Roll up, roll up for the ultimate circus in sport

My week inside the surreal world of Tyson Fury reveals a cut-price Muhammad Ali for the Tiktok generation

Tyson Fury wore a garish suit to Thursday’s televised press conference at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Covered in countless iterations of a fist-sized crest, the cloth bore a Latin inscription: “Non est nisi unum Tyson Fury”.

“It means ‘There’s only one Tyson Fury’,” he explained, leaning over to show off a brightly embroidered cuff.

Fashion might seem of peripheral importance for a man who goes to work with his shirt off. But Fury is nothing if not an attention seeker. And this brash, noisy and tasteless item of clothing felt entirely in keeping with his whole project.

It was ridiculous, yes. But even as I rolled my eyes at Fury’s hubris, I felt myself being drawn into his roguish world. You can accuse him of so many things – of homophobia, of anti-semitism, of consorting with a suspected mafia boss in Daniel Kinahan. But you cannot accuse him of being boring. And that, in the blandly corporate world of modern sport, is at least something to celebrate.

Fury must be doing something right, because Frank Warren’s Queensberry Promotions has sold an astonishing 50,000 tickets – plus 10,000 more hospitality passes – to tonight’s fight against Derek Chisora. Such enthusiasm might make sense if this were a title unification bout against deft Ukrainian Oleksandr Usyk, or a Best-of-british rumble with Anthony Joshua. Instead, we are looking at a rather flaccid property: Fury’s third meeting with a Queensberry stablemate he has dominated in the past.

Given the imbalance in record and reputation, I half-expected the participants to spend this week shoving, eyeballing and throwing furniture around – just to spice things up. But there has been no hint of the usual weigh-in pantomime. Rather than bad-mouthing each other, Fury and Chisora have turned their collective ire on anyone who dares to question the relevance of this fight.

There is no doubt that, if their fighting gifts were equal, Joshua would be more conventionally saleable than Fury. In some parallel universe where he moves as well as he punches, Joshua has emulated Frank Bruno by becoming a fixture on BBC light entertainment, and a serial contender for Sports Personality of the Year (an institution that Fury flamboyantly disdains, on the grounds of excessive wokeness).

Fury is far too edgy for any of that. We have not even mentioned the drugs yet: either the cocaine use during his three-year hiatus from the sport (which he admits), or the positive test for nandrolone in 2015 (which he blamed on eating uncastrated boar). But then, perhaps, it is Fury’s very outsiderdom,

his refusal to give a stuff, that makes him magnetic to a certain kind of sports fan. Well, that and the fact that he is the finest British boxer of the 21st century. The more time you spend with him, the more you find yourself admiring him – almost against your better instincts.

Despite Fury’s tawdrier moments, he is as good at selling fights as he is at winning them. He has the motormouthed fluency of a fairground huckster, often coming across like a cut-price Muhammad Ali for the Tiktok generation.

For all his flaws, Fury has been a serial winner and an entertainer to boot. More than any of his rivals, he understands that boxers must also

be entrepreneurs – because, uniquely among athletes, there is no league or tour to do the job for them. At 34, he has developed into a master of self-promotion.

The result might not have been good for public decency or progressive values, but it has carried boxing to a point where it can sell out an open-air football stadium in December – even for a superficially unappealing fight like this one. As Chisora said: “We don’t want British boxing to go back to where it used to be, when we couldn’t even sell out York Hall [capacity 1,200]. So, we’re here until we find somebody else we can give the buck to. Then me and Tyson are gonna retire.”