Tyson Fury is the TSS 2019 Boxing Personality of the Year

Last year, Tyson Fury was named the TSS Comeback Fighter of the Year. This year he returns to the list, but in a different category.

Tyson Fury’s ups and downs have been well-chronicled. He was up after upsetting long-reigning heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko in November of 2015, but one could say that he was down in the very next month when 47,000-plus Brits signed a petition to have his name removed from the short list of candidates for the BBC Sportsperson of the Year award. Those that initiated the petition were mortified at the thought of the coveted award going to a 6^th-grade dropout (Fury left school at the age of 11) whose off-the-cuff comments betrayed sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic notions.

In the ensuing two years, Fury fell into a very dark hole. Plagued by alcohol and substance abuse, he battled depression and let his weight balloon to almost 400 pounds. He was out of the ring for 31 months.

Fury returned in 2018 and after two tune-up fights was accorded a shot at WBC heavyweight title-holder Deontay Wilder. Their match on Dec. 1, 2018, in Los Angeles was a great crowd-pleaser. Fury out-landed Wilder in nine of the 12 rounds according to CompuBox but was knocked down twice and had to settle for a draw. The last knockdown, said Kevin Mitchell of The Guardian, was from a punch that would have anaesthetized a horse. It was a miracle that Fury was able to beat the count.

In the media room after the fight, Fury burst into song, regaling those in attendance with Don McLean’s “American Pie.” It was an endearing moment.

Fury fought twice this year, looking razor-sharp against Germany’s Tom Schwarz and overcoming a vicious cut to turn away Norway’s Otto Wallin in a fight that proved far more difficult than expected. Those wins – both in Las Vegas — likely won’t stand out years from now when his career comes fully into focus, but Fury made legions of new fans with his engaging personality.

His best moment, in this reporter’s view, came in the ring following his stoppage of Tom Schwarz when he serenaded his wife Paris, sitting ringside, with the Aerosmith song “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” Tyson and the former Paris Mulroy, who is also from a Traveler community, have five children, the youngest a boy born this year.

Fury ended the year fighting WWE superstar Braun Strowman in a pay-pre-view event in Saudi Arabia. Years ago, it was considered undignified for a boxer to “fight” a grunt-and-groan wrestler, but nowadays people understand that these events are scripted and accept them as a form of melodrama. Pro wrestling’s biggest stars are real-life cartoon characters and the six-foot-nine Fury, who is larger-than-life, fits right in.

“Some of his views,” wrote the aforementioned Mitchell, “would embarrass a nightclub bouncer. Or once did” (italics mine).

Yes, in case you hadn’t noticed, Tyson Fury has toned down his rhetoric, seemingly making a conscious effort to mend fences with those he has discomfited. The old Tyson Fury, at his best moments, was drop-dead funny with his snarky, anti-establishment observations and we saw some of that come back this year without the unfortunate baggage that often accompanied it in the past.

John Wight recently wrote this about Tyson Fury in the British periodical The Morning Star: “After suffering a justifiable fall from grace over various bigoted and sexist comments after his world title victory over Wladimir Klitschko in 2015, the self-styled Gypsy King has reinvented himself not only as arguably the most talented heavyweight in the world, but more importantly perhaps as a high-profile ambassador for people suffering from mental illness. In the process, he’s matured and evolved as a human being even more than he has as a fighter, battling his demons and coming out the other end a flag-bearer for the powers of reinvention.”

We are always reluctant to anoint a person an outstanding role model, mindful of all the good citizen-type awards bestowed on O.J. Simpson before he became infamous, but Tyson Fury was a ray of sunshine in 2019 and the big galoot was an easy pick for the Boxing Personality of the Year.

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