Promoter of two-time world heavyweight champion believes he has not yet reached his peak and will prove it when he comes out of retirement
Tyson Fury may remain adamant he will never fight again but one extremely influential man is simply not buying it. “Tyson’s a fighting man,” says Frank Warren, the legendary boxing promoter who counts the world heavyweight champion as one of his charges. “And I feel in his heart he will fight again.”
Today, Warren is Mr Heavyweight, one of the sport’s great movers and shakers, in the enviable position of having three of the division’s leading fighters – Fury, Joe Joyce and Daniel Dubois – under his watch.
So when he speaks, boxing listens. And when Warren says the 33-year-old heavyweight champion has not yet reached his prime – even claiming “Tyson Fury is the closest thing we have had to Muhammad Ali” – it is likely to cause a stir in the sport.
“I’d go as far as to say I don’t think Tyson’s even at his peak,” Warren told Telegraph Sport. “He’s got no miles on the clock. He was inactive for 2½ years during the Covid times, and for me the time for him to be fighting is when he’s at his best.”
Fury’s future appears to rest on his date with destiny – or rather his nemesis – and what happens when Anthony Joshua meets Oleksandr Usyk again, this time in the Middle East. Can Joshua claim the victory, and draw Fury back into the ring? “I’m giving Joshua a puncher’s chance,” Warren says.
“The gameplan was clearly wrong last September [Joshua was outboxed and lost on points to Usyk], but I don’t know whether he can change what he’s doing. I was very surprised by his tactics – I thought because of his size and his jab, his superior reach, he would have posted that on Usyk – but he didn’t.
“I think he’s capable of knocking out Joshua. But then I think a lot of people are capable of knocking him out. But if Joshua can win, it would be great for British boxing, and we would all like that.”
Fury, we reason, may still fight Joshua if the Londoner loses. “He may do, but it depends on how he loses. If he gets knocked out or is completely outclassed again his earning capacity drops dramatically, and who knows, maybe he may not want to fight on. But it is still a big fight between Fury and Joshua if Joshua improves dramatically, or wins.”
Warren also believes that Joyce and Dubois will go on to become world champions, with the latter, still just 23 having “age on his side to take over the division in the next five years, but time will tell on Daniel”.
Little doubt, though, according to Warren that this is a “golden age for British heavyweight boxing, with five of the top 10 from the UK”, inspired, the 70-year-old believes, by the brilliant amateur set up in Sheffield, run by Robert McCracken – and the fact that “the biggest American athletes have turned in the last 20 years to American football and basketball”.
‘Tyson is the most unique gut I’ve ever worked with’
“The heavyweight division has shifted over to this side of The Pond,” Warren adds. “We’re blessed with heavyweights. It’s unbelievable times, I never would have thought this in a million years. I grew up with Henry Cooper, Jack Bodell, Brian London, then Joe Bugner who, by the way, was a bloody good heavyweight. Very good heavyweight. But this is different class now.”
For Warren, having promoted Frank Bruno, Naseem Hamed, Amir Khan, Ricky Hatton and Joe Calzaghe down the years – to name but a handful – Fury has given him the most pleasure. “Tyson Fury has probably gave me the most satisfaction, because of where he came from and where he is now: he was totally an outcast as far as boxing was concerned, he reached the depths of despair weighing around 28 stone, everybody had given up on him, and I sat with him and I looked him in the eyes and I knew that he had the hunger there and the want and the need for boxing because boxing was his saviour.
“If it weren’t for boxing he may have committed suicide. He was suicidal and boxing gave him that impetus, gave him that sense of direction and for me it was a privilege to be part of that journey back for him and it is an unbelievable story. I’ve been very lucky and fortunate over the years to work with some of the great British boxers and boxers from around the world, but Tyson is a very unique character, a one-off and love him or hate him, for me he’s the most unique guy I’ve worked with.”
So unique, in fact, that Warren compares Fury to Ali, who the promoter saw, as a boy, as something very special. “When I was young, that’s what turned me on to boxing – watching Muhammad Ali. He was unbelievable. An unbelievable athlete, an unbelievable sportsman, all the things that you’d never seen in sport before: loud, brash, and more importantly he could fight, colourful, just everything was unbelievable, and I was lucky enough to meet him when he came over to the UK when I was a kid, through my uncle. I met him a couple of times. And Tyson Fury is the closest thing we have had to Ali in the heavyweight division.”
Some comparison. “Well he is,” says Warren. “And he’s head and shoulders above the rest right now.”