Tyson Fury's camp will attempt to persuade Wladimir Klitschko to travel to Wembley next summer for a multimillion-pound world heavyweight title rematch in front of 80,000 people. But Fury, who took the WBA, IBF and WBO belts with a unanimous decision on Saturday night in Dusseldorf, is also happy to return to Germany to face Klitschko again if the former champion wants a rematch sooner.
Speaking the morning after bamboozling Klitschko to defy the bookies odds of 5/1, Fury insisted that the biggest damage he had suffered were the blisters across the soles of his feet. “Not too many people thought I could do it but I had faith all along that I’d be the champion of the world and make it an easy fight,” he said.
“And it was an easy fight against one of the great champions with 23 world title defences. People said nobody could breach his defences, but a bit of brains is all it took.
“I want to be a great champion,” he added. “And I’d like to do it all again. One thing I can say about the rematch is that it’s going to be explosive.”
In the past Fury has allowed his weight to balloon between fights but he promised this time it would be different. “They say it’s hard to win a championship but even harder to hold on to it,” he said. “If I trained hard up to now – and I think my conditioning was quite supreme – I will train even harder.”
Commercial sense
Fury's promoter, Mick Hennessy, said the rematch with Klitschko would take place wherever it made most commercial sense, but admitted his preference was London. "Wembley Stadium would be very appealing at the right time of year, definitely," he said. "It was close to 55,000 in Dusseldorf. It would easily do 80,000 at Wembley. But it would have to be at the end of the football season."
Hennessy predicted the fight would be even bigger because the 27-year-old Fury was “a loud, young, brash, outspoken and brilliant talent as heavyweight champion of the world who no one knows what he’s going to do next – and that includes me”.
However, Fury has insisted that in the future he would give up a version of his belts rather than fight fellow Briton David Haye, who twice pulled out of matches against him.
“Absolutely point-blank, I will say Haye will never get a chance after what he did to me,” he said. “I will never give him a payday. If he gets mandatory for the WBA, he can have the WBA. Let him go and fight Fred Flintstone or Joe Bloggs and make no money. Whatever title he gets mandatory for, I will vacate. Let him fight the next challenger. I’m not giving him a payday.
Pretender
“I don’t care if he says I can make £10 million, it’s not about money for me. I’m not here about the money, because, let’s face it, the next fight with Wladimir Klitschko is going to be for a lot of money. He is getting no opportunities from us. He is a pretender, a fraud.”
Hennessy, meanwhile, is not convinced that Klitschko will want the rematch. “He was busted up pretty bad and I just think there’s more to come from Tyson,” he said.
“If Tyson could have got that right hand off clean, it would have knocked him out. So he knows that Tyson is only going to get better. Next time he fights Klitschko, I guarantee he knocks him out.” Guardian Service
