Tyson Fury

Tyson Luke Fury is a British professional boxer. He is a two-time world heavyweight champion, having held the WBC, The Ring magazine and lineal titles since defeating Deontay Wilder in February 2020; previously he held the unified WBA (Super), IBF, WBO, IBO, The Ring, and lineal titles after defeating Wladimir Klitschko in 2015.

Tyson Luke Fury was born in the Wythenshawe area of Manchester to Irish parents Amber and John Fury and was raised in a house in Styal. Fury was born three months premature and weighed 1 pound (450 g).

The Fury family has a long history in boxing. Fury's father competed in the 1980s as "Gypsy" John Fury, initially as a bare-knuckle and unlicensed boxer, and then as a professional boxer.

Fury became the third heavyweight, after Floyd Patterson and Muhammad Ali, to hold The Ring magazine title twice, and the first heavyweight in history to have held the WBA (Super), WBC, IBF, WBO, and The Ring magazine titles.

As an amateur, Fury represented both England and Ireland, as he was born in Manchester to an Irish Traveller family and traced his family lineage to relatives in Belfast and Galway.

He won the ABA super-heavyweight title in 2008 before turning professional later that year at 20 years of age. After winning the English heavyweight title twice, he became the British and Commonwealth champion in 2011 by defeating the 14–0 Derek Chisora.

He then won the Irish and WBO Inter-Continental titles, before defeating Chisora again in a 2014 rematch for the European and WBO International heavyweight titles.

This success, along with his 24–0 record, set up a match with the long-reigning world champion Klitschko in Germany, which Fury won by unanimous decision.

Fury was stripped of his IBF title 10 days after the Klitschko bout as he was unable to grant a fight with the IBF's mandatory challenger, Vyacheslav Glazkov, due to a rematch clause in his contract with Klitschko.

The rematch did not materialise as Fury suffered from mental health issues leading to alcoholism, recreational drug use and extreme weight gain. He was charged with anti-doping violations. In 2016, he vacated the WBA, WBO, and IBO titles; The Ring stripped him of his last remaining title in early 2018.

Later that year, after more than two years of inactivity, Fury challenged for the WBC heavyweight title against Wilder. The fight was controversially scored as a draw, with many believing Fury won.

After Fury became world champion in 2015, the British media began to scrutinise what he had said in the past. He received criticism for having said that he would "hang" his sister if she was promiscuous, as well as comments made in an interview before the Klitschko fight in which he denounced abortion, paedophilia, and homosexuality, saying that the legalisation of these behaviours would bring forth a Biblical reckoning.

Fury was nominated for the 2015 BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award but around 140,000 people signed a petition claiming that his equation of homosexuality with paedophilia should disqualify him. When asked about the petition by a BBC journalist,

Fury quoted religious phrases, including "believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved," along with John 3:16: "For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son, whoever believes in Him shall have eternal life and shall not perish."

Fury ultimately came fourth in the SPOTY award and said at the ceremony, "I've said a lot of stuff in the past and none of it is with intentions to hurt anybody. I apologise to anyone that's been hurt by it." 

He also was criticised for comments on bestiality, transgender people, and "Jewish people who own all the banks, all the papers, all the TV stations" in a May 2016 interview. 

The interview was later deleted and Fury apologised: "I said some things which may have hurt some people, which as a Christian man is not something I would ever want to do.

Though it is not an excuse, sometimes the heightened media scrutiny has caused me to act out in public and then my words can get taken out of context.

I mean no harm or disrespect to anyone and I know more is expected of me as an ambassador of British boxing and I promise in future to hold myself up to the highest possible standard.

In June 2020, Fury publicly thanked Daniel Kinahan for his role in brokering a potential Fury-Anthony Joshua fight.