What Happens in the Gym Stays in the Gym?

USA Today Sports via Reuters

What Happens in the Gym Stays in the Gym?

Yousef Ananifeatured
9h

As the AJ-Fury megafight finally draws near, a disputed story has resurfaced about the day the two men met in a sparring session 16 years ago

Tyson Fury has never missed an opportunity to disparage his British heavyweight rival. “He’s a big stiff idiot!”. “He’s just a bodybuilder!”, etc

Perhaps Fury would rather it were forgotten, but there was one moment when he was recorded heaping praise on AJ. 

It was sixteen years ago, when Fury was just a young prospect and Joshua hadn’t even turned professional. Because they were boxing under different codes, they were not, at that stage, a threat to one another

While Fury was down in London, he decided to pay a visit to the Finchley gym where AJ trained. There, he asked to spar with the amateur heavyweight he’d been hearing about

Of course, no footage exists of that session (if it did, it would have garnered millions of views) but Fury told listeners that evening on Steve Bunce’s show on BBC radio that AJ had got the better of him and was a certain star of the future. He even went so far as to say that he’d been beaten up by the young Watford man

Talk to Fury now about it and he tells a rather different story. He says that AJ’s team had to pull him out to save him from getting hurt

So which version is true? Is it possible that both are?

All the focus has been on the dredged up Fury clip, but there is another, often overlooked interview about the session from a credible man who was there to witness it

That man is Sean Murphy, a former British and Commonwealth Featherweight Champion and coach at Joshua’s old gym. It was Murphy who supervised the spar. Murphy told IFL TV that Joshua came out fast and hurt Fury in round 1 with an uppercut/left hook combination. Fury, dazed, grabbed onto the ropes and Murphy intervened to tell him not to. 

The second round was different, with Fury using angles to blunt Joshua’s attacks. In his own account, Fury said he dug in a few body shots to slow down the youngster

And then in round 3, Joshua came back and landed the better punches, winning the round

So was Joshua pulled out? Well, Fury, according to Murphy had originally asked for three rounds. So if true, that should have been the end of it. But after losing two of the three rounds to an amateur, Murphy said Fury asked for more. Murphy said it was clear that Fury had a point to prove, and since there was no money at stake, he decided to call a halt to proceedings

But how can a 16-year old sparring session have any relevance to their forthcoming collision in the professional ring?

Well, AJ is a boxer who sometimes seems to struggle with confidence. Memories of that spar may give him the boost he needs to start the fight aggressively, just like he did all those years ago. If he doesn’t he is surely doomed. 

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