JOHN Tyson, the dad of WBC world heavyweight champ Tyson Fury, has written a knockout account of his wild and wayward life as a bare-knuckle fighter and no-nonsense minder – and we have exclusive extracts from the book, When Fury Takes Over.
In Day One he tells how premature baby Tyson was not expected to survive – and how Jesus spoke to him in his jail cell.
“THE night that Tyson was born is something I’ll never forget.
It was August, and the baby was due in seven weeks’ time.
My wife Amber and I had had problems with previous births.
Hearing that she had gone into labour, I left work and went straight to Wythenshawe Hospital in Manchester.
It was a foul night of thunder and lightning, rain pouring down as if it was the end of the world.
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Again, there were complications for my lad. Tyson had been born massively premature and weighed only 1lb — small enough to fit into the palm of my hand.
The doctors said he wouldn’t make it, but I saw something completely different — a little warrior with a glint in his eye and his fist held up, as if he was ready to take on the world.
I said to the doctor: “That boy is special, he is going to live and he’s going to be almost 7ft tall, weigh 20st, and one day he’s going to be the heavyweight champion of the world, mark my words.”
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As Tyson grew up, there were problems for the first four years. He kept overheating and suffering delusions.
He would have terrifying hallucinations that lions, monsters and demons were trying to eat him.
Amber and I would pack him in ice and rush him to hospital. I started to take him outside for the natural medicine of fresh air.
Once, I took him to a golf course. I was mucking around with a golf club when the president of the club appeared in the distance.
He started shouting and walking towards me, so I picked up Tyson and legged it.
I tried to jump over a ditch but the bank gave way beneath me and I landed with all my 20st on my baby son’s leg and snapped it.
It sounded like a dry stick being broken. I took him home, he was shaking and sobbing in my arms.
Naturally Amber was fuming, and I was devastated. It was one of the most painful experiences of my life, never mind for my poor son.
“How could you get this wrong?” I asked myself. How can a father break his own child’s leg?
“You can see the bone sticking out of his leg!” screamed Amber.
I hung my head in shame.
“You’re absolutely right. I’m a misfit and not capable of being a father,” I agreed.
We took him to hospital where they performed emergency surgery on the limb.
It haunted me, seeing his little leg with a steel bolt through it.
For me there is nothing worse than causing pain to one of my sons, intentional or not.
Now, 33 years on, it still brings a tear to my eye when I think of it.
Over the next six weeks, Tyson wore a kind of protective pot on his leg.
It didn’t stop him crawling around the house at speed or drawing boxing gloves.
After this traumatic event, I’m glad to say the rest of Tyson’s childhood was smooth as milk.
He was 11 years old when he decided he wanted to take up boxing.
Me, I didn’t want him to go down that route, so I gave him no encouragement whatsoever.
But he was determined to do it and he found an amateur gym on the other side of Wythenshawe.
When he went to school in Styal, Cheshire, he was huge compared to the other boys in his class.
He would often get taunted by older boys, but the difference between Tyson and me was that he learned self-control and discipline at an early age, and he was better at controlling his red mist.”
“I REMEMBER the summer of 1969 and one of many trips to Yorkshire.
Some of my mum’s people were up there working at Martin’s Farm in Norton, picking fruit on a family estate called Castle Howard, the baroque palace in Garfield II and Brideshead Revisited.
Six miles from the estate was a huddle of derelict red-brick farm buildings, where we pitched up our trailer and car.
One day a whole lot of blackbirds and crows started to gather. There must have been more than 100.
It was like something out of that Hitchcock film, The Birds.
In Romani lore — my mother’s lore — a large collection of black-feathered birds signifies the coming of death and a predator among us.
The messengers of doom then started their assault on our home.
The air was full of their cawing, the flapping of their wings and their talons tearing at the paintwork.
The noise was insufferable. Then, as quickly as they had come, they began to disperse.
My dad had this ominous knack of knowing when something bad was about to happen.
“Something terrible has happened to one of our own,” he said.
Within half an hour, we saw a solitary police car rattling down the lane toward us. This was the messenger of doom.
The copper looked at my parents uncomfortably and said: “Your nephew, Owen, has just been killed in a car accident, just 15 miles down the road.”
It was my cousin. At the time the crows had attacked us, Owen had died and met his maker.
Six years earlier, he had been hawking carpets with my granny.
At one door, a woman’s gaze fell on Owen and she said: “Do not ever take this boy near the coast, because it will be his demise.”
It had been six years from when the medium first laid eyes on Owen, to his horrible death, just a short distance from the sea.”
“ON both sides of my family, we were very religious.
When I went to prison for the first time, serving an 11-year sentence for a fight in which another traveller lost an eye, I never questioned my faith, nor tried to blame it on God that he had landed me in such a horrible place.
It was my actions, and my actions alone that had taken me there.
Jesus has come through for me that many times when things have got rough — more times than I can remember.
Two years into my sentence, Tyson rang up, sounding hollow and scared.
He was in Sheffield hospital and his little son Prince, who was only one year old, was very ill with meningitis. “They told me he’s going to die, Dad.”
I said: “Listen, son, they told me you were going to die, so that’s rubbish.
“Your son is going to be all right. I’m going to call you tomorrow in the morning, and your son is going to be here.”
Back in my cell, I sat down on my bunk and took up my old Bible.
As I read, the words were leaping out at me in a more pronounced way than usual.
It was as if the letters had been dipped in gold.
The more I read, the calmer I was becoming. I said a prayer under my breath: “Dear Lord, I’m in need of help today. Well, not me, my grandson.
“He’s struggling a bit, but keep your hands on him and do the best you can for him, please.” Then I fell asleep.
My eyes open suddenly. At the bottom end of the bed stands the figure of a man, and though I can’t see his face in much detail, I know it is the shape of Jesus.
Then with a voice as clear as a bell, the figure says: “Everything will be OK.”
Pure joy passes through me, like someone has just told me that I’m to be released from my prison sentence in the morning.
It’s four o’clock in the morning and I feel like bursting out into song!
At 6.45am I call Tyson to see how his boy is. “Everything’s all right, isn’t it, son?”
“Yes, Dad, it is. You were right again. He came right in the night — some time between 3 and 4am.”
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After that moment, I sailed through the rest of my sentence.”
- When Fury Takes Over, by John Fury, (Macmillan) is out on Thursday, £22.
Source: Boxing - thesun.co.uk
