If boxing still moonlights as a beacon for the forlorn and forgotten, as a sweaty path from galling poverty to fame and fortune, it's hard to think of a more perfect emblem of the outhouse-to-penthouse narrative than Tyson Fury.
Fury was literally reared by a band of fist-fighting Irish gypsies. Indeed, there's an epic, almost biblical feel to Fury's journey. And only in boxing could a man with Fury's odd bona fides be the first fighter to win every one of boxing's soup of championship belts. According to CBSSports.com, Fury has at some point in his surreal career owned the WBA, WBC, WBO, IBO, IBF, Ring Magazine, and lineal titles.
This from a man who tried his best to flush his burgeoning career down the toilet, much like Josh Hamilton did in baseball. After stunning the world in 2015 by beating longtime champion Vladimir Klitschko, Fury, 31, took off three of his prime years to feed a fast life of booze and cocaine binges. Almost nothing about Fury - the way he talks, walks, moves, or his ogre body straight out of a D&D handbook - screams great boxer, big-time athlete, or much more than a bouncer at your local Blarney Stone.
Yet despite Fury's funky accent, lack of muscle tone, and ham-handed jokes about his opponents, he beat the snot out of Deontay Wilder on Saturday night in Las Vegas. Wilder has all the dimensions of a great boxer - tall and lean, muscular and vascular, his tattooed right arm producing perhaps the hardest punch in the history of the sport (so says Max Kellerman, who replaced Bert Sugar as the bon vivant of boxing pundits).
But if we gaze past the comic book contours to Fury's ascent, this was not the best night for boxing. Fury did more than drill Wilder into the canvas. He ripped the heavyweight title from America - the division's ancestral home and most profitable real estate. While Americans have lorded over boxing for a century - belts worn by Sugar Ray Robinson, Willie Pep, Sugar Ray Leonard, Oscar De La Hoya, Bernard Hopkins, and Roy Jones Jr - the baddest man on the planet was always the heavyweight champ, who was almost always an American.
Most of boxing history, plus a good portion of our postage stamps, have been dedicated to our best big men. You can't write a book about the 20th Century without touching the pillars of pugilism - Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Larry Holmes, Mike Tyson and, of course, the greatest of all, Muhammad Ali.
Is it a coincidence that all the most celebrated heavyweights in history were American? Not at all. It's no secret that the United States, with a few exceptions in niche sports, produce the best athletes. With all due respect to his skill and deeds, does anyone look back on the Lennox Lewis era as a great one for boxing? Was Klitschko's reign anything more than a sleepy bookmark in boxing history?
The truth is America loves good showmen, and most good showmen are American. We've had some exceptions - a brief love affair with Prince Naseem Hamed, a 12-year obsession with Roberto Duran, and a deep, almost religious respect for Alexis Arguello, Carlos Monzon, and Salvador Sanchez - but by and large American athletes, groomed by TV and cinema and the native mantra that everything is bigger and better here, give them more magnetism.
Wilder has 30 days to trigger a rematch clause in his contract with Fury, and to avenge the first loss of his career. At 34, Wilder is in that boxing netherworld when his skill and speed could erode over a few months, or vanish over a few rounds. Temerity doesn't work without talent, and will doesn't work without skill. He needs to jump back into a ring with Fury as fast as possible, while his reflexes are still sharp, his punches are still crisp, and the public still cares.
Just as Tyson Fury became the king of boxing in one shocking night, Deontay Wilder can bring it all back with one fine night of his own. Boxing may not be a purely American sport, but it gets the most money and mojo from American boxers. Just ask Tyson Fury, who was named after the most polarizing American champion, Mike Tyson.
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