The fairytale of the fighting Fury cousins could have been scripted to order: two Gypsy boys battling their way to the top of the heavyweight division, never destined to meet in the ring, always linked by blood and culture.
While Hughie, in many ways, is not a lot like his loud cousin, Tyson, there is one abiding characteristic they share. Both of them will fight pretty much anywhere, any time, against anyone – except each other.
That is why Tyson, only two perfunctory fights into his comeback after a two-and-a-half-year layoff, is heading for Los Angeles in December to take on the unbeaten Deontay Wilder, while the 24-year-old Hughie took barely a minute to agree to fight the intimidating Kubrat Pulev in Bulgaria on Saturday week.
The younger Fury is a man of few words but he knows how formidable a challenge he faces in Pulev, the gnarled 37-year-old hardman who rarely leaves Bulgaria or Germany and who frightens more challengers away than are willing to take him on. The IBF ordered him to fight this eliminator – being televised by Channel 5 – against Dominic Breazeale but the American did not fancy it; talks with Dillian Whyte and Jarrell Miller then broke down, and then up stepped Fury.
As he said on Wednesday before heading for Sofia, “We tried to get straight back out there [after a controversial points loss to Joseph Parker], and the only person who wanted to take the fight at the time was Sam Sexton. We took that one just to get back. And same here, we took the first one. Straight in.”
It is a gamble, no question. Pulev has lost only against Wladimir Klitschko, who stopped him in five rounds four years ago, and has beaten among many quality opponents Samuel Peter, Dereck Chisora, Tony Thompson, Michael Sprott, Alexander Ustinov and Alexander Dimitrenko.
As Fury says: “He’s tough, very experienced. He doesn’t really like to come out of his back garden, so people don’t like to go there. It doesn’t bother me where the fight’s at, or who it’s against. It’s a fight.”
Going to Bulgaria does not daunt Fury; he first visited when he was 14. “We’ve got some close friends over there. I was out there training with my dad.”
Fury has not had an easy rise, although he insists he has fully recovered from a rare skin disease that threatened to end his career. “I’ve never felt better. It took quite a while to get over it. What happened was I got rid of it and it just took my body a while to get back to where it is now, to get back to full strength. It was a virus that poisoned my system. I was ill all the time.”
His father, Peter, trained Tyson until earlier this year, although Hughie’s relationship with his cousin appears to have survived the split. “I wish Tyson all the best and hope he does it.”
As for fighting him, he is adamant – just as the Klitschko brothers were when asked the same question. “No, never. But it would be 100% nice if we had all the titles.”
The industry was mildly surprised on Wednesday when Chisora, who is riding a late‑career surge of support after stopping Carlos Takam in July, signed a management deal with his one-time bete noir, David Haye.
It is only six years since Haye, a four-times world champion, knocked Chisora out in five rounds (having had to be separated from him by a metal fence beforehand). Chisora, who has changed his nom de guerre from Delboy to WAR, once threatened to shoot Haye (although nobody took him literally) and they famously brawled at a press conference in Germany.
