Why Tyson Fury's Retirement Is Good For Boxing

For the time being, Tyson Fury’s second retirement is final. If his promoter Frank Warren has anything to say about it, that may not last long, but for the moment it’s official. Fury has been perhaps the most controversial person in boxing ever since he took the Heavyweight titles away from Wladimir Klitschko. His anti-semitic and homophobic hate speech has led to most boxing fans hating him. If that wasn’t enough for people to despise him, he was also probably the most ungrateful champion in the past two decades. His constant taunting of Klitschko, and most recently Anthony Joshua, has not endeared himself to many. It’s with all this in mind that I say that his long overdue official retirement is a great thing for boxing. He’s a bigot and a bully. He’s been an alcoholic, drug addict, and cheat. He is everything that embodies what detractors of boxing could point to when they say that boxing is a terrible, low-class sport. I will say that he has brought much more attention to the sport though. It’s just all the wrong kinds of attention.

Lately, boxing, and MMA for that matter, have been under the microscope. Pacquiao’s controversial loss to Jeff Horn ignited a social media firestorm. The Mayweather and McGregor press conferences have been headline news. Dana White has taken flak for threatening one of his longest reigning champions, Demetrious Johnson. Most of those controversies greatly hurt boxing and fight sports as a whole. Fury making racially charged comments towards Anthony Joshua, an upstanding and inspirational champion, is not helping the situation. Boxing should be focusing on the Gennady Golovkin vs Canelo Alvarez match and the potential Klitschko vs Joshua rematch instead of these sideshow acts. Fury may have been able to sell tickets to boxing fanatics and those who want to see him get horribly beat, but he would have the opposite effect when it comes to bringing boxing back into the mainstream. Mayweather and McGregor are already messing up one of boxing’s biggest opportunities to regain a high level of popularity. Fury doesn’t need to waltz in and potentially ruin an up-and-coming Heavyweight division that is looking to gain a foothold back in the American mainstream audience with a potentially huge rematch between Klitschko and Joshua in Las Vegas. Fury wouldn’t even bring the kind of attention to the division that a controversy like the Pacquiao and Horn debacle would. A Pacquiao and Horn rematch would at least get people to watch if only because they were rooting to see Pacquiao “right the wrong” that was done to him during their first encounter. A Fury vs Joshua match would just be a media circus that would probably result in Fury making the same kind of comments that Mayweather and McGregor have made that have hurt boxing’s reputation. The only difference would be that it would appear like Mayweather and McGregor’s raw star power will cause most to forget their terrible comments. That wouldn’t be the case with Fury I believe.

With all that said, Fury’s retirement came at the right time. It clears the way for a potential Deontay Wilder vs Anthony Joshua or Wilder vs Klitschko match after the potential super-fight between Klitschko and Joshua occurs in Las Vegas. With those two fights, boxing will have a clear way to break back into the mainstream conscious and could achieve the level of popularity it saw when the likes of Tyson and Holyfield were carrying the titles. Those fights would not have a dark cloud of negative press hovering over them due to an out-of-shape former champion taking offensive jabs at the competitors on social media.