One of the joys of covering big fights in Las Vegas is the daily discourse in the Media Centre with fighters (past and present), trainers, commentators and writers – all offering their opinion as to who will win at the weekend and how.
In August 2017, when Floyd Mayweather fought Conor McGregor at the T-Mobile Arena, not a soul asked me who I thought was going to win. There was no debate to be had.
Yet there was such support for McGregor with the bookmakers in and beyond Vegas that the Irishman started the fight at similar odds (between 3/1 and 4/1) to those mounted against Tyson Fury ahead of his world title-winning showdown against Wladimir Klitschko in Dusseldorf two years earlier.
Madness? The result – Mayweather winning cosily in the 10th round - and the pattern of the fight would seem to suggest so. But what might be described as the blind passion for McGregor is part of the foundation underpinning this weekend’s shindig in Saudi.
Francis Ngannou cannot command the same kind of following as McGregor – and it is unlikely that the Cameroonian’s odds will tumble in the way McGregor’s did six years ago – but the narrative has been created around Ngannou’s punching power and the notion that he could knock down the Empire State Building with a single right hand.
The parallels with Muhammad Ali and his dalliance with the Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki back in 1976 are misleading because Inoki was allowed to kick and the initial plan was to choreograph the contest, with some accounts recording that Inoki agreed to be cut with a razor blade during the fight to create the impression of a blood bath. Eventually, Ali insisted the fight be ‘honest’ and as promoter Bob Arum later said: “Any moron knew it wasn’t fixed because a fixed fight wouldn’t have been that awful.”
Many fans were similarly unimpressed by Mayweather versus McGregor but everyone with a financial rather than emotional investment in the event chuckled all the way to the nearest ATM. With 4.3m PPV buys in the US, it leapt into second place on the all-time list of highest-grossing fights – beaten only by Mayweather against Manny Pacquiao in 2015.
So why shouldn’t Tyson Fury capitalise? Can Saturday’s runout be any duller than his last two title defences against Dillian Whyte and Dereck Chisora? Like Ali and Mayweather before him, Fury has earned the right to veer off the conventional path.
I was ringside when he defied those monumental odds away from home against the younger Klitschko in 2015 and again when he rose in miraculous style from the last-round sniping by Deontay Wilder to salvage a draw at the Staples Center close to Christmas in 2018.
The balance between risk and reward is the judgment all boxers must make from the moment they sign a professional contract. Fury is gaming the system – in a system which has gamed too many.