Tyson Fury was one of the fighters of the year in 2020, along with Teofimo Lopez, for his work in dispatching Deontay Wilder by way of 7th round TKO last February. A trilogy fight, as they fought to a draw in their first battle, was scheduled for December of last year, but word emerged early in 2021 that after that had been pushed back, the trilogy fight was off the table.
As such, Fury, the WBC champion and lineal champion, will seek to unify all the heavyweight titles in a megafight with the other top heavyweight in the world, fellow Brit Anthony Joshua, as the two sides have agreed to a deal, as Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn told ESPN’s Mark Kriegel.
“One of the fascinations about this fight will be the build-up because they’re two totally different characters, two totally different personalities,” Hearn said. “The mind games will be on another level for this fight. Tyson is very good at that. Anthony is excited by that…He’s so pumped, so focused, he hasn’t stopped training since the [Kubrat] Pulev fight [in December]. He’s like a caged lion. The buildup is going to be epic.”
Joshua holds the WBO, IBF, WBA, and IBO heavyweight titles and the winner of this fight will unify all of the major belts for the first time since Lennox Lewis, as the Klitschko brothers refused to fight each other and each lorded over one of the belts for the better part of a decade. It will be a massive fight and the plan is to complete a site bid within a month, with the expectation that a site in the Middle East will win the bid at least for the first bout — although there are bids in from all over, per Hearn — as that was likewise the site of Joshua’s rematch with Andy Ruiz.