Over the next couple of weeks, BoxingScene writers are listing their favorite fights. Some are fights they attended, some are not. Some are included because they were epic contests, others because they involve a favorite fighter, a favorite moment, or hold some kind of special significance.
When Tyson Fury was dancing around a fight with Oleksandr Usyk in 2023, I was mostly disappointed that Usyk seemingly wasn’t going to have a chance to complete his audacious bid at heavyweight. Of the storylines I’d delved into as I waded into boxing’s occasionally scintillating murk, Usyk’s two-fight series with Anthony Joshua intrigued me. Who was this Ukrainian with less muscle tone than the chiseled god across the ring from him, and how did he have better stamina despite that? I admired the bravery required to fight somebody that much bigger and more powerful, as well as the skill to beat him twice.
Until it happened, however, I never quite thought Usyk could beat Fury. If Usyk’s archive impressed me, Fury’s, that dextrous alien, was plain spooky. Of course there was that impossible recovery against Deontay Wilder in their first fight, in 2018, when Wilder landed two flush bombs and Fury lay unconscious at his feet. At some point in the time between his lights emphatically switching off and Jack Reiss counting “nine”, Fury rose as if by resurrection. Wilder landed a violent left hand square on Fury’s chin seconds later – in his autobiography, Fury wrote that it was harder than the punch that had knocked him down. Fury didn’t care and beat the shit out of Wilder for the rest of the round.
Then there was the nasty punishment he doled out to Wilder in their rematch, and the two knockdowns he survived in their probably-unnecessary-but-definitely-thrilling third fight before pummeling Wilder once more.
Fury seemed an unstoppable force – impervious to ostensibly hopeless deficits, and whose victory felt, as illogical as I knew it was, predetermined.
Even Fury’s ugly, bloody unanimous decision over Otto Wallin seemed further evidence of that. With a gaping slash over his right eye, Fury ate Wallin’s best left hands in the final round and survived without too much trouble. If not impossible to beat, he certainly seemed impossible to knock out – too big, too slippery, too tough, and too good.
Would Usyk, a relatively light puncher by heavyweight standards, even be able to hurt Fury? If he could, surely Fury would recover more easily than he did from Wilder’s fists.
The day before the fight finally happened, a friend told me he could envision Usyk stopping Fury. As hard as I tried, and as awful as Fury had looked against Francis Ngannou the previous October, I couldn’t.
Boxing fans are familiar with the sickening excitement that precedes marquee fights. I’ve never been more nervous for one. My greatest hope was that Usyk put up a fight; that he had moments; that he wouldn’t be dismantled.
Usyk landed the flashier punches in the first two rounds, winning at least one of them. The knot in my stomach loosened marginally. Fury, meanwhile, looked completely unbothered. He’d showboated in the opening round, baying to the crowd when Usyk wouldn’t accept his invitation to follow him into the corner so that Fury could do a Muhammad Ali impression, torso sloshing around and arms on the ropes as he evaded Usyk’s punches.
The third round was tighter as Fury worked behind that long jab (Another reason I was skeptical of Usyk’s ability to be competitive: a seven-inch reach disadvantage). It grew obvious that Fury had indeed mailed it in for the Ngannou farce at the end of 2023, that his abysmal performance there was not a sign of decline but overconfidence and disinterest.
In the fourth, Fury began to land clubbing body shots. Even as Usyk has continued to overcome all challengers in his path, I’ve never been convinced that his midsection isn’t indeed more sensitive than other boxers. He still reacts to them much more visibly than many other fighters. Fury’s body shots seemed to sap Usyk’s energy. He looked small, and when he breathed hard through his mouth, exposing his mouthpiece, slightly scared.
Then Fury added his uppercut to the mix. Snappy, scooped shots found Usyk’s jaw time and again. Fury’s blunders during the past two years have obscured the fact that he is a boxing genius. No one has looked as good against Usyk for as long as Fury did from rounds three to seven in their first fight. Fury seemed to have solved the unsolvable puzzle Usyk posed to all his other opponents, and all it cost him was giving up the first two rounds.
In the sixth, Usyk pressed forwards and flung himself right on to the point of a Fury uppercut. Usyk jolted, jarringly, hit with a punch he hadn’t seen. “The Ukrainian is hurt,” Todd Grisham cried on the DAZN broadcast. Fury was lackadaisical in following up, with Usyk in full retreat – Fury landed a hard right to the body and not much else – but at that point it looked like the fight’s outcome was sealed. Fury seemed to have the fight in the bag.
Usyk made a little charge at the end of the seventh, landing a few left hands in succession. It didn’t convince me he was back in the fight – he’d eaten another big uppercut earlier in the round.
But in the eighth he found his best counters. He was landing harder, cleaner punches, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the opening two frames. A left earned a sarcastic “Woo!” from Fury; a combination got a cheeky nod. But then a right landed bang on Fury’s nose, disfiguring it, sending pale Vaseline flying. Fury wasn’t smiling after that.
Though it still felt like Fury had a lead and would be the likely winner, the eighth round was satisfying. Usyk had generated a momentum shift against this creative boxing monster. It seemed unlikely after the sixth round, but it happened. The fight had a story.
When Usyk reached his left hand back so far and then landed it on Fury’s chin in the ninth round, I screamed. Fury looked out, stumbling back to the ropes with his head lolling back and his eyes unseeing. I’d seen him unconscious and I’d seen him buzzed, but I’d never seen him on his feet and stripped of his senses. As his back hit the ropes, Fury woke up and erected a high guard around his dome – that knockdown at the end of Wilder I all over again, condensed into an instant.
Usyk battered him across the ring, elation morphing quickly into queasiness. Usyk landed clean, again and again, rolling Fury’s eyes back in his head each time. I didn’t care that knockdowns could have been called and weren’t, I felt I was seeing what would have happened had Tony Weeks waited ten seconds longer to stop Diego Corrales-Jose Luis Castillo I.
Mark Nelson didn’t, a decision I still disagree with – though I have to concede that if one fighter should have been given a chance to keep fighting after that, it is Fury. He didn’t land much in the 10th, but he did stay on his feet easily. By the 11th, it was a fight again.
Usyk went to work in the 12th, surging forward to pin Fury in the corners and tagging him with power punches. Fury landed a counter right that made Usyk’s body sag backwards, candy for the judges to give him the round.
Usyk won by a point on a single scorecard. They had an excellent rematch that didn’t quite reach the heights of their first fight. Usyk is now 38 years old and coming off a demolition of Daniel Dubois that put to rest the idea that Joshua and Fury lost to Usyk because they didn’t bum-rush him. Being hit in the head and body so many times by bigger men hasn’t taken its toll on Usyk yet. He’ll pay that price later in life.
Fury is yet to fight since losing to Usyk again. Discussions of a third fight between the two have generally been greeted with mockery. Far more lopsided “rivalries” than this one have been granted third installments, including two involving Fury. Has everybody forgotten how exceptional the first two Usyk-Fury fights were? Fury has tripped over his very large feet and put them in his mouth many times over the course of his career. Still, as a boxer, he deserves better than this classification that he is Usyk’s clear inferior and perhaps an equal to Joshua.
Regardless of what Usyk achieves from this point on, his first win over Fury will forever be the high-water mark of his career. It is a testament to hard work, to talent, to endurance, but primarily to the sheer balls required to even want to fight a man that big and that good and then to walk him down and hurt him. As Usyk’s estimation continues to rise in boxing circles, as it did with the Dubois rematch, the legacy of his first fight with Fury may change. It could become a bout that Usyk was supposed to win, one of Fury perhaps overachieving, an inevitable coronation of an irresistible newcomer to the heavyweight division.
Since then Naoya Inoue has risen from knockdowns twice to eviscerate men naturally bigger than him. David Benavidez has lumbered towards opponents like a truck, throwing the quickest combinations and somehow evading the worst of the counterfire. Jesse “Bam” Rodriguez has pieced up his opposition so efficiently that he may be the best fighter in the world and we just haven’t realized it yet.
But we haven’t seen the fulfillment of any dream quite as ambitious as the one Usyk brought to his first fight with Fury (Depending on how much Terence “Bud” Crawford can get done against Saul “Canelo” Alvarez, that could change). In years to come, Usyk will be wildly overrated and underrated in various all-time fighter debates. Just remembering how it felt to watch him beat Fury the first time will be enough.
Owen Lewis is a freelance writer with bylines at Defector Media, The Guardian and The Second Serve. He is also a writer and editor at BoxingScene. His beats are tennis, boxing, cycling, books, travel and anything else that satisfies his meager attention span. He is on Bluesky and can be contacted at owentennis11@gmail.com.
