By Bart Barry-
Latenight Saturday on ESPN+ lineal heavyweight champion Tyson Fury will defend his strapless title against an undefeated 28-year-old Swede named Otto Wallin, a man BoxRec’s rankings place squarely atop the formidable, fourperson Swedish-heavyweight heap (while allowing him to crack the world’s Top 50 just barely). It will be shocking joyful if Wallin featherdusts Fury, and he won’t.
The Fury victory tour continues apace. He rose from substance abuse to challenge Deontay Wilder nearly a year ago and rose from Wilder’s wildness to win a draw. Those feats and promoter Top Rank’s feat of finding its way back to a division in which its touch has not been magical for a decade or two are the reasons we got served the June fight with Tom Schwarz – ostensibly about a lineal championship (that traces all the way back to Wlad Klitschko, who beat no one the previous generation considered great but is brother to a man who gave Lennox Lewis a couple tough rounds).
Aficionados rightly saw the Schwarz thing for what it was. In case they didn’t ESPN, more camp than champ, saved its greatest enthusiasm for Fury’s ringwalk.
Saturday’s ringwalk better include live dinosaurs accompanied by the London Symphony Orchestra.
Less than that mayn’t reinflate the seeping Fury balloon. Ratings and press releases and multiplatform coverage from ESPN will imply something else entirely, of course, but trust your gut on this, come Sunday morning.
Fury’s style is not conducive to playing the overdog. Had he completed his denuding of Wilder by remaining upright for 36 minutes Fury and his enablers would’ve had another 18 months of goodwill to tinkle on. Alas, “Wilder &” Wilder dropped Fury often enough to dissuade any loose immediate-rematch chatter from the lineal champ and make Wilder’s standard-loop claims of being avoided feel a touch credible. Wilder’s folks, obviously, are in no real hurry to see their guy tested again, or they simply do not know what they’re doing – but Luis “El Viejo” Ortiz is still a more meaningful opponent at 40 1/2 than either of Fury’s recent foes (if that fight actually happens).
Which is all a fairly direct route to saying over and again: Thank heavens for Andy Ruiz!
Ruiz’s stamping CUR on the nearest thing the heavyweight division had to an undisputed champion is the one gift heavyweight prizefighting gave us in 2019. When he does it again in December he will fairly well cut Fury out of the conversation altogether. However much Ruiz’s manager sacrificially fed him to a rival promoter in June he’s still a PBC asset. That means when AJ taps out again a few weeks before Christmas, PBC will have each heavyweight belt except Fury’s imaginary one.
It will require no imagination whatever for PBC to host a fullthroated superfight in 2020, crowning a WBC/WBA/IBF/WBO Heavyweight Champion of the World in a genuinely intriguing unification match between Ruiz and Wilder. Fury and Joshua will play footsie for a year or two about a British-contenders-unite match whose purse negotiations will not be helped by their post-Brexit economy.
While the rest of the world forgets who they are. ESPN+ will have full coverage of the negotiations and quite a few features about Tyson’s dad, “Gypsy John”, and Anthony’s dad, Robert, with the striking, unforeseeable conclusion these men influenced their sons. “Not since I promoted Muhammad Ali . . .” will go many of Bob Arum’s colorful quotes about Fury.
While we’re on about Arum let’s use one of his best verbs: To dissipate. About 15 years ago I had a chance to ask Arum a few questions at a media gathering in a Phoenix supermarket. One of those questions concerned what qualities he looked for in a prizefighter before signing him, and Arum listed but one: “Does he dissipate between fights?”
If Fury hasn’t dissipated fractionally so much as expected between fights, interest in his rematch with Wilder sure has. As goes its flagship division, so goes our beloved sport. If there isn’t less collective interest in boxing in 2019 there most certainly is not more, and that’s with the full might of late-boom economics driving network acquisitions and broadcast calendars.
Storm clouds now gather on the American economy’s horizon, and while a recession may mint a new generation of prospects it’ll do nil to prod this generation’s fatted calves towards greatness. Showtime will follow HBO, while Fox follows DAZN and ESPN to boxing’s destination platform: App Store. Circus barkers will contrive a new language of YouTube likes and trailing-month replays, and what few of us still write regularly about the sport will begin a fifth or sixth search for green shoots while the BWAA hasn’t a choice but to award boxing’s best tweeters. Floyd and Manny will make a desperate cashgrab of a rematch, and the old salts’ll use whatever gaudy revenue number comes along to do a 27th installment of the Boxing Is Not Dead serial.
Whatevs. We’ll always have and must always cherish what Andy Ruiz did to Anthony Joshua on June 1, 2019.
Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry
