John Fury was not a fan of how his son fought on Saturday, and he wants a complete coaching overhall to fix things.
Tyson Fury had a harder Saturday night than expected in Las Vegas as a game Otto Wallin cut the British heavyweight badly above the in the third round and kept things scrappy across 12 rounds of boxing (watch the highlights here). Fury would end up winning the fight handily via unanimous decision (116-112, 117-111, 118-110), but with his eye seemingly one big punch away from ripping completely apart it was hard for many to focus on Fury’s positives.
One source of criticism over his fight came from an interesting place: Tyson’s father, John Fury. He lambasted his son’s performance in an interview with BT Sports and put the blame squarely on trainer Ben Davidson and his team.
“I don’t know how he has taken the cut in the third and made it to the 12th,” Fury Sr. said. “It has gone terribly wrong in the camp and someone is to blame. Tyson never landed a meaningful punch. If Tyson had been in front of one of the top-three or Alexander Povetkin, he would not have won. I am a straight talker and that is the worst I have ever seen him.”
“I have half an idea what went wrong but I cannot share it,” he continued before sharing it. “He has done an eight-week camp but his strength and power have gone. He was as weak as a kitten. His body looked a lot softer tonight. He is not an 18 stone fighter, he wants to be body beautiful. I have seen this coming. I saw this coming. If he keeps hold of that team, that whole team, they will cost him his career. Ben Davidson and everyone.”
”The cutman is the only one who can take any credit. it was like a shark’s mouth,” Fury’s father finished. “If this was not his show, if he was the away fight, he would have been gone.”
It didn’t take long for Davidson to respond to the elder Fury’s angry comments.
“John is Tyson’s dad so of course you have to respect him,” he said. “But Tyson was fully prepared and you can’t do anything about sustaining a bad cut. Just because he’s gone 12 rounds it doesn’t mean he’s weak. If he was weak he wouldn’t have been able to do 12 rounds there.”
”We worked in training camp for it to potentially be a dogfight because we knew that we might have to go there. Otto had heart and balls and tried to close the gap up and luckily we had prepared Tyson in case it went that way because that’s what he needed.”