Ahead of his $2.2 million fight with the YouTuber, has the Love Island star, influencer and little brother of Tyson betrayed boxing or saved it?
Four years ago Tommy Fury couldn’t afford a bus fare. Getting across Manchester could take him hours because every time a ticket inspector boarded the bus he would have to jump off. The broke young boxer had only recently turned professional, with just two victories under his belt, and had never even seen Love Island when ITV scouts approached him to take part in the 2019 series. “I didn’t have a clue what I was going on. I just thought I’d be sitting in the sun chatting to a few girls.”
He was selected not because of his boxing record but because his big half-brother is Tyson Fury, the British heavyweight champion. By the time he left the villa, he was a celebrity in his own right.
No other Love Island courtship before or since has enchanted viewers or electrified the tabloids more than his on-screen romance with Molly-Mae Hague. The young blonde influencer, then 20, had been an ordinary home counties teenager who amassed a fortune by posting photos of herself in nice outfits on Instagram, where she now has eight million followers. A northern boxer from an Irish Traveller background, whose father had been jailed for gouging out a man’s eyeball in a brawl, wasn’t an obvious match for the ambitious daughter of two police officers. But when Fury conveyed his devotion by cuddling up in bed with Hague’s stuffed toy elephant, a nation’s hearts melted and the couple became the show’s greatest love story.
Four years on Fury, 24, has acquired five million Instagram followers and the couple have lucrative contracts with fast fashion brands — she with PrettyLittleThing, he with BoohooMan. They live in a £4 million ($8.2 million) Cheshire mansion, which has its own Instagram account, with their eight-month-old daughter, Bambi.
In the new fame economy Hague and Fury are the Posh and Becks of their generation. And in the new boxing economy Fury’s fame has not hindered his career but supercharged it.
In February this year he entered the ring in Saudi Arabia for one of the most lucrative fights in modern boxing history. Before a sell-out crowd of 7,500, including Mike Tyson and Cristiano Ronaldo, and thousands of global fans watching via pay-per-view sales, the cruiserweight contest ended after eight rounds in a points victory for Fury. Twenty-four minutes in the ring earned him more than £3 million ($6.1 million) — almost as much as his half-brother Tyson made from a European heavyweight title defence fight, and more, according to one commentator, than the top ten cruiserweight boxers in Britain combined have made in their entire careers. And his opponent, Jake Paul, wasn’t even a real boxer.
Paul, 26, is a YouTuber from Ohio who became famous in his teens for posting videos of inane pranks. He has become the headline name in a sensationally popular new concept of boxing in which YouTube stars fight one another — or, increasingly, actual professionals. Paul claims to have made US$30 million ($50.5 million) from fighting Fury, adding to the US$30 million he reportedly made from two previous fights in 2022, which placed him on that year’s Forbes list of the world’s highest-paid athletes. Depending on your point of view, crossover fights are either reinvigorating boxing by attracting a vast young generation of new fans, or debasing the once noble art.
“What they do,” the British boxing pundit Steve Bunce tells me, “is great business at the box office. And for a novice, Tommy’s very good. He might be the real deal in time. He has the attitude and guts and desire and drive. He’s brave and he’s game. But right now he’s a novice. He didn’t have a massive amateur pedigree, he hasn’t fought serious opponents. There are 50 or 60 other fighters out there just as good as him. What Tommy’s got that makes him special is the Fury name, good looks and Love Island.”
Britain’s answer to Jake Paul is a YouTuber-turned-boxer called KSI, who fought and beat Paul’s brother, Logan, in 2018 and 2019. After the last match Fury declared: “If he wants a real fight, he knows where I am.” KSI retorted: “He needs me more than I need him, like way more. I’m on a completely different level to him.”
When Fury and I meet earlier this summer I ask if a fight with KSI will ever happen. At first he says no. “I don’t see how he’s going to get in the ring with me, I really don’t. KSI is wild, he’s erratic in the ring. It would be literally suicide.” Then he says, “But money talks, doesn’t it? Especially for these guys. These guys are in the sport for one thing: money. And fighting me will generate KSI the most amount of money.”
And so, inevitably, this weekend the pair will square up in the ring in Manchester for the biggest bout in British boxing this year. A press conference in August descended into chaos when Fury’s father saw red and upturned a table. Insults continued to be traded on Good Morning Britain last month, with Fury warning, “This is a message to KSI Come October 14, his life will be ruined, all his singing, podcasting and business will all be finished. Because, mark my words, he’ll be leaving Manchester Arena in an ambulance, I can quite clearly guarantee it.” Kate Garraway, GMB’s presenter, looked aghast: “I’m actually getting a little bit disturbed by all of this.”
Fury and I meet in a studio in Manchester, where the first thing he does is order a huge breakfast on his phone. He will be playing for Usain Bolt’s Soccer Aid football team 12 days after we meet, but isn’t bothering to train for it as he happily admits he’s clueless about football — though he does go on to nutmeg the former Arsenal player Jack Wilshere with his first touch in the game. Looking sublimely relaxed, he says he feels unfazed about meeting any of the Soccer Aid celebrities. “They’re all just human.” The only person on the planet he can think of that could make him starstruck is the wrestler-turned-actor Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
Charisma is always elusive to define, and in Fury’s case even trickier, his owing less to personality than an arresting physical impression of stardom. The reality-TV-grade grooming — HD eyebrows, precision stubble, glossy hair gel — is predictably immaculate, but his frame makes him seem much taller than his 6ft height, and I’m completely unprepared for the sapphire blue eyes. He is, in short, absurdly good-looking. Surprisingly, he carries himself with an unlikely — and immensely likeable — air of obliviousness to all this. “I’m not Justin Bieber or anything like that. I’m just Tommy from Salford, who has done all right for himself.” There is a light, laddish playfulness about his conversation but he always seems deeply sincere, although seldom expresses an opinion without contradicting it within seconds.
Having grown up in poverty, he remains, as he often puts it, “old school”. The unimaginable riches of Instagram deals and YouTuber spectacles have complicated everything, and yet Fury himself seems cheerfully unconflicted.
He comes from a long line of Irish Traveller prize boxers and bare-knuckle fighters. His father was a professional heavyweight known as Gypsy John, who had three sons with his first wife before marrying Fury’s mother. Tommy’s older brother Roman is also a boxer, and Fury took up the sport in earnest at 12. Like his older half-brothers, he grew up in a house — on the outskirts of Salford — but was instilled with his father’s traditional Traveller values.
At 14 he left school, a Catholic secondary, without any qualifications. Fury had been just 11 when his father was jailed for assault and served four years. “I was young and you need your father around, and when he wasn’t there, you know, you had to do it yourself. Yeah, it was tough. But, you know, there’s no crying over spilt milk. What’s happened has happened.”
Big brother Tyson, now 35, was a constant presence in his childhood and he idolises him. “He put the Fury name up in bright lights, he put us on the map, he’s the reason why I’m where I am. I’m very privileged to have him as a brother.” I tell him I interviewed the heavyweight a few months after Fury’s Love Island appearance and was struck by Tyson’s reticence when I mentioned his baby half-brother’s new fame. Is Tyson possibly a bit threatened by it? Fury bursts out laughing. “Absolutely not! I haven’t done anything in my lifetime that could even come close to what he has done.” The brothers have never, he claims, had a single argument about anything.
Ever since childhood he has experienced anti-Traveller prejudice and abuse — “When I was 14, 15, people would tweet me stuff like, ‘Oh, what did Tyson buy for your birthday? A trailer?’ “— and he thinks that probably immunised him from the online hate he and Hague, like all Instagram stars, routinely receive. It takes an implacably sunny disposition not to care, and he swears he doesn’t.
For all the laid-back laddishness, though, there is clearly steely drive. In his early teens he used to go running at 4am, calculating that this gave him an edge over competitors still in bed, and in between fight training camps he still trains at least once a day, come what may, and typically twice or more.
Tyson has famously suffered from depression and had a breakdown in 2015. Depression also plagued their father and their grandfather but Fury has been spared the family curse. The only demon he can think of is a tendency, when feeling down, to comfort eat. “My go-to when I’m upset is large Domino’s pizzas.”
His relationship with food doesn’t sound at all like an elite athlete’s. “My logic — and it’s terrible,” he admits, “is that between fights I try to cram as much crap as I can into my body so that when I have to get back in shape I’m sick of junk food.” The very first thing he did after beating Paul in February was eat £300 ($615) worth of cheesecake. He also ordered pizzas, burgers, milkshakes, “everything that was bad for you, it was in that hotel room that night”. Three weeks later he got on the scales and found he’d gained three stone.
It’s hard to imagine Hague relinquishing her self-discipline. A teen beauty pageant contestant, by just 16 she had 16,000 Instagram followers and by the time she entered Love Island had dedicated herself tirelessly to the career of curating digital perfection. She always says she fell for Fury’s traditional family values; he is, she wrote in her 2022 memoir, “old-school romantic, gentlemanly”, which she credits to his Traveller upbringing. “His morals and values are more traditional.” Nevertheless, family gatherings with her police officer parents and Fury’s ex-con father must be interesting, I suggest — which makes Fury laugh.
“Police officers, right! I’ll never forget coming off Love Island and seeing her dad talking to my dad. And I was, like, I never thought I’d see that. But it was lovely, because they got on really well. So we’ve never had any issues. And it’s an amazing thing to see, because it shows that people from different backgrounds can come together and can share the same opinions and have things in common.”
This assertion was tested in August when Hague made a cameo appearance on Tyson’s fly-on-the-wall Netflix documentary, At Home with the Furys. “With Tommy obviously being Traveller, he has had conversations with me about our child not going to school,” she told the cameras, “which is absolutely non-optional. I’ve been raised completely differently to that. It would never be a question that our children or our child would not go to school.”
Hague got into hot water last year for saying on the Diary of a CEO podcast “we all have the same 24 hours in day” and “if you want something enough, you can achieve it”. Critics accused her of being ignorant of the obstacles facing people in poverty and branded her “Margaret Thatcher with a spray tan”. When I ask Fury if he agrees with her that anyone can get rich if they only try hard enough, his PR and his manager jump in and shut the question down.
“I do believe everything happens for a reason,” Fury offers philosophically. At times he thinks that reason is in heaven. “God works in mysterious ways.” At others he puts his rags-to-riches success down to a “winning mentality”, or what Hague likes to call “manifesting” — the pseudo-mystical self-help practice, popularised on social media, of making aspirational desires come true by visualising them. Ultimately Fury thinks the real secret of his and Hague’s popularity is that their life is “so relatable”.
He offers this with utter sincerity despite the couple’s Instagram feeds being an infinite scroll of luxury handbags, five-star hotels, speedboats, fast cars and flawlessly filtered supermodel styling. He talks very earnestly about the importance of not spoiling Bambi — “She won’t be floating about in Gucci” — making me wonder if he has seen the photo Hague posted of their baby’s wardrobe, which resembles the racks of a luxury designer babywear store.
He may well have not have. Social media, he tells me unexpectedly, “isn’t really my thing”. He’s baffled by the hours people can spend scrolling through Instagram. “I can’t do it, I have to be up and about, doing something. My phone gives me a headache to look at it too long, and at the end of the day the bulk of what’s on there is no good anyways.”
He is even more puzzled by the envy that fuels so much of social media’s popularity. “I’ve never understood it, because I’m not that way inclined. Some people are on Instagram to look at the life they don’t have, and that’s when they start to get upset and sad with their own lives. But they shouldn’t be upset. It’s, like, there’s always a level above you. I could look on Instagram and see a billionaire driving 20 supercars, but that’s not going to make me unhappy. If someone’s doing better than me, I think God bless you and good luck to you.” I don’t think it has occurred to him that inspiring envy is arguably the literal definition of an influencer’s job.
Before meeting Hague he had no idea how much work goes into an influencer’s social media feed. “You’ve got to get the angle of every photo right, and the background, and before you know it four or five hours are gone,” he marvels. “Seeing the sort of stuff that goes on behind the scenes, oh my God, it’s a hell of a lot of work. My missus is very good at it. Seeing her putting the hours in, she’s nonstop, she’s 24/7. She enjoys it, it’s her passion.”
But if it isn’t his passion, why does he bother doing it? The question takes him by surprise. “I don’t know.” He thinks for a moment. “I suppose it’s just nice to keep people updated, because they take time out of their lives to keep up to date with you. I don’t owe it to them, but I kind of owe it to them. If people are liking the content I’m putting out, I’m going to keep doing it, because obviously people are liking it.”
The Paul fight was unquestionably, he says, his greatest achievement. Had he lost, he would have quit boxing for good. “Hand on heart, 100 per cent. I wouldn’t even be able to show my face in public for a long time. I’ve been boxing all my life and then I lose to a YouTuber? That would have been the biggest joke.”
To traditionalist critics the fight itself was a joke, but as Fury sees it, any bout that commands big money — and reportedly he’s set to earn another £1.1 million ($2.2 million) from the KSI fight — is by definition credible. “That’s how you judge it. That’s when you know it’s a big fight. Even though the Paul fight wasn’t for any world title belts or anything like that, that was the highest stage you could ever get to. I mean, it was watched by millions of people all around the world, and the money involved — you know, world champions sometimes don’t even get that big of a deal. That fight was bigger than Tyson v Anthony Joshua,” he says, referring to the long-anticipated British heavyweight clash that looks increasingly unlikely to happen. “So to have been involved in an event like that and come out as the winner, it means everything.”
But when I ask if the life-changing money he can make from YouTuber fights means these will be his professional future, he looks appalled. “Definitely not. I haven’t trained all these years to mess about with,” and his tone turns slightly mocking, “YouTubers and people who play video games on the internet. I come from a very old-fashioned family, I trained my whole life to test myself against the best. I owe that to myself. So even though these fights are very lucrative for me, I’ve probably got one or at most two of these fights left.”
He says boxing is “just business, it’s how I pay the bills”, but seconds later that it’s not about money at all. “I do it because I want to. There’s something about Furys, we all fight. Fighting runs through my veins for generations if I lost everything, I’d still be happy because I was happy before, when I was a kid and didn’t have anything.
“I live a very normal life. Go shopping at Tesco, get sweets from the petrol station, go to normal bars, clubs, restaurants. Paparazzi are always around but I don’t let that stuff get to me. I’m just doing my thing and they’re just there, I don’t really process it.” His inner circle consists of a handful of friends he made at the age of four or five whom he trusts “like family” because they’ve never sold stories about him or “asked me for a shilling”.
My impression of Hague being the more calculatedly ambitious half of the couple is not, he says, necessarily accurate.”She’ll do whatever she needs to do to make sure she succeeds. Yeah, but I’m the same. I think we’re both as driven as each other, to be honest. We’re not scared of getting our hands dirty. We’ve both done very well, but it doesn’t stop here. For me to be truly satisfied, I have to get my hands on title belts. I don’t want to sit in the rocking chair at 70 thinking I could have challenged for a world title, I could have been in contention. I want my name to go down in history for ever.”
He needs to win only one professional title belt, he says, and then he will retire from boxing. I ask what he’d do next and his expression lights up.
“Bodybuilding.” Seriously? “Yeah! I’m obsessed. It’s my next passion. I’m going to get substantially bigger. The whole thing, the 20in arms, I love it.”
Posing on stage, oiled up in a neon thong? “Well, I won’t do an actual competition.” He grins. “OK, I do want to do a competition.”
Boxing is on the ropes, writes the pundit Steve Bunce
Boxing is in a mess at the moment. The heavyweight champion Tyson Fury’s next fight is against someone who has barely set foot in a boxing ring — the mixed martial arts champion Francis Ngannou. Fury will become the highest paid fighter on the planet when they meet in Saudi Arabia later this month. Ngannou should be an easy and static target.
Months later Fury will finally meet Oleksandr Usyk for the undisputed heavyweight title fight in Riyadh. The Ukrainian has made just one defence of his title this year. This means that 2023 is one of only three years in the past sixty when there has been just a single heavyweight title fight.
In the US the biggest earning boxer is Jake Paul — a YouTuber. Paul has fought a list of no-hopers, former MMA fighters and lost to Tommy Fury when the pair met in Saudi Arabia in February.
Tommy is the third highest paid boxer in Britain, trailing behind his big brother and Anthony Joshua. A loveable novice, he fights next weekend against KSI, another YouTuber — the co-owner of the energy drink Prime — in a show that will do phenomenal numbers.
In these crossover fights the rules and medical precautions are the same, but the level of skill is lower. Meanwhile the hundreds of registered male and female boxers in Britain watch from the sidelines, wondering why the novices from the world of pulp television shows and YouTube are getting paid a fortune for their poor fights.
To be honest, I am wondering the same thing.
Written by: Decca Aitkenhead
© The Times of London
