Like many a boxing devotee, I’ll be rolling my eyes in the early hours of 12 December wondering what the hell persuaded me to forgo the nest to watch two ageing heavyweights settle a score as old as The Bible.
Boxing has always existed on the bar stool where sport and spectacle meet. Sometimes it’s more one than the other. In the case of Tyson Fury versus Anthony Joshua, who will enter the Cardiff ring at a combined age of 75, it is clear to which end of that spectrum they lean.
Talk of this being the biggest fight in history will have Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier chuckling over the celestial backgammon, not to mention Ali and George Foreman half a century after they rumbled in the jungle. Any claims made of boxing are necessarily accompanied by the sound of trumpets. How else are the promoters going to hit the numbers required to pay Fury and Joshua £75m apiece?
We are entirely to blame, of course. Were there not a market for this kind of folly there would be no fight. For all Joshua’s brittle resistance, despite Fury’s tiresome bombast, drawn to the flame are we, unable to turn our gaze from the desperate scene.
We will persuade ourselves that something of Apollo is retained in Joshua’s formidable physique, that Fury’s hands might motor at the same pace as his indefatigable mouth. A decade ago this might have justified the hype of Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn, whose plumage was understandably up with the award of the fight to Cardiff.
We might never know the real reason Hearn and Joshua, a fighter who in the age of Saudi benefactor Turki Alalshikh is more likely to call Riyadh home than Wembley, stamped their feet so firmly for a UK venue. It is unlikely, however, to be rooted in patriotism.
Only five of Joshua’s last 12 fights have been in the UK. This is about power, micro-aggressions, calling the shots, disrupting the equilibrium of the other. If Joshua can get inside Fury’s head, no matter how negligibly, it could yield a marginal gain in the ring. And Joshua needs all the help he can get.
Echoes of that crushing defeat to Daniel Dubois two years ago flooded the Jeddah ring in July when Joshua touched down in the first round against light-fisted Kristian Prenga. The Albanian was supposed to be rehab following the tragic car accident in Nigeria that claimed the lives of Joshua’s key associates and close friends, Sina Ghami and Latif “Latz” Ayodele, eight months prior.
Joshua resumed his feet to blast Prenga out in two but not before he opened our eyes to the reality of a chin that has never been the same since Andy Ruiz landed his haymaker in New York seven years ago to change the trajectory of both their careers.
Following successive defeats to Oleksandr Usyk, which occurred hard on the heels of a humiliating split-decision victory over MMA fighter Francis Ngannou, who was making his boxing debut, Fury might have been a marginal underdog before Joshua’s Prenga moment. Now he will barrel into Cardiff on a wave of hideous Fury supremacy, shouting the odds: you big dosser, sausage, rabbit, wooden top and the like.
All of this melts away in the ring when the diminished abilities of heavyweights of questionable historic merit finally go toe-to-toe. Bar Wladimir Klitschko, Usyk and Deontay Wilder, Fury’s CV is inflated by second-tier bruisers like Dereck Chisora and Dillian Whyte.
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Joshua, a late entry to fighting under rules, began his professional career with question marks over his legitimacy after a relatively rapid dash through the amateur ranks to Olympic gold at London 2012. Every setback since, most notably the double loss to Usyk, has stoked the embers of the imposter syndrome he felt on turning over.
The old equaliser remains a potent weapon, however, but of little use if caught flush while pulling the trigger. Fury could be anything on the night from fairground fighter to florid technician. Neither is reliable, which in its own way makes this contest morbidly compelling even if it is no longer elite viewing.