In September 2015, Tyson Fury, never one for the conventional, turned to a professional kickboxer to help him prepare for the biggest boxing match of his life. The fight in question was a world heavyweight title challenge against Wladimir Klitschko and the kickboxer to whom Fury turned was a 26-year-old from Holland called Rico Verhoeven.
At the time it seemed rather odd for Fury to prepare for Klitschko, a heavyweight champion for nine years, by using a man more synonymous with kicking than punching. He was tall – around six foot five – but size alone did not justify Fury’s faith in Verhoeven. There surely had to be more to it than just size and inherent toughness.
In an effort to find out, I decided to interview Verhoeven back in 2015, just two months before Fury fought Klitschko and changed both the complexion and indeed future of the heavyweight division. Back then, Verhoeven was as unfamiliar to me as he was to most in boxing – though the name was one I had heard, I had never seen him fight – but the Furys not only vouched for him but were longtime admirers. They had, in fact, been aware of the hard-hitting Dutchman for around three years, having first encountered him on one of their training camps in Belgium. That was when Fury and his family first got to see Verhoeven up close and began to wonder if kickboxers – or just Verhoeven – possessed a fortitude boxers lack.
“They were getting a lot of Dutch guys in for sparring but the sparring was turning out to be a real problem,” Verhoeven explained to me. “Most of the guys they were sparring would quit or be sent away after one session. They all thought, No way, this is not for us. You’ve got one of the best boxers in Europe at the time knocking their heads off with just the jab. It was crazy. They weren’t used to it. For us, as kickboxers, it’s totally different to what we’re used to.
“So, back then my trainer hooked us up with them and we started doing some sparring. They came to our gym and we did six or seven rounds. Tyson closed both my eyes inside the first four rounds, which was quite a feat considering we were wearing head guards.
“He definitely surprised me. After four rounds my trainer said, ‘Look, he’s a big guy, he’s now going to start getting tired.’ He told me to speed up. Already both my eyes were closed. I couldn’t see a lot. But I still thought I was going to speed up and kick his ass.
“It never happened. After four rounds Tyson turned southpaw on me. I couldn’t believe it. He was now southpaw and still kicking my ass. I looked over at my trainer as if to say, ‘What the hell is this guy doing?’
“For a man of his size – so big, so heavy – he can move so well. He’ll be backing up against the ropes and I’ll think, Right, now I’m going to take his damn head off! But then he’ll just step to the side and I almost fall out of the ring. I think, How the hell does he do that? He’s leaning on the back leg and is still able to move sideways. It really is crazy. He’s so skilled. He’s a natural. Orthodox or southpaw, it doesn’t matter. It’s amazing to watch him at times.”
The experience stuck with Verhoeven, as one might expect, yet his pride was never dented. He was a kickboxer, after all, and by agreeing to enter Fury’s world – boxing – he was giving up certain advantages in order to sample something new. The eventual taste – blood, pain – may have been bitter and not entirely to his liking, but it didn’t deter Verhoeven, nor put him off going back for more.
“I didn’t enjoy getting my ass whooped, but it was a great learning experience for me,” he confessed. “I was already at a decent level in kickboxing, sparring was always difficult for me to find, and this was something completely new. I liked it. It was difficult to hit him, but I knew if I kept on training and kept on improving, I now had something to work towards. Each time we sparred I got a little bit better.
“I got my respect from them [the Furys] as well. I was different from the other fighters they found in Holland. I just kept coming. Even though Tyson was beating my ass at times, I’d never stop. I’d keep coming back, keep taking my beating and, over time, I got my respect from the Furys. It was mutual respect.”
Although Verhoeven has now competed over 75 times as a professional kickboxer, he has fought only once as a professional boxer, despite him getting a taste for it back in 2012. That one boxing match – a second-round knockout of Janos Finfera – took place in Germany in 2014, but never after that did Verhoeven box again. In fact, his next dalliance with another combat sport came in the world of mixed martial arts the following year when Verhoeven stopped Viktor Bogutzki in round one of a fight in Romania. That, too, was a one-and-done situation, with Verhoeven in the end doing no more than testing the waters and exploring the other dangerous parts of his anatomy.
Still, by broadening his horizons, the current GLORY heavyweight champion does at least have a decent grasp of the differences between the arts. If anything, he is better positioned than most when it comes to pointing them out.
“I don’t want to say our sport is tougher, but when you get kicked to the body, kicked to the leg and kicked to the head, it’s not nice – it hurts like hell,” he said. “But you have to keep going and push through the pain barrier. You can’t just stop. With boxing, it’s just arms. That’s the biggest difference. In kickboxing it hurts when you get a kick right on your thigh; there’s no pain like it, especially when you’re not used to it.
“That ability to fight through the pain is definitely something the Fury team liked about me. I’m used to being hit and hurt. It mentally makes me very strong. A strong punch to the face means nothing to me. It just makes me go, Oh, is that it?
“Also, in boxing you have 12 rounds. You have time to have a look around and ease your way into the contest. It’s not like that in kickboxing, though. The fights are much shorter and you’re into the action straight away. My championship fights are fought over five rounds. Most other fights are three rounds. As soon as the bell goes, that’s it, you fight. There is no time to waste.”
Verhoeven, who turns 37 next month, is perhaps applying the same logic and urgency to his own career. Unbeaten for 11 years as a kickboxer, he is now in the phase of a fighter’s life when final boxes are being ticked and any remaining itches will need to be scratched. If that means boxing again, so be it. If it means not only boxing again, but doing so against the best heavyweight on the planet, Verhoeven is, at 37, apparently game.
Because on May 23, in Egypt, that is exactly what Rico Verhoeven, 1-0 (1 KO), will do. He will box Oleksandr Usyk, the best heavyweight boxer in the world in only his second professional boxing match – some 12 years after the last. He will then presumably realise in the process that everything he experienced in sparring with Tyson Fury is nothing compared to the experience of fighting Usyk – a two-time Fury conqueror – in a competitive bout over 12 rounds. He will realise, too, that it is one thing helping someone else prepare to challenge for the world heavyweight title, as Verhoeven did in 2015, yet quite another thing challenging for the WBC world heavyweight title himself. For that, more than just toughness is required. For that, you are no longer the help. You are instead the one now in need of help.
In this case, that means Fury helping Verhoeven rather than the other way round. Specifically, it means Peter Fury, Tyson’s uncle, training and then cornering Verhoeven for his fight against Usyk on May 23. “It’s going to be a great night; a lot of hard work to be done,” the trainer wrote on social media. “Two great people, two great champions in their own right. What a privilege.”
The last time Peter Fury cornered his nephew, of course, the pair were in Düsseldorf, Germany, where Tyson Fury shocked the world by dethroning Wladimir Klitschko on a cold November night. Since then, a great deal has happened. Fights have been won and lost, drug tests have been failed, titles have changed hands, and relationships have been broken and never fixed. Yet one thing has remained constant throughout the past 10 years: Rico Verhoeven has been a kickboxer, not a boxer.
