What would Tyson Fury have to do for you to consider him an ATG?

Much of what he did will always be in question. This is the guy, after all, who pretended to be in camp for Usyk when he had no intention whatsoever of taking the fight. And he turned down a fight a with AJ when Joshua was at his most fearsome. Yes, he was still getting back into shape then, but there is a pattern.

Might sound harsh, but for me there's even a question mark of him finding enough balance to get back into boxing just months after Wlad retired. When you pull stunts like he did against Usyk, everything becomes suspect.

 

I was really implying how much harder it is to get past British HW title level because it is so tough

Take for example who some other HWs got to face before a world title and then look at what the British based HWS had to do first, if going down the British HW title route first.

G Mason. A good HW faced Undefeated L Lewis
Chisora faced Undefeated Fury
Gorman faced Undefeated Dubois
Dubois faced Undefeated Joyce

Etc

They can be tough fights just to be British champion which can end a career

 

His win over Seferi already did that for me!

 

Avenge his only loss against Usyk, and beat Dubios/AJ would probably squeak him in

 

He is an ATG for me. So is Andy Murray in tennis.

 

...take himself seriously, proper diet, proper camps. I really feel Fury has underachieved in his career, as ridiculous as that might seem. I think the Fury we never saw, the best version of him, beats AJ easily and beats Usyk. History then looks different, doesn't it? The Fury we have will never beat Usyk now and I make AJ a favourite against him...

 

Couldn’t beat Usyk

Not an ATG

 

He is probably there H2H, but his resume is so lacking he can't be considered very high.

 

Absolutely makes sense, and it's not ridiculous at all....

The question is, though, whether Fury with a different mentality that enables him to train properly, eat properly (and take on the challenges the real Fury wouldn't) would have lost anything... Is there something in that flawed mentality that helps him in the ring? I think it's entirely possible.

I guess the question then is what that Fury even looks like, and whether it's even possible... I don't see that you could combine Wlad Fury and Wilder2 Fury without losing something from both, and possibly becoming less than either - the sloppiness of kronk Fury would ruin the slicker version from before retirement, and the tightness of the slicker version would decline the power of kronk Fury back to the softer punching accumulation/points fighter that he was when younger.

Absolutely... I guess it's one of those "yeah and if your aunt had balls, she'd be your uncle" kind of scenarios - he is what he is, he probably couldn't have been much different because of his personality flaws, and ultimately Usyk would've beaten him regardless (even though Fury was able to age him out to where he'd have a better chance, he still couldn't do it).

 

Beat Usyk, AJ, Dubois, Kabayel, Parker, Itauma.

 

Adding to that ... he beat the man who retired Audley Harrison ... so you could almost count that as a win against an Olympic gold medallist by proxy. In fact, that's pretty much the same as Fury winning a HW Olympic gold medal himself when you think about it..

 

He’s not coming back unless Usyk retires and maybe he wants to reign supreme again

 

He'd have to beat a top notch fighter in their prime, which he never has nor ever will.

 

Unpopular to say, perhaps, but often left out of discussions of Fury...

It's hard to imagine him having had a luckier career.

Yes, sometimes the situations he got into where he required that luck were his own fault (underestimating Ngannou quite as much as he appears to have done, for example), but nonetheless he's ridden his luck quite a bit - he could very easily have arrived at the Usyk fight with several losses... Or not even got to fight the cat at all.


I'm only really bringing this up as an interesting counterbalance to the opinion that he's underachieved (not necessarily just you, @Philosopher, though you might find it interesting)...
In some ways I agree, he has underachieved, but in others it could be argued he's actually overachieved and that lady luck has spared him several times - and that in terms of knock-on consequences, he could just as easily have been completely irrelevant as a genuine ATG.


For fun, hypothetically:
- If he'd lost to McDermott, would he have got the Chisora fight a couple of bouts later? If not, and without that British title springboard, how much longer would it have taken him to climb the rankings?

- If he'd lost to Cunningham, would his ranking have taken a significant enough hit that he wouldn't have got the Wlad fight just a few bouts later?

-- If either of the above happened, would the Wlad bout have ever happened at all, considering he'd have probably needed more fights to climb back into contention and Wlad didn't have that long left already?

- If he'd lost to Wlad on the cards (whether Wlad turned up better or not), would he have even come back to fight Wilder or just spiraled deeper into depression and drugs, and never fought again?

- If he'd been counted out in the first Wilder bout, would Wilder have given him the rematch? And if not (likely) he'd never have been WBC champ, or at least probably not in time to fight Usyk?


Don't get me wrong, I don't deny for a moment he's a really good fighter... But there's so many places his career neeaaarly got derailed, that it's impossible to ignore completely - none of the above is realistically all that far fetched


If you ran his career 10 times over, how many times do you think it would have gone better than it did? And how many might it have gone nowhere near as well?