The case for Fury
Having exhausted the collective wisdom of Wikipedia, and viewed most of their recent fights, I've resorted to trolling You Tube for any indications of the respective fitness of Dereck Chisora and Tyson Fury.
Essentially my wagering thesis is that all else being equal, Fury, with his 11 inch reach advantage, should be able to fight essentially the same fight that led him to a unanimous decision over Chisora in 2011.
All else is never quite equal though, is it? Chisora was out of shape for the previous fight, actually outweighing a man eight inches taller than him, whereas now he is considerably lighter, while Fury found himself quite a bit heavier this past winter (up to 26 stone, according to one youtube post). Meanwhile, Chisora has fought several fighters tougher than anyone Fury has faced, including Wladimir Klitchko and David Haye. He lost three of these bouts in a row, but only Haye achieved a TKO, while the other two bouts went the distance. Conventional wisdom seems to be that these were fairly respectable losses, and since then he has won five fights in a row, picking up three belts in the process, though you likely haven't heard of any of them.
Fury has since won eight fights, improving to 22-0, but has only fought 11 total rounds in the past year-and-a-half. This lack of work, combined with concerns about his weight, have led to the narrative that Chisora has left Fury behind in terms of fitness and competition and skill, and will ride these advantages to victory at the end of the month.
That's the argument for Chisora, and who can say it's wrong? The building blocks seem to be accurate...but do they add up to enough to overcome an eight inch height advantage and 11 inch reach advantage?
That's where my You Tube trolling comes in. Dereck Chisora's improvements may add up to something if Fury is indeed out of shape. He certainly was heavier as of a few months ago. In the mean time, Tyson has been training, as evidenced by several videos from Team Fury, some of which I've included links to in my last post.
There I described Fury and his team as looking "frighteningly incompetent." A couple things about that.
First, this seeming incompetence is only frightening if you plan on betting enough on Fury that will take you a while to recover if he loses. That is what I'm considering doing. Maybe I'll be to frightened to follow through.
Second, if you are serious about doing whatever due diligence you can before going for a double-up with junior's college fund...wait,...let me rephrase...
If you have a lot of time to waste, take a look at the comments below some of these videos. Granted, the internet seems to bring out the venom in a lot of people, but the comments there are far worse than anything I've said. Doesn't make any of it fact, but it all makes an impression. The impression is that Fury, who has come into other fights with evident flab, and has lapsed mid fight into antics that suggest he doesn't take anything too seriously, from his opponents, to his chosen profession, and possibly his training, is being trained by a clan of Pikeys ruled by nepotism and suspected of inbreeding.
These training videos are home videos. One of the Furys holds the camera, and points it towards the actiion. There are no cuts, no close ups, no cutaways, and no montage music, from the '80's or otherwise. In other words, these vids are devoid of production value. Marin Scorsese is not involved, and it shows.
Tyson and Hughie may run on the beach together, but there is no music from Rocky III, and no weird, uncomfortable, homoerotic hug at the end.
In other words, an amateurish video does not amateurish training make. Ironically, aside from my own limited videography experience, Tyson Fury's own twitter account (@Tyson_Fury) crystallized my realization that the Fury's home video, as clueless as it may appear, is not necessarily indicative of actual cluelessness. There I found a series of photos put together to mirror one of Rocky's training montages, where Fury chased a chicken, punched a frozen side of beef, and ran up some steps, etc. While it didn't hit me at the time, the training montage photos were really well done. Well done enough that I could remember the images 10 or 12 hours later while writing about how shitty these home videos are.
Well done enough that, while I wasn't paying enough attention to notice it at the time, 10 or 12 hours later I realized that they were almost certainly professionally done.
I went back and checked, and saw what I'd missed before: There were two shots of him hammering the frozen meat, and one had text crammed over to one side. The photos were from a magazine spread, in Forever Sports.
My point is not that these magazine photos made him look like he's got his shit together. If anything they make him look like a burly David Beckham, or Mark Wahlberg; a fashionable coat-rack, other than he's not wearing anything more glamorous than sweats for these glamour shots. Rather, their professionalism contrasted with the unprofessionalism of the home training videos.
Essentially my wagering thesis is that all else being equal, Fury, with his 11 inch reach advantage, should be able to fight essentially the same fight that led him to a unanimous decision over Chisora in 2011.
All else is never quite equal though, is it? Chisora was out of shape for the previous fight, actually outweighing a man eight inches taller than him, whereas now he is considerably lighter, while Fury found himself quite a bit heavier this past winter (up to 26 stone, according to one youtube post). Meanwhile, Chisora has fought several fighters tougher than anyone Fury has faced, including Wladimir Klitchko and David Haye. He lost three of these bouts in a row, but only Haye achieved a TKO, while the other two bouts went the distance. Conventional wisdom seems to be that these were fairly respectable losses, and since then he has won five fights in a row, picking up three belts in the process, though you likely haven't heard of any of them.
Fury has since won eight fights, improving to 22-0, but has only fought 11 total rounds in the past year-and-a-half. This lack of work, combined with concerns about his weight, have led to the narrative that Chisora has left Fury behind in terms of fitness and competition and skill, and will ride these advantages to victory at the end of the month.
That's the argument for Chisora, and who can say it's wrong? The building blocks seem to be accurate...but do they add up to enough to overcome an eight inch height advantage and 11 inch reach advantage?
That's where my You Tube trolling comes in. Dereck Chisora's improvements may add up to something if Fury is indeed out of shape. He certainly was heavier as of a few months ago. In the mean time, Tyson has been training, as evidenced by several videos from Team Fury, some of which I've included links to in my last post.
There I described Fury and his team as looking "frighteningly incompetent." A couple things about that.
First, this seeming incompetence is only frightening if you plan on betting enough on Fury that will take you a while to recover if he loses. That is what I'm considering doing. Maybe I'll be to frightened to follow through.
Second, if you are serious about doing whatever due diligence you can before going for a double-up with junior's college fund...wait,...let me rephrase...
If you have a lot of time to waste, take a look at the comments below some of these videos. Granted, the internet seems to bring out the venom in a lot of people, but the comments there are far worse than anything I've said. Doesn't make any of it fact, but it all makes an impression. The impression is that Fury, who has come into other fights with evident flab, and has lapsed mid fight into antics that suggest he doesn't take anything too seriously, from his opponents, to his chosen profession, and possibly his training, is being trained by a clan of Pikeys ruled by nepotism and suspected of inbreeding.
These training videos are home videos. One of the Furys holds the camera, and points it towards the actiion. There are no cuts, no close ups, no cutaways, and no montage music, from the '80's or otherwise. In other words, these vids are devoid of production value. Marin Scorsese is not involved, and it shows.
Tyson and Hughie may run on the beach together, but there is no music from Rocky III, and no weird, uncomfortable, homoerotic hug at the end.
In other words, an amateurish video does not amateurish training make. Ironically, aside from my own limited videography experience, Tyson Fury's own twitter account (@Tyson_Fury) crystallized my realization that the Fury's home video, as clueless as it may appear, is not necessarily indicative of actual cluelessness. There I found a series of photos put together to mirror one of Rocky's training montages, where Fury chased a chicken, punched a frozen side of beef, and ran up some steps, etc. While it didn't hit me at the time, the training montage photos were really well done. Well done enough that I could remember the images 10 or 12 hours later while writing about how shitty these home videos are.
Well done enough that, while I wasn't paying enough attention to notice it at the time, 10 or 12 hours later I realized that they were almost certainly professionally done.
I went back and checked, and saw what I'd missed before: There were two shots of him hammering the frozen meat, and one had text crammed over to one side. The photos were from a magazine spread, in Forever Sports.
My point is not that these magazine photos made him look like he's got his shit together. If anything they make him look like a burly David Beckham, or Mark Wahlberg; a fashionable coat-rack, other than he's not wearing anything more glamorous than sweats for these glamour shots. Rather, their professionalism contrasted with the unprofessionalism of the home training videos.
posted by roQQ | 9:43 PM
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