TYSON FURY denied being an X-Men style mind controller but reckons he has got inside the head of Dillian Whyte.
The WBC heavyweight champion, 33, defends his belt against Brixton’s 34-year-old Body Snatcher in front of 94,000 people on Saturday night.
Whyte has refused to help publicise the fight until the last couple of days.
And Fury thinks the infamous trash-talking and mind games that helped him dethrone both Wladimir Klitschko and Deontay Wilder are what silenced Whyte throughout his training camp.
The Gypsy King smirked and said: “People always say I am a master of mind games but I don’t do anything intentionally. I just talk, sometimes it’s a load of old rubbish and sometimes it’s good, most of the time it is entertaining.
“But a lot of fighters have a fear factor that I am going to get in their head. I’m not [Professor] X, I am just a boxer, how can I get inside someone’s brain?
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“But Dillian Whyte not getting involved has shown that I am in his mind already. He has stayed away and stayed quiet because he thinks it will stop that. But I know he has been thinking hard about me.”
Back in 2011 Fury walked into a Derek Chisora press conference flanked by two dwarves, to make himself look even bigger than 6ft 9in.
He dumbfounded a Klitschko press conference by bursting in dressed as Batman and then pulled off a masterstroke by revealing an old story about outlasting the ten-year champion in a sauna showdown.
The stunts have leaped from genius to ridiculous but — in a thinly disguised dig at twice-beaten Anthony Joshua — the undefeated ace insists he has always backed up the bravado.
He said: “The Batman stunt is my favourite, I always wanted to do it and Klitschko was the perfect fight for it.
“It’s all right being brash and confident but you have to back it up.
“Some of these fighters, supposed confident characters — naming no names — go in the ring and can’t back it up.
“But if you can go in and back it up every time then you are on to a winner.”
Whyte is flying into the UK today and will finally come face-to-face with his former friend and sparring partner at tonight’s media work out or tomorrow’s press conference.
And, despite Whyte being at war with the WBC over his 20 per cent of the £30million purse and promoter Frank Warren over the big-fight contract, Fury insists he always knew his foe would show.
He roared: “For the money he’s getting you would turn up in any state. Only an idiot wouldn’t.
“Even if I had been on the drink every night of camp and eating s*** every day, I would still turn up and take the money. You would have to, wouldn’t you?”
Whyte whisked himself away from his family for another training camp in steaming-hot Algarve.
Fury also moved out of his family home in Morecambe but only four miles down the road so he could fully focus away from wife Paris and their six children.
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He added: “I moved out of my family home for eight weeks.
“The camp house I have used is about four miles away from the house, just around the bay.
“I never ran near the house, I never saw the family.
“But it wasn’t that hard, it was not that long a time, it doesn’t matter if I am across the Atlantic or down the road, I have to focus on the camp and the fight and it is not a problem.”