WBC heavyweight champion Tyson Fury has been calling out anyone and everyone since knocking out Dillian Whyte in April.
‘The Gypsy King’ picked up a sixth-round knockout victory over Whyte at Wembley Stadium earlier this year before announcing his retirement from professional boxing.
Almost immediately afterwards, he invited UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou to the ring to talk about a potential hybrid rules fight that remains in play for 2023.
Determined to follow in the footsteps of Floyd Mayweather, who has had four lucrative exhibition fights since retiring, Fury traveled to Iceland with his father in search of a potential opponent.
Hafthor ‘Thor’ Bjornsson, the former strongest man in the world – who also played The Mountain in Game of Thrones – made headlines when he started exchanging words with Fury on social media.
The British boxing champions’ trip to Thor’s home country proved fruitless because, unbeknownst to him, the man he was hoping to face was actually in Rome shooting a movie.
Meanwhile, he also mentioned The Rock, Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis and Frank Bruno as potential opponents but none of them showed any interest.
Fury soon turned his attention to real active boxers, namely Derek Chisora, an old friend who angered the 34-year-old by publicly backing Whyte to knock him out at England’s National Stadium.
Inspired by a potential trilogy fight with Chisora, the 32-0-1 boxer has ended his short retirement and claimed to have sent a £2million fight offer over the man he has already beaten two time.
However, fight talks between the British duo came to nothing, with both men blaming each other for a fight that no one really wanted to see fall through.
After retiring again and seeing Oleksandr Usyk pass Anthony Joshua for the second time, Fury flirted with the idea of an undisputed fight with the Ukrainian but only for an obscene amount of cash.
“It’s the biggest fight in the world, so it has to be the biggest payday in the world. [Floyd] Mayweather got £400m to fight [Manny] Pacquiao, I want £500m,” he told talkSPORT in August.
Usyk ruled himself out for the rest of 2022 due to injury, but Fury felt like fighting again and decided to offer Joshua, who is on a two-game losing streak, a chance at his world title.
Joshua has agreed to terms to face the Gypsy King at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium on December 3, however, a delay in signing a contract has put the fight in serious jeopardy.
As boxing promoters Frank Warren and Eddie Hearn work tirelessly behind the scenes to make the biggest fight in British boxing history, Fury undermines them by calling out other boxers.
Most notably, Mahmoud Charr, who hasn’t fought a relevant opponent since 2015 and was former heavyweight king Marius Briedis, who brutally knocked him out.
Charr claims to have signed a contract to fight Fury and the heavyweight duo have been going back and forth on social media as a potential fight with Joshua remains in limbo.
Finally, after Joe Joyce scored a career-best win over Fury’s teammate Joseph Parker, talk quickly turned into a fight between the two British fighters.
“I have to say the great Joe Joyce is the second best heavyweight in the world, behind me and his day, considering his timing, who knows if he could beat me or not?” said Fury.
“I think we’ll have to find out one of these days.”
Despite all the talk, Fury still doesn’t have a fight booked.
He is expected to return to the ring in December, which means now is the time to stop calling people and start writing a fight contract.