter who has been shanghaied – placed under a spell by some money-grubbing dream-weaving bastard of a promoter. He’s stuck now in a rut fighting tomato cans and wee girls, waving his paws like a trained bear in a cage so the kids will throw peanuts at him.

And he roars “I’m the best! The one true champ!” And like the Emperor showing off his new clothes, he swats at Tom Schwartz and the kids shout “Yes! You’re the best!” and he swings at Otto Wallin and they all swoon “You’re our champion!”.

He doesn’t’ know that the kids work for the promoter. And none of them will tell him that he’s disengaged, disconnected from the rest of the boxing world, that he’s living a fiction, in a fantasy world.

These fights don’t mean anything. He’s not working toward a title shot, he’s saying “I’ve already got one!” like the French guard in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. Maybe he should try to fight Shrek next. It would mean as much.

He can’t see that he’s lost in a magical land* called Irrelevancy. And no one has the guts to say that really he’s just playing with himself.

The big Tosser.

*I didn’t say it was good magic.