Oleksandr Usyk has ended Tyson Fury’s time at the top… let’s hope time is called on Saudi Arabia staging boxing too

IT’S over for Tyson Fury at boxing’s top table, for a golden age of British heavyweights and for Saudi mega-fights.

Fury will have to content himself with a final mega payday in the sport’s second division.

What once would have been the biggest British fight of all time between Fury and Anthony Joshua will now be little more than a cash cow for two fighters who have been dismantled by Oleksander Usyk, lacking prestige, meaning or belts.

For all the griping and sour-graping of the Gypsy King and his promoter Frank Warren in the immediate aftermath of his second straight defeat by Usyk, this was conclusive.

Usyk is simply too good — and also too low on box-office charisma. This fight, between the foremost heavyweights of the age, played out to near-silence in a 26,000-seater arena which was not even full.

Daniel Dubois, Britain’s IBF champion, got into the ring to call out Usyk but we have already seen the Ukrainian knock him out last year — albeit with some controversy over a borderline low blow from the Brit in the fifth round.

After years of A-list fights involving Fury and Joshua, this era is done.

Usyk has outpointed them both, fair and square, twice in just over three years. He is an utterly worthy champion. An all-time great fighter and an admirable man from an occupied nation, fighting a bloody war against Russian aggression.

Usyk is 37 and has no credible opponents left to conquer. He has neither the knock-out power — after all, the former undisputed cruiserweight king conceded four stones to Fury — nor the lippiness to sell too many more jackpot fights.

For all his horrible faults, the heavyweight division will miss Fury at the top end.

His has been a macabre circus to follow. Often crude but always strangely enthralling, the man from Morecambe achieved much, by dethroning Wladimir Klitschko, and in an epic trilogy against Deontay Wilder.

His ring walk in the early hours of a Saudi Sunday morning, dressed in a Santa outfit to the strains of ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ was classic Fury.

Inside the ring, his performance was anything but.

There was none of the showboating that might have cost him in the original fight with Usyk, for the undisputed crown, in May.

But Fury lacked sharpness, lacked the brainpower to unlock a devilishly difficult opponent and lacked the supreme fitness to prevail during the championship rounds.

The fire seems to have gone from his considerable belly.

In both fights against Usyk, Fury faded alarmingly in the second half.

This time, he hadn’t even built up a lead in the opening six rounds.

Ignore the bellyaching from Fury and Warren. The three judges got it spot-on with a unanimous 116-112 to Usyk. We had feared Fury might have got a dodgy decision if it went the distance, after the great Saudi matchmaker Turki Alalshikh threw his public support behind the Gypsy King, but we need not have doubted their integrity.

There was an experiment with an AI judge — which didn’t count towards the result — and the robot handed the verdict to Usyk by an even wider margin.

“F*** robots,” wailed Fury, “give more jobs to humans. And f*** electric cars too.”

That was perhaps the first sensible thing he had said all week.

This was not the result Alalshikh and his sportswashing regime wanted — and it was not the spectacle he was after either.

A trilogy fight had been planned for next year, had Fury prevailed, but that never looked genuinely likely. The atmosphere, in the dead of an Arabian night, was little more than a deathly hush.

The biggest roar of the evening arrived when an enormous man in the audience won a Mercedes in an electronic raffle.

Alalshikh is a genuine boxing aficionado, who has even revived the print edition of Ring magazine. And fair play to him for that.

But his home country does not share his fervour for the fight game and does not possess the sporting fan culture which takes decades to grow.

There have rightly been complaints about the human rights record of the Saudi regime.

Yet to be brutally cynical, that can be washed over.

The Rumble in the Jungle between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman was contested under the blood-stained regime of Zaire’s dictator Mobutu.

What doesn’t work is sport in an atmospheric vacuum. The crowd needs to be engaged.

Fury is a showman worthy of the bright lights of Sin City, Las Vegas, but this audience was as difficult to please as the Saturday night late crowd at the Glasgow Empire.

And for entirely the opposite reason — no booze.

The Saudi grip on elite sport is tightening with the 2034 World Cup confirmed and an Olympics likely to follow two years later. Not to mention the riches of football’s Saudi Pro League, of LIV golf and ventures into many other sports.

But heavyweight boxing may no longer hold its lustre. The biggest purses in the foreseeable future are likely to feature YouTubers, old men and wrestlers.

So what next for Fury? Lennox Lewis has urged him to get it on with Joshua at Wembley.

But Usyk has relegated that prospect to a B-list sideshow.
Now let’s all get home for a nice Christmas drink.

Source: Boxing - thesun.co.uk