Nobody in Tyson Fury’s inner circle wanted him back in the ring and for a while, they made that perfectly clear by cutting him off.
‘My dad stopped speaking to me for a while. My brothers stopped speaking to me, even Paris. Everybody cut me off,’ Fury says of the fallout after he chose to end yet another retirement and fight again. ‘Nobody wanted me to return and they made that clear… but, it’s my decision and my life.’
The decision is now locked in. Fury will return to face heavy-handed contender Arslanbek Makhmudov in April at the Tottenham Hotspur stadium, topping a major card promoted by The Ring Magazine.
But when Fury talks about why he’s back, the story begins not with belts or future opponents, but with conflict at home.
‘It’s my decision to make, it’s but probably a bit selfish,’ he says. ‘It’s just I’m my happiest when I’m in that ring entertaining people and I have no plans to stop any time soon. I’ll probably keep fighting until I’m 50 I’d say.’
Retirement, with Fury, has always been a flexible concept. This is his fifth return. He speaks about fighting not as a career obligation but as a compulsion – something chosen, not required.
Nobody in Tyson Fury’s (pictured above) inner circle wanted him back in the ring and for a while, they made that perfectly clear by cutting him off
Fury sat down with Daily Mail ahead of his return to the ring against Arslanbek Makhmudov
The Gypsy King will take on Makhmudov at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on April 11
‘I’m back because I’ve chosen to be back. I ‘ve chosen boxing because I love boxing. I ain’t boxing because I’ve spent my money and I have to risk my health to make a quid. I get that people want me to move on with my life but it’s just one of those things I can’t.’
That idea, moving on, became a fault line in our conversation when we discussed his fiercest rivalries.
I put to Fury a specific scenario. We had sat down with a sports psychotherapist to analyse the explosive interview given by Deontay Wilder on talkSPORT, where he reacted angrily when challenged on the various explanations he has offered for his defeats to Fury.
The specialist’s view was clear: Wilder will never return to his previous level unless he fully accepts, internally, that he was beaten.
Acceptance, he argued, is the only way elite fighters psychologically reset after a loss.
I then asked Fury directly: by that same logic, has he come to terms with his own defeats to Oleksandr Usyk?
The response was immediate and incendiary.
‘He never beat me. He cheated. Man, he cheated. He had rockets up his ass. He cheated. I’ll never agree that he beat me. He’s a cheater and he’s pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes.’
Fury is adamant he didn’t lose to Oleksandr Usyk and described the Ukrainian as a ‘cheat’
Fury offered no evidence to support the allegations, and no wrongdoing has been found against Usyk (pictured above)
Daily Mail Sport was given exclusive access to Fury before the press conference on Monday
When pressed on whether he genuinely believes Usyk cheated and what he meant by it, Fury did not retreat behind diplomacy.
‘A cheater? Yes. He cheated. He’s a total cheater. I don’t need a psychologist to help me get over those defeats as they weren’t defeats. I also don’t need a psychologist to tell me to leave it in 2024, I have worked that out myself.’
It is a total rejection not only of the official results but of the psychological premise behind the question.
Where the therapist’s model depends on acknowledgement and processing, Fury takes a very different route – reframing the results entirely and removing the need for any emotional reconciliation.
He insists the power remains in his hands anyway.
‘Make mark these words, the rabbit will be begging the GK for a fight by the end of the year, begging on his knees.’
Fury offered no evidence to support the allegations, and no wrongdoing has been found against Usyk.
If Fury will not concede an inch on Oleksandr Usyk, he is just as firm when discussing Deontay Wilder. His view is that time, punishment and mileage – more than mindset alone – explain where Wilder now stands.
Fury gets ready for with Claudio Lugli founder Navid Salimian in what has become a tradition
Fury says Deontay Wilder will never return to the fighter he was prior to their trilogy
‘He’ll never get back to where he was, because I smashed him to pieces twice, literally took years off his life,’ Fury says.
‘And the fact that he’s 40 year old, the sun’s run out the bottle for him… He can never get back to where he was.’
‘Look, it’s simple. He’s past his prime, it’s like his sell by date has expired. If you get the best steak ever, $1,000 for a steak. Leave it in the fridge for a week, and it goes off.
‘You ain’t gonna eat it. You’re never gonna get it back again. You can’t rejuvenate it unless there’s a youth serum that I don’t know about and that’s what’s happened to Wilder.’
In Fury’s telling, their trilogy – especially the third bout – was the decisive turning point.
‘Deontay Wilder was finished in 2021 after that terrible destruction I gave him in that third fight. That should have been curtains for him. But, he spent all his money and made bad decisions so now he has to come back – fighting in his 40s and risking his health as well as everything else. So it’s a sad state to get in. But I hate to say it, but I told you so.’
For Fury, all of it – Usyk, Wilder, the critics, the retirement chatter – is secondary to one simple truth: he fights because he chooses to, on his own terms.
‘I’ve been through it all, I’ve seen it all, and I’m still standing,’ he says. ‘Records, belts, opinions… they don’t change what I do in that ring. I fight when I want, I fight how I want, and I fight for me. That’s it.’
