Tyson Fury is the most overrated athlete in the world

Tyson Fury is the most overrated athlete in the world

GuyWhoLikesSport

Tyson Fury is a good to great-boxer who has had a mediocre to good career. That’s it. 

That reality makes him the most overrated athlete in the world. He is so overrated. I don’t even know who’s in his zip code. 

None of this is a reaction to his extremely shaky victory over MMA fighter Francis Ngannou. While he looked terrible in that fight and appeared one diet coke away from being the first professional fighter to ask to fight in a rashie (it’s just for sunburn I swear, says the fat guy on the beach), this position has been brewing for some time. 

He’s treated like a deity. A peer to Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Joe Louis, and the other great heavyweights of yesteryear. 

He’s not.  

He’s closer to a peer of Mike Tyson. I don’t mean that as a compliment. 

He is undoubtedly the most talented heavyweight of his era. It’s so rare to see a heavyweight like him who can switch his style mid-career and be equally effective at them both.  

But, even if he is the most talented heavyweight of his era, he absolutely is not the most accomplished.  

Oleksandr Usyk is the most accomplished boxer in the heavyweight division after unifying the belts at cruiserweight prior to heading up to heavyweight and dispatching Anthony Joshua twice, Derek Chisora a full two years before Tyson Fury relegated him to a lifetime of slurred speech, and Daniel Dubois.  

That heavyweight resume alone is better than Fury’s, which includes victories over the battered bodies of Dillian Whyte and Derek Chisora (to cap a trilogy nobody asked for), a snoozefest of a victory over a 39-year-old Wladimir Klitschko, and two wins and a draw over Deontay Wilder.  

 All of that was prior to going to life and death with Francis Ngannou in his first professional or amateur boxing bout on the weekend. 

That’s it for notable names on his resume.  

You could even argue that Anthony Joshua, with his three losses, has a better resume than Fury. Joshua has a win over an in-his-prime Dillian Whyte, a life-and-death victory over Wladimir Klitschko, solid wins over Joe Parker and Alexander Povetkin, and a win over Andy Ruiz. That is more genuine, solid victories than Tyson Fury has on his resume.  

But it isn’t even just the shaky resume that makes Fury so overrated. It’s his prodigious lying. He’s like if George Santos was a boxer with slightly fewer professional ethics.  

Fury is a liar who variously bellows that he doesn’t need money and lives a simple life, will only fight for $500m, only cares about legacy, only is in it for the money and doesn’t care about legacy, that he’ll fight all comers, and that the belts don’t matter. It really depends on the week. It seems that people seize upon the ones that make him look good and ignore his constant about faces.  

We got the most recent one in the ring after he eked out a classically shaky decision against a mixed martial artist. This one perfectly exemplifies why Fury is so overrated. He’s perceived as Country Mac but he’s Philly Mac, but even more delusional and in worse physical shape.   

Before Fury and Ngannou had stepped foot in the ring, he finally announced, after years of ducking Usyk, that the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world would finally be contested on December 23, 8 weeks after the Usyk fight.  

 It was a tight timeframe, especially for someone as chronically inactive as Fury.  

Fury was asked about two days before the fight and said “Usyk has to fight me in December. He doesn’t have a choice. He’s signed a contract.” 

 After the fight, sporting a nice cut and big old shiner, inflicted by an actual badass, Fury said “I’m going to go home take a long hard rest and we’ll see what’s next for us.” He later did another interview where he said “I’ll see you all sometime…next year”.  

 Here are the two videos side by side. 

 Obviously, what happened was that Fury went into the Ngannou fight expecting to roll through him and didn’t do any training for it. He effectively treated Ngannou as the first sparring session of an 8-week camp for Usyk. Ngannou was a tougher fight than he could possibly have imagined, and now he’s trying to wriggle out of a contracted date, and I have no doubt will try and wriggle out of the fight itself as he has done time and again.  

 Maybe he’ll fake retire again but still not get stripped? Who knows. Anything is possible in boxing.  

 The reality of Tyson Fury does not match the perception of Tyson Fury. He’s not some badass who will take on all comers. He has one great name on his resume and one or two good ones depending on how you rated Derek Chisora in his prime. This has been a good era for consequential heavyweights and he’s only fought one of them; Deontay Wilder. This isn’t a Klitschko situation where there just weren’t any fights for him.  

 There are fights, he just doesn’t want them. 

 There is no athlete in the world more overrated than Tyson Fury. He’s perceived like he’s the Martin Scorsese of the modern heavyweight division, but that would only work if Marty wrapped it up after Mean Streets and only made tight 90-minute thrillers with Jason Statham for the rest of his career but kept talking as if Mean Streets was Citizen Kane. 

 I bet that the Usyk fight doesn’t happen. And it will be yet another black mark on boxing’s increasingly blackened name.