THE HEAVYWEIGHT WAIT, WAIT, WAIT IS OVER
time heavyweight champion of the world. After that, in the first quarter of next year, I want that trilogy with [Oleksandr] Usyk [who is the reigning Ring Magazine champion]. That’ll be my final fight, win, lose or draw. I’ll go out with a bang. That’s the fight I want. I’m going to use AJ as a warm-up. I’ll take Usyk’s student, smash him to pieces, then I want Usyk, who is AJ’s sensei. We can fight at Madison Square Garden. He’ll love that as well. That’ll be the icing on the cake, beating the man who took my belts and getting it all back again. Regain it, walk off into the sunset. Brilliant! RING: I don’t know if you know this, but a win over AJ would make you the second-oldest man to win a version of the heavyweight title behind George Foreman. Does that kind of boxing history still motivate you? TF: It would make me the second-oldest … that’s not too shabby, is it?
I won the WBA super when I beat Klitschko and vacated it in 2016. Usyk has now vacated all his belts, so [Murat] Gassiev was given a regular version [before being upgraded in July 2026]. Here we are again with an opportunity to fight for the original belt that I first won. So, yeah. I’m very, very happy. RING: With the AJ fight being for the WBA super title, some fans and media feel that Gassiev has been slighted. He’s automatically demoted now that you guys are fighting for the WBA super title. What’s your reaction? TF: To be honest, who in the world is Murat Gassiev? Murat Gassiev couldn’t sell 50 tickets. Who the fuck is he? Do you know what I mean? This is the biggest fight the world has ever seen.
It’s the biggest fight in the world right now. In any weight division, there isn’t one bigger. Murat Gassiev was lucky to be a regular champion. He might give the sanctioning [organization] $2,000 [in sanctioning fees]. It’s pointless! Having him as a champion is a waste of time. That isn’t me lashing out at Gassiev. That’s facts. I couldn’t give tickets away in the Isle of Man to Murat Gassiev, never mind sell them. The WBA regular title is for champions who are not at the elite level. Manuel Charr only held the regular version. He was never the super champion. Gassiev beat [Kubrat] Pulev for the regular belt, and all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘I want to be the top dog. I want to be slated as the top G.’ Well, you’re not; you only ever beat someone for a secondary belt. Daniel Dubois doesn’t even class [the WBA regular] as a world title. He beat the American, Trevor Bryan, in a couple
of rounds on a Don King card. If that were a real title, he’d be a three-time world champion, which he isn’t. If I were [a sanctioning organization], I’d pay to have my world title belt [on the line] in this fight. Do you know what I mean? It’s a big fight, and it deserves a world title. RING: Lennox Lewis versus Frank Bruno was the most famous all-British heavyweight matchup before this one came around. You were too young to remember the fight, but do you have any memories of Bruno and Lewis? TF: I don’t remember the fight because I was only 5 years old. I’ve seen it, though, and it was a good fight. Bruno was doing very well, then he got caught, and that was it – game over. Both of them were good champions. Lennox had a good career, and so did Frank Bruno. They both made plenty of money. One of my earliest boxing memories was staying up in 2001, when Lewis fought [Hasim] Rahman the first time around. We were waiting up all night for it. I also remember waiting up to 5 o’clock in the morning to watch Lewis versus David Tua on pay-per-view. RING: It shows you the age gap between us. My earliest boxing memories are Barry McGuigan versus Eusebio Pedroza and Mike Tyson versus Trevor Berbick. TF: Tyson-Berbick was just after I was born, right? RING: A couple of years before … 1986. TF: A long time ago, but as I said, I don’t remember there being a bigger fight than me and AJ. All those big heavyweight title fights in the past, like The Rumble in the Jungle, were big for the day, but today we have social media, which has hundreds of millions of views. I’ve generated 305 million in the last few days on my social media alone, just me. The numbers for it are astronomical. The commercial value and the commercial reach of this fight are beyond anything we’ve seen before.
Arslanbek Makhmudov was almost shut out by Fury back in April.
to pieces in the rematch. How does SugarHill view the AJ matchup from a tactical point of view? TF: Well, the game plan’s going to be the same as always: Come forward and get your shots off. It’s no secret that ... Listen, I will hit Joshua before he hits me. And when I do, he’s going to go down like a sack of shit. That’s the game plan. People are expecting me to jab and move and give Joshua a ton of momentum coming forward. I’m going to meet him head-on in the middle of the ring and back him up like I did Wilder and blast him out of there. Any time you give me a game plan, usually that’s exactly what happens. I’m going to come forward and set about him. Listen, a man who ain’t 2% of me [Kristian Prenga] nearly knocked him out. He didn’t throw a punch in the next round. The old doorman nearly put him away and nearly cost us the biggest fight in boxing history. RING: Was your heart in your mouth that night? TF: I wasn’t actually watching. I was on a plane coming home from Thailand, but I was getting updates as and when we got internet on the plane.
At Home With the Furys broke steaming viewership records in the U.K.
RING: The Rumble in the Jungle was back in the closed-circuit days and did phenomenal numbers for its time (an estimated 50 million people watched worldwide). Financially, in recent times, Floyd Mayweather versus Manny Pacquiao still holds the records for revenue and pay-per-view. TF: Today, I’m talking about. Nothing matches this. I saw some [viewership] statistics from [the press conference] yesterday. There were over 500,000 views on Netflix, 450,000 from [SecondsOut], 330,000 from [Matchroom], and 250,000 from [Ring Magazine]. It had over a million subscribers for the press conference alone. The views for the Joshua presser with Jake Paul did 200,000, and that went on to do 33 million views on fight night. They’re expecting this to shatter all records. RING: When you linked up with SugarHill Steward, he convinced you to be more the destroyer than the boxer, and you blasted Deontay Wilder
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