First off I am not a huge fan of boxing. I only turn up for the super huge events that the world gets all hyped up about and this one was all over the place in promotions for weeks before it happened. The bar I went to in order to watch it was surprisingly quiet even though they advertised the event for a while before hand and I was a bit shocked how few people in the area really even cared that it was on.
I thought it was a civil affair between the boxers but after 12 rounds I knew going to the judges' scorecards that Usyk was a very one-sided affair and that it likely wasn't even going to be close. and it wasn't.
Tyson Fury has always been interesting to me because the "Gypsy King" appears to be someone that just happens to be exceptionally tall an big, but doesn't really exercise. This obviously is not the case, he does exercise and I would imagine that his training is extremely vigorous.. he is just a beastly huge man.
If we were to take a shot of these two people and show it to someone that knows nothing of either one of them or the sport and ask "who will win in a fist fight" I think I know what most people would say.
Fury is significantly larger than Usyk and in this particular bout Fury weighed in at a whopping 60 lbs heavier than Usyk. There is a reason why they don't bother with weight after a certain point in most professional fighting sports: When you reach a certain size how much you weight offers no sort of advantage. In all actuality the guys who are super-human huge tend to not fare as well because it takes a great deal more energy to move a body around when you are that huge. Just ask Shaquille O'Neil how much fun it is to run a full-court game for 40 minutes, you'll get the news.
Usyk is 6 foot 3 inches and 223 lbs. This is not a small man by any means. Fury though, he is just a mutant of a person. He is 6 foot 9 (closer to 6 foot 10) and 281 lbs. If you are a kg or stone person this is basically 1/3 of an adult male additional weight. Here is the thing though, if you look at their arms, which is the most important part of a fight where you are expected to hit people with your arms, they are about the same size so the only real advantage is the reach and well, as you would expect Fury has an advantage there as well - one of 9 inches. On paper, it would seem like the size differential would favor the bigger man but that is not how this game works at all. If it did, Mike Tyson, who is 5 foot 11, would have never been a champion.
The heavier you are the harder it is to move around and I guess this was a factor in this fight because while Fury got a few good shots in, Usyk was more agile and landed more punches of actual value. With his 9 inch reach advantage Fury was landing a lot of straight jabs, but when your arms are that much longer than your opponent, of course you are going to do that.
While for most of the fight Fury was actually backing down Usyk that doesn't mean that Usyk was running away, I can't say exactly what he was going for there but it was in his counter-attacks that the Ukrainian truly shined. Fury would go for a heavy knock of some sort, a hook or an overhand and Usyk, the quicker of the two would land a few big blows while Fury covered up. I don't think anyone can KO Fury, but the name of the game is shots landed and who was the better fighter if both of them are still standing by the end of the fight. I am no boxing judge, but I don't think I have to be to notice that after 12 rounds that most of them were won by Usyk. Despite Fury being the aggressor for a lot of the fight, he just didn't land very many shots of consequence. The searching jab doesn't really count in my book.
My eyes aren't good enough to analyze all of that but it's funny to me that all 3 judges ended up with the same score but just go there by different means. A score of 116 means that the judges thought that Usyk won all the rounds except for 4 of them because 120 is the most points you can get in a 12-round fight. For the most part the judges disagreed about what rounds they thought Fury won, but in the end it doesn't really matter.
I am a little suspicious whenever all 3 judges come to the exact same result at the end of any fight like this and if it was close, I would think it was a fix.
There is no doubt in my mind that the boxing world would have much preferred if Tyson Fury had won this fight because then they would have a big money trilogy on their hands but unless you are completely biased, I don't see how anyone could have watched that fight and though that anything other than a Usky victory was coming up. There was one guy in the bar I was in that shouted out "bullshit" when Usyk was announced as the winner but I kind of know this guy and he is an idiot in more ways than one.
There are no real losers in this thing though because check this out: The fight purse was $190 million between the two of them. Usyk had to agree to a 55/45 split because I think he knows that the real draw in this fight was Tyson Fury and without him the fight wouldn't have had this large of a purse. To nail this point home a bit more in their first match Fury made $100 million and Usyk made $45 million. That's not 55/45 at all.
So Fury I think will take this loss pretty well, considering that he made many many times the amount of money that most people will every see in their lifetimes losing in something that took 36 minutes.
For anyone out there claiming that Fury was robbed or that Usyk didn't fairly win the fight I question what they were watching. To me it was extremely clear even as late as the 8th round who was going to win this. By round 9 I was saying that Fury needs a KO if he is going to have a chance at this. Fury did well, he just didn't do well enough. The time of Usyk has arrived.