When John Fury yelled “HERE I AM!” before a press conference on Monday to announce his son’s latest comeback fight, it reminded me of the times my three-year-old nephew has said the same while in the process of “hiding” during a game of hide-and-seek. Oddly, no matter how often you instruct the boy to keep quiet, he seemingly cannot stay hidden for any length of time without exposing himself and spoiling the game. No matter how often it is explained to him, the etiquette and indeed point of the game will never supersede a three-year-old’s desire to be the centre of attention. So that’s why he yells: “HERE I AM!”
To punish him for it, I then usually pretend I still can’t see or hear him as I search the room. This, as expected, starts to panic and scare the attention-seeking three-year-old. He wonders now if he has disappeared, or somehow become invisible. There are signs, even at three, of a Kafkaesque identity crisis. I can see it in his eyes and in his trembling bottom lip. He wonders, If my favourite uncle can’t see me, do I even exist? What even am I? It is then, before he begins to cry, I tell him I was only joking and say that yes I can see him. I also repeat how a game of hide-and-seek is supposed to work before being interrupted and told it is my turn to hide.
“THEY’RE TALKING ABOUT ME DAY AND NIGHT ON VIDEOS!”
That’s John Fury again, not my three-year-old nephew. I should say, too, that, for as jarring as it is, the entirety of John Fury’s Monday monologue will in this column be written in uppercase as per the style employed by many of today’s esteemed content creators. Fury RAGED, he FUMED, he BEEFED, etcetera.
“HERE I AM READY TO FIGHT!” began a FUMING Fury. “WHERE ARE YOU, EH? THE WORLD’S BEEN CALLING ME A F****** S***HOUSE! YOU KNOW ME, LENNOX” – that’s Lennox Lewis, by the way, who appeared more baffled than afraid on a raised platform working that day for Netflix – “YOU KNOW I’M NO F****** COWARD! I WAS GONNA FIGHT YOU IN YOUR F****** HEYDAY! WASN’T IT TRUE? DID I BACK AWAY FROM YOU?”
Lewis at that point shook his head, if only because it was the easier, safer option. It would have been amusing, of course, if he had attempted to trigger in John Fury the same identity crisis I give to my nephew whenever he spoils a game of hide-and-seek, but Lewis, clearly, is a better man than me. In short: he played along. “THAT’S RIGHT!” said Fury, made two inches taller by the nod of Lewis’ head. “SO PUT SOME F****** RESPECT ON THE NAME JOHN FURY! GET THAT F****** CARL FROCH HERE!”
Interestingly, Carl Froch was already there, standing right beside Lewis, which John Fury somehow failed to realise. Either that or he was, like me with a three-year-old, feigning ignorance in order to prolong an already pointless game. “IF HE WANTS IT, I’M F****** HERE! AND ANYBODY ELSE IN THE BUILDING” – he now flexed his biceps, both arms – “LOOK HERE, THE ULTIMATE F****** MALE! THE ULTIMATE F****** MALE! NEVER F*** WITH THIS GUY AGAIN! IF YOU’RE NOT WILLING TO PUT UP, F****** SHUT UP! RUN LIKE A F****** B****, CARL FROCH!”
Switch the names and those sentiments aren’t too dissimilar to what I hear from my three-year-old nephew before he counts to 10 and says “coming, ready or not!”
I’m kidding, of course.
No, somehow even at the age of three my nephew has a considerably better grasp of the English language than a 60-year-old John Fury and can strike urgency and fear into me in far more creative and less vulgar ways. Besides, Fury, for all his shouting, flexing and fist-clenching never actually found Carl Froch in the end, which is a damning indictment of his hide-and-seek skills, I must say. He was right there all along, after all. Wasn’t even running. Just standing.
Still, John Fury came away from Monday’s game feeling like a winner and that’s all that matters. It was never a game of hide-and-seek anyway. It was, if anything, a game of “Who Can Shout the Loudest?” and the difference between the two games, both designed for children, is rather crucial. If playing hide-and-seek with Froch and Lewis, Fury came up short. He found them, yes, but probably should have grabbed them to remove all doubt, particularly given the nature of his threats. However, if all John Fury was concerned about on Monday afternoon was shouting the pair into a kind of submission or obedience, he did it well, as he always does.
Because this is John Fury’s domain; where he is at his best; where he is world-class; where he is unbeaten. Give John Fury a bit of distance between both him and his target – enough distance to ensure no punches can land – and he is free to express himself and deliver the full John Fury repertoire. From this kind of range, he can say what he wants and say it as loudly as he wants, certain that nobody – not his target, nor any bystander – will dare interrupt him, shout over him, or argue back. In fact, for as long as John Fury is operating at this kind of range, and performing at this volume, he is a man shadowboxing alone in a ring, landing every punch, winning every round. He is, while this dynamic exists, everything he has always fantasised he is when lucid dreaming, or two pints deep, or waiting for his son to come out of retirement. He is Big John Fury, the heavyweight champion of the world. He is the ultimate f****** male.
As for the real champions, Lewis and Froch, they are humanised for having merely been within John Fury’s shouting range. We saw in them on Monday the common reaction of anybody stuck in John Fury’s vortex, overwhelmed by his size and deafened by his noise. Rather than scared, they both reacted the way one would if trapped in a lift with somebody who had just broken wind. Or the way one would if sitting on a train waiting for a strung-out beggar to shuffle from their carriage into the next.
“Boxers are usually the least confrontational people you will ever meet,” the trainer Joe Gallagher said to me last month when I interviewed him for a piece about boxers and trainers splitting up. “If ever they find themselves in a situation that requires it, they don’t want to know.”
As soon as Gallagher said those words, I knew exactly what he meant. I knew, having spent enough time around one or two in the past, how some boxers just don’t like it, confrontation. Either they never had a confrontational bone in their body when starting out or they instead saw the shaving down of that bone brought on by the discipline, humility and competition they received from their sport. Regardless, Gallagher was right: boxers, generally speaking, are not great in moments of confrontation.
In the case of Froch and Lewis, this was evident on Monday. Confronted by Fury, they did nothing. But then why would they do anything? As well as modern-day legends, the pair are both professional and reasonably smart. (In fact, the last time I knew of them being so close in proximity they were sitting on opposite sides of a table playing chess in Jamaica almost 15 years ago.) They also have enough credit in the bank – that is, world titles, respect – to avoid succumbing to the insecurities that fuel more volatile and impulsive individuals. In other words, they have nothing to prove to anyone.
John Fury, on the other hand, fidgets with all the agitation of a man who wants you to know he can fight – or at least once fought (which he did, 13 times as a pro). But the issue is, these days John Fury is not a fighter, nor indeed a promoter, manager, or trainer. He is instead now at risk of becoming British boxing’s botched BBL; something once thought of as an appendage to an already sizeable arse, but something that has now started to sag and become an all-too heavy burden to have to schlep around.
And yet, though each of us know there are better arses about (firmer ones, more in proportion), nothing, it seems, attracts our attention quite like a botched BBL. See one in the street, out in the wild, and you cannot resist having a look, can you? Plenty do the same. You see them. They see you. You then look again, almost shocked that arses that big actually exist in the real world. You knew, having seen enough of them online, that they were real – well – but until proven otherwise they appeared an exclusively online phenomenon, like the actress Rachel Sennott, the band Geese, or DAZN. When at last you see one trailing from an actual human being, it stops you in your tracks. You gawp at it but not with admiration.
The same goes for John Fury in the wild. All around him you will notice rubberneckers, each of them holding their phones towards his face and in turn providing him with the fuel and incentive he requires to keep going. From him, they get their content, and from them, he gets his social Viagra.
That he is roused in this way by a collection of strong-wristed young lads whose gormless gawking is not a choice but an affliction is neither here nor there as far as John Fury is concerned. They are merely the dealers. Seeing their phones, he is soon VIRILE and VIRAL. “HERE I AM!” he reminds them. “HERE I AM!”
When John Fury first gatecrashed the boxing scene with his son, he was a loveable rogue who could offer insight into not only a boxer – his son, Tyson – but a lifestyle and culture with which most are unfamiliar. To talk to him was to learn; something not always common in boxing. You might learn a new word, for example, or turn of phrase. You might learn a new perspective on life or on boxing. You might learn why his son behaved the way he did. Seldom, in fact, would time in the company of John Fury ever be dull or predictable and never in an interview would he sound like anybody else. It was refreshing in a way. It made sense to have him around.
But then, after a while, something changed. Sadly, as often happens with supporting characters, people in the “media” started to see John Fury as easy pickings, or low-hanging fruit, and exploited him for content, headlines, and video slop. They stripped from him whatever once made him unique and now remade him in their image. Soon he was being asked for his opinions on subjects entirely unrelated to his son or any other member of the Fury clan. Soon he was given carte blanche to go wherever he wanted – well, within the UK – and say whatever he wanted because wherever he would go someone would be relieved to see him and tell him so. Even if the few brave ones in the vicinity rolled their eyes behind his back, this sense of John Fury being a nuisance was invariably trumped by a far greater sense of him being wanted and needed by the scores of young reporters holding phones to catch the spittle from his gob. He wasn’t just being recorded by those phones, he was being created by them. He was given life by them. Permission, even. His name alone was no longer the credential required to get him in. It was instead his ability to shout that name louder than anyone else in the room could shout “Help!”. It was his ability to perform on command until everybody in the room pressed “stop”.
Later, when the same fingers have pressed “post”, you can’t help but think of the original arse and how that feels in all this. Surely there is some feeling of inadequacy on their part – that feeling of not being enough – or at least resentment on account of the bigger arse now receiving all the attention. It doesn’t just steal attention, either, the bigger arse. It hangs, it leaks, and it drags, which presumably causes both structural and psychological damage to whatever is left of the original arse. Perhaps, on reflection, that’s why it chooses to go into hiding every now and again.
“HERE I AM!” it then says on its return, having quickly become bored of waiting to be found.
