The camera crew inside the tiny gym tucked inside a strip mall a few miles from the hustle and bustle of the Las Vegas Strip is the only clue that one of the middle-aged men working out isn’t your average Joe trying to drop that extra bit of belly fat.
There is no large entourage. There is no boombox with obnoxiously loud music to advertise his presence. There isn’t much of anything except a giant of a man intent on doing everything he possibly can to right what he sees as a wrong, to prove to the world that, yes, he’s its No. 1 heavyweight.
Tyson Fury, the lineal heavyweight champion, grins and says, “Feb. 22 isn’t that far away,” as he hops onto an elliptical trainer to begin a workout in preparation for his pay-per-view rematch with WBC champion Deontay Wilder down the road at the MGM Grand Garden.
They fought to a split draw on Dec. 1, 2018, at Staples Center in Los Angeles which left both men wholly unsatisfied. Wilder knocked Fury down and, he believes, out in the 12th round. Only a mistake by referee Jack Reiss, Wilder feels, kept him from having stopped Fury and kept his knockout run alive.
“He’s knocked out every man he’s ever faced,” Fury says in that gravelly voice of his before grinning devilishly and adding, “Except one.”
Both men feel they won the fight and Fury thinks the decision wasn’t even close. He’s perplexed by how anyone could have watched that bout and felt Wilder had won, but he’s been around boxing long enough to know that judging is an imperfect science, at best, and sometimes a lot worse than imperfect.
It’s why he’s vowing to knock out Wilder within two rounds in the rematch and insists the harsh words are not just a ploy to build interest in the fight.
“I don’t care if it sells 10 pay-per-views,” Fury says of the bout that will earn him tens of millions of dollars, helped by proceeds of the Fox Sports/ESPN+ pay-per-view sales that are expected to exceed 1 million and could reach 2 million. “I’m here to win.”
The promoters are left to find ways to best promote this epic bout. It’s the quintessential match, pitting the charismatic slugger against the brash boxer.
Fury promoter Bob Arum of Top Rank is more prone to hyperbole than the next guy, but his opinion that the fight will do mega-business and be the biggest heavyweight match in the sport since at least the 2002 bout between Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis in Memphis, Tennessee, is hardly out of the mainstream.
“This is a massive, massive pay-per-view,” Arum said. “ … With the combination of ESPN and Fox, and the interest in this fight and how great the first fight was, we’re going to set heavyweight records for pay-per-view.”
That would mean in excess of 2 million sales, which would be roughly seven times what the first fight sold.
