Jerry Campany: Fury-Wilder brawl will be remembered as 1 of best

My interest in sports is a century behind the times.

Basketball and football are fine enough and the worst game beats any movie on Netflix, but give me baseball, golf and boxing. I’m not sure why, but if an athletic endeavor didn’t come of age until the 20th century I have a hard time with it.

Part of it is the thought that our bigger, stronger and faster athletes are playing pretty much the same game as their ancestors.

I can see Babe Ruth in Shohei Ohtani. They were born nearly 100 years apart on opposite sides of the world — yet they are linked. A succession of commissioners who decided that money is the only thing in the best interests of baseball has dimmed the shine on my favorite sport. I don’t think I have watched a playoff game yet after 162 straight in the real season.

But there was an event on Saturday that stacks up against anything since the Marquess of Queensberry approved putting gloves on the local London brutes in the 1860s.

After much hype from ESPN and Fox, heavyweights Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder hooked up in Las Vegas for some belts and a purse and put on quite a show. It was the third fight between the men and Fury kept his World Boxing Council and Ring Magazine titles with an 11th-round knockout.

Fury is also the lineal champion, the only title he cares about because it is the line of champions going back to John L. Sullivan in 1885 and the only way you can claim it is by either beating the reigning lineal champion or being judged the baddest man on the planet if the lineal king retires as Lennox Lewis did in 2004. All of the greatest champions are on the list— the WBC title didn’t begin until Sonny Liston came along — and Fury has held it for six years and has defended it seven times since beating Wladimir Klitschko in Germany.

Wilder wasn’t interested in titles; he simply wanted revenge after getting stopped in their second fight and blaming everything except himself. He lost a lot of credibility with his excuses but won it all back with his performance in the loss. Sure, he refused to shake the champion’s hand after waking up from a fitful sleep brought on by Fury’s fists, but what he did before that made up for it. Wilder has never been a great boxer but relies on one shot, lucky or otherwise, to bury his opponent sooner rather than later.

Coming in at a career-high 238 pounds on his 6-foot-7 frame, Wilder was giving up nearly 40 pounds and 2 inches to his bigger foe and decided to play it smart. He began by jabbing Fury to the body and looked good doing it. But as Mike Tyson famously said and Fury reminded us in the prefight chatter, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Fury blasted Wilder into the canvas and true to form the Bronze Bomber turned into an animal and dropped Fury TWICE in the fourth. Fury then forgot how to box and turned into an animal himself, flooring Wilder again in the 10th before knocking him out cold in the 11th.

It wasn’t what purists would call “the sweet science,” but it was the kind of brutality you had to watch through your fingers no matter how loud your husband is and how good your book is. It was a car crash that brought to mind heavyweight clashes of the past like the 1976 Ring Magazine Fight of the Year, when George Foreman and Ron Lyle tasted the canvas four times in five rounds.

But this was different. These two heavyweights fought at a welterweight pace, and they did it for 11 rounds. That never happens.

We don’t know what the future holds for Fury or Wilder, but retirement is possible for both of them. Fury came back from a bout of depression that cost him three years and there is nothing left for him to accomplish. He has a mandatory against dangerous Dillian Whyte or Otto Wallin and can become undisputed with a win over the winner of the rematch between Anthony Joshua and Oleksandr Usyk, but he has reached the top of the mountain. Wilder is 35 years old and Fury has no desire to fight him a fourth time.

If they truly are done, they have left behind something that would have been appreciated in any era of the sport and will live longer than the sport itself.