After a round of watching and waiting, keeping Whyte at arm’s length, Fury unleashes a ferocious uppercut – and the challenger is down. He gets up, but he’s badly dazed – and the referee calls a halt! Fury wins in the sixth!
As Lennox Lewis, the first winner of an all-British world heavyweight title fight, once said, “adversity makes reaching your goals so much more rewarding.” Frank Bruno, his beaten opponent at a windswept Cardiff Arms Park that night in 1993, was a little more, well, frank. “Boxing is the toughest, loneliest sport in the world.”
Both of tonight’s headline fighters understand where he’s coming from. It has been a long and troubled road to Wembley for both the champion, Tyson Fury and his challenger, Dillian Whyte. Fury has courted controversy and battled demons before completing one of sport’s great comeback stories; he claims that whatever the outcome tonight, it will be the last fight of his career.
While the Gypsy King appears ready to walk out of the ring, Whyte has waited a lifetime to climb into this particular squared circle. The Brixton ‘Body Snatcher’ sees his whole life as a fight – growing up, it was a fight just to survive. In recent years, it has been a long, hard battle to earn a world title shot. Tonight, he will finally get it.
After the two fighters’ paths diverged in 2015, this has been a fight seven years in the making – in truth, much longer than that. Fury is a heavy favourite, but Whyte is more than happy to play the underdog. Both men can be counted on to leave everything out on the canvas, in front of 94,000 spectators. It’s on!
-thegurdian
