“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Your hands can’t hit what you can’t see,” Muhammad Ali exclaimed before his World Heavyweight bout with Sonny Liston; unbeknownst to “The Greatest,” this impassioned rhetoric was to be permanently inscribed on the walls of boxing and cultural immortality. His words outside the ring and his fists inside the ropes inspired millions.
Fast-forward 54-years, and under the lights at the Staples Center in Los Angeles a gargantuan, six-foot-10 figure lay sprawled out, unconscious across the canvas. As he lay motionless, his prospects of the greatest comeback the sport had seen since Ali’s in 1974 seemed dashed, yet within milliseconds, a flicker of the eyelids before an instantaneous resurrection saw The Gypsy King emerge from his Deontay Wilder-induced slumber. At that very moment, as Tyson Fury sat up and stared over at a befuddled Wilder, the Boxing world sat up with him and took heed.
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Like his world champion predecessor, Ali, Fury has always been one for trash talk — “you, big dosser” and “you, big bum” are ever-present in the champ’s vocabulary; perhaps not quite the poetic sophistication Ali would emit, but noteworthy and hilarious in equal measure.
Hollywood’s fascination with the sport of boxing, and the characters contained within it has been highlighted in the lucrative Rocky movies (and Creed) as well as some of the best biopics of all time, like Ali starring Will Smith, Scorsese’s Raging Bull, and Ron Howard’s Cinderella Man.
The giant world of the heavyweights is forever churning out characters, yet, since the days of the Louisville Lip, there hasn’t been a more intriguing fighter than Tyson Fury. With last year’s announcement that Jamie Foxx would play Mike Tyson in a new TV Series based on the former Heavyweight World Champion’s life, Fury could well be the next boxer to be made the subject of a biopic. Here’s why his life would make for a remarkable screenplay and a great movie biopic.
The Rise of Fury
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Of course, with most estimable sporting success stories, there is often a propensity to initially focus on the build-up and rise of an athlete: the who, why, what, and where. In the case of Tyson Fury, his hike up the mountain of sporting acclaim was a turbulent one. Born and raised in the traveler community, the heavyweight boxer has often recalled the harsh reality of his upbringing, where discriminatory behavior against his people was a recurring theme and the constant fight to maintain their heritage took an arduous toll.
Part of a long, rich-blooded line of fighting men, the genetic foundations had already been laid centuries before Fury’s conception, however, his narrow escape from death as a premature baby served as a poignant reminder that even when the chips were down, the man from Morecambe would come out fighting.
The years that followed saw Fury excel in the sport of his forefathers, beating everyone that was put in front of him with a slick, tricky, but awkward style. Then, in November 2015, Fury was given the chance to make history against Wladimir Klitschko, the reigning champion who had been undefeated in 11 years. “I’m gonna have a little talk with Jesus when I get home tonight,” rang out around the Esprit Arena in Düsseldorf as Fury made another one of his characteristically unforgettable ring walks. With the odds dramatically stacked against him, Fury went out and put on a boxing clinic to outpoint a despairing Klitschko, and was subsequently crowned undisputed champion of the world.
The Fall of Fury
Towering over a bar on the French Riviera and accompanied by several hundred rowdy England football fans, Tyson Fury, with the St. George’s flag emblazoned on his t-shirt, ordered the barman to pour him 200 Jägerbombs for him and his fellow patriots to enjoy during the European Championships. Despite this being seven-months from that historic night in Düsseldorf, this was perhaps the first public display of an issue being afoot.
A fall from grace is usually a direct byproduct of a loss or a tragedy. However, in Fury’s instance, his nosedive into alcoholism and depression followed a career-high of dethroning the great Wladimir Klitschko to become undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. His well-documented battle with depression and bipolar disorder had physical ramifications too: ballooning to 400lbs, the fighter simply became incapable of fulfilling his boxing duties both physically and mentally.
“I bought a brand-new Ferrari convertible in the summer of 2016, and I was in it, and I was on this strip of the highway where I am. I got the car up to about 190mph, and I was headed towards that bridge,” Fury recalled when opening up about his mental health struggle and subsequent suicide attempt on the Joe Rogan podcast, parts of which can be seen below. “I just wanted to die so bad, that I gave up on life. And just as I was heading towards that bridge at 190mph in this Ferrari I heard a voice saying: ‘No, don’t do this Tyson…”
The Comeback of Fury
18 months on from his tanked-up and concerning appearance in Nice, 13 miles down the road at the Casino de Monte Carlo Salle Medecin in Monaco, a 28-stone Fury announced his intention to return to the ring to reclaim the world titles he’d been stripped of and vacated a year prior. Greeted by a tirade of once-doubting smiles and disbelieving grins, eight months later and 10-stone down, a regenerated and transformed Fury began his second ascent of the Heavyweight mountain.
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After just two warm-up fights, following a two-and-a-half-year hiatus, Fury was back challenging at boxing’s summit for the WBC world title against the fiercest puncher in the game, Deontay “The Bronze Bomber” Wilder. It was here that Fury’s comeback became even more miraculous; seemingly knocked unconscious by a Wilder haymaker, Fury returned to his feet to draw a fight the critics said he had all but won. A year on from his controversial draw, Fury would return to the ring with Wilder where he would regain his title as the best on the planet.
While the sporting world watches on with bated breath as Fury ponders his retirement from boxing, filmmakers and scriptwriters alike will be rubbing their hands together at the potential opportunity of working on a project about The Gypsy King. Even Fury himself has spoken about fielding offers to film his life story, and with the recent news that he’d like Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson to play him in the movie of his life, perhaps his great comeback story is closer to being filmed than ever before. His backstory is both unique and inspiring, and a prospective film would delve into unprecedented territories of reaching the pinnacle of a sport while concurrently battling mental illness. It certainly has the makings of a knockout screenplay.
