Well it’s official. February 22, in Vegas, Tyson Fury will put on his big boy shorts and fight Deontay Wilder again. The official announcement was made on the 27^th, but I didn’t hear of it till yesterday. Earlier today I watched some talking heads (one of them Timothy Bradley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilfXVDfTTvQ ) on Youtube talking about it and they were hyping this fight as the biggest of the decade – bigger than Pacquiao / Mayweather, bigger than Joshua / Ruiz 2.

They said a lot of nice things about both fighters, that Fury was a clever boxer, and that Wilder was the hardest puncher of this generation, that both men were courageous for agreeing to fight each other, etc.

However, they got some things wrong, and it pissed me off: (For the record, Bradley did not utter any of these hereseys.)

1. Tyson Fury is not the Lineal Champion. We’ve been over this before. You can’t claim that you’ve “never been beaten in the ring” when you twice failed to show up for a fight that you were under contract for. Chickening out is not the same as winning the fight, and I can’t believe that I have to point this out again.
2. It’s time to quit dissing Andy Ruiz for losing to Joshua in the rematch. The “little fat kid” is currently the number 6 heavyweight in both the IBO and Ring Magazine rankings. He wasn’t the recipient of a gift from crooked or incompetent judges, he kicked Joshua’s ass. That he lost a decision to the same man is no cause for derision. Grow up.
3. Tyson Fury has not become a ‘world wide mega-star’ by fighting Tom Schwartz and Otto Wallin. In fact, he lost a lot of credibility by doing so, and at tremendous risk to his career. What if he had lost to one those stiffs? Game over, or at least a return to square one. And Wallin presented a problem for him, cutting his eye badly enough that he could have lost by TKO.
4. It will not be bigger that Pacqiauo / Mayweather, or Mayweather / MacGregor for that matter. I hate to break it to you , but out there in the real world, people generally don’t know who these men are. Manny Pacquiauo was hyped enough, (like Oscar De la Hoya before him) that he became a household word. Mayweather slowly got close to that kind of celebrity status, but he never got all the way there. The Pacquiauo / Mayweather fight got hyped so much that it became almost a national holiday, with people gathering in homes all over the country to watch the “two world’s best” duke it out. This could have been a huge boon to the boxing world, with huge numbers of the uninitiated watching, had they put on a show. But what they saw was an aging and injured Pacquiao chasing around a reluctant Mayweather for 12 rounds; an epic snooze-fest. The Fury / Wilder fight promises to be much, much better than that, but I don’t believe they will pull in near the audience that Pacquiao / Mayweather did. Despite their accomplishments, people just don’t know who these men are. When Wilder knocked out Ortiz some weeks back, my local newspaper had this to say about the event: Nothing. Zip, zero, squat.

Despite these malodorous mis-statements I do share the excitement of this talking head crew. This is a heavyweight fight of real import, not because Fury is the lineal champ, but because he has the skill set that can possibly beat Wilder. He beat Klitschko, after all,and there are some key similiarities between Wilder and Klitschko. (Long and strong jab, devastating right hand, etc.)

This is so much better than seeing Fury take on yet another stiff, this is not a farce, this is championship boxing.

For the moment I will take back the blog-imposed title of ‘the Tosser King’ (meaning he was a great wanker for fighting Wallin and Schwartz) and will give a thumbs-up to him for fighting the most dangerous man on the planet.