It’s quite simple: we just need to know how the story ends.
It has been 10 years in the making – and many would say about five years too late – but British heavyweights Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua will finally settle the score in a rivalry that has transformed boxing and captivated a generation.
The two former world champions will meet in Cardiff in December, their parallel career paths at last converging after an epic saga of missed opportunities and setbacks.
In one corner, the “polished, commercially perfect” Joshua. In the other corner the “potty-mouth, straight-talking, no-nonsense” Fury.
That is how former boxer Johnny Nelson describes the pair in BBC Sport’s new documentary Rivals: Fury v Joshua, and podcast series, adding: “You'll take the villain side, you'll take the hero side. But either way, you'll take a side.”
The WBA 'super' heavyweight belt is on the line on a night of fighting that begins on 11 December in Cardiff, though Fury and Joshua are not expected to meet until the early hours of the following day due to the demands of an international TV audience.
Nevertheless, the tickets for the fight sold out in less than an hour, and the result will go beyond any title.
“This rivalry has been so gripping. It captures everybody's imagination,” former boxer Tony Bellew says. “We believe in the fighters. We back the fighters. We take part in their story.
"[The fight is] long overdue but ultimately, we still want to see it and I'm not going to lie, we still have to see it."
This is the story of why they made so many people care so much.
At the time Fury and Joshua arrived on the scene, boxing’s traditionally glamourous heavyweight division was often being described as ‘boring’.
At the turn of the century Ukrainian brothers Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko dominated, holding all the belts. But they chose not to fight each other to keep a promise to their mother, which meant that in 2015 there had not been an undisputed champion since Britain’s Lennox Lewis held all three belts in 2000.
The division needed someone new. Even better, a new rivalry. The days of Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier, Mike Tyson-Lewis were long gone.
With no upper weight limit, heavyweights are the giants of the sport – in physique, power and personality.
Fury and Joshua had all three in spades.
"You have about as much charisma as my underpants – zero,” was one of Fury’s shots at Wladimir Klitschko in the run-up to a 2015 fight where the Ukrainian’s WBA ‘super’, IBF and WBO heavyweight belts would be on the line.
Fury had earned himself a first world title shot after going unbeaten in 24 fights since turning professional in 2008 and becoming British champion. On paper, it looked set to be yet another routine mandatory defence for Klitschko, having held the belts for nearly a decade.
The Briton had turned up to a news conference dressed as Batman and serenaded his rival at a public workout. The Ukrainian might have had a number of words going through his head but “boring” probably wasn’t one of them.
When the fight came along on 24 October 2015, Klitschko still had not worked him out as a skilful Fury pulled off one of the sport’s biggest upsets in a unanimous decision victory in his opponent’s adopted back yard of Germany.
“It was such a refreshing victory that it just gave the heavyweight division the kiss of life it needed,” says boxing commentator Steve Bunce.
Having waited 15 years for a British heavyweight world champion, it would be less than six months before the country had another.
Anthony Joshua was already a household name before he turned professional, having won Olympic gold at London 2012.
He had 15 knockouts from 15 professional fights – including 14 straight knockouts in the first three rounds – before facing Charles Martin for the IBF world heavyweight title in April 2016.
That belt had briefly belonged to Fury, who was stripped of it less than two weeks after beating Klitschko because the Briton had agreed to a rematch with the Ukrainian rather than agreeing to fight the IBF’s mandatory challenger.
Joshua wasted no time in claiming it, stopping Martin in two rounds in London.
“He's the best finisher in the heavyweight division,” says Bellew. “When he gets a guy here, guess what he does? He wipes you out and knocks you out.”
There had already been whispers about a Fury-Joshua fight but now that there were two British world champions – and with the added appeal of them having such different personalities and styles - the calls got louder.
“Anthony Joshua captured the nation in 2012,” says Bellew. “The granny who's sitting there watching Coronation Street knows who Anthony Joshua is because she took part in his journey, she believed in his story and that's what an Olympic gold can do.”
His charm and good looks made him a commercial dream, while the fact that even as a world champion he was living with his mum in an ex-council house gave him a down-to-earth appeal.
Joshua’s cousin Benga Ileyemi recalls how he caused a traffic jam on the way to fight at Wembley one time when he was letting fans take photos, saying: “He'll just put down his window and start saying ‘Hi’ to people.”
Joshua came to boxing late – his former headteacher Gary Lewis said he seemed more likely to win Olympic gold in the 400m – and he was wearing an electronic tag when he first started at 18 after a troubled past that included charges for fighting and possessing cannabis with intent to supply.
By contrast Fury was born into a fighting family, with dad John a former professional boxer who says his Traveller family goes back 300 years with “prize fighters with the gloves, without the gloves”.
His physique is also very different to Joshua’s chiselled look – Fury dubbed their upcoming fight ‘Adonis vs Blancmange’ – and his eccentric and outspoken personality a world away from Joshua’s more polished and media-trained one.
When he first became world champion by stunning Klitschko, the public were slow to warm to him.
“We came home on an empty ferry with the lorry drivers … no paparazzi, no nothing. It is like it never took place,” says John Fury.
“I thought, ‘where's the open-top buses? Where's the paparazzi?'”
Fury’s dad says it seemed like his son’s “face didn’t fit” because of his Traveller background.
Others, however, will point to a series of headlines that came out soon after that fight, which detailed a series of controversial comments he made, including saying a woman’s “best place is on her back” and being critical of homosexuality and abortion.
He had given the public enough to cast him in the role of villain in the burgeoning rivalry with Joshua.
"Two very different people, but two great characters,” says Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn. “You're kind of either Team Fury or Team AJ."
What both fighters do have in common, however, is their competitiveness. Fury’s Rolex was on the line in the one sparring session they had when Joshua was still an amateur. Joshua later said Fury left with his watch but sporting a black eye.
For years to come, even if they were not fighting each other, that did not mean they couldn’t get the better of each other.
When Joshua faced Klitschko a year after becoming a world champion, he produced a stunning performance in a knockout win in front of a post-war record 90,000 fans at Wembley to add the WBA title to his IBF crown.
“I think AJ thought ‘I can't just beat him like Tyson beat him. I have to do better',” says Joshua’s former Team GB team-mate and fellow boxer Natasha Jonas.
“Because everybody wants to compare them, everyone wants to see if they're level, who's better, and it's these little things that the British public and the fans will take on themselves I think.”
After the victory, Joshua’s thoughts immediately turned to one man.
“Tyson Fury, where are you at, baby? … Is that what you want to see?”
By that time, though, boxing could not have been further from Fury’s mind.
Joshua’s thrilling victory over Klitschko propelled the Briton to superstardom.
He was inundated with chat show and red carpet invitations, with Hearn calling him “the biggest star in world boxing” and his cousin Ileyemi saying all the new attention meant they had to stop their weekly trip to the supermarket for their favourite apple crumble and custard.
That had not happened for Fury when he had beaten the Ukrainian three years earlier in Dusseldorf and his dad blamed this lack of public recognition for pushing his son into depression.
“That killed him off,” he says.
Within a year of his greatest victory, Fury was taking drugs, binge drinking and having suicidal thoughts.
It would be another 924 days before he would fight again.
Talk of Fury-Joshua went quiet.
“He was 30 stones in weight, he ate and drank himself nearly to oblivion,” says John Fury.
Fury, however, has had to “show resilience from the day he was born”, according to his dad.
He was three months premature, weighing just 1lb, but John felt so sure he would become a world heavyweight champion that he named him after Mike Tyson.
A sickly Fury was in and out of hospital for the first five years of his life but by the age of 10 he had taken up boxing, having developed skills by watching old boxing videos and observing his dad’s training.
He had to wait until he was 16 for his first fight because his size for his age – he was 14 stone at the age of 14 - meant it was impossible to match him with anyone.
But he worked hard in the gym, the first to arrive and last to leave, honing the skills that made the most of his height and reach.
It was this drive and dedication that Fury would eventually lean on to return to the sport in 2018 after opening up on his battles with ADHD, bipolar and depression.
During his time away he had relinquished his world titles and tested positive for a banned steroid – something he blamed on eating uncastrated wild boar.
He hired a new coach, Ben Davison, whose immediate priority was to get Fury “to fall back in love with boxing” so that he enjoyed training and could start burning enough calories to shift the 10 stone he had put on.
Fury asked him to move in with him – a fact Davison says Fury only mentioned to his wife Paris when the trainer had parked up at the house.
Under Davison’s guidance, Fury went back down to around 18 stone and rediscovered his passion.
"Boxing is like a marriage - you have to work at it. You do fall in and out of love," Fury said at the time.
"But I have spiced it back up again, bought her some sexy lingerie and we are back at it, better than ever."
Fury was also being shown more love from the public on the back of his honesty about his mental health struggles.
He was ready for a comeback fight.
During his rival’s time out of the ring, Joshua had become the dominant heavyweight, holding three of the four world titles, while American Deontay Wilder held the WBC crown.
Fury set his sights on Wilder.
Fury came through two mismatched opponents on his comeback before sharing a microphone with Wilder in the ring to announce their fight.
John Fury says his son was a “fool” to face Wilder so early into his comeback, while Davison recalls sitting in his car giving Fury an “honest and truthful” phone call saying he would be much better off waiting seven or eight months.
Yes, he had lost the weight but his strength was not fully built back up, they thought. And Wilder was one of the sport’s most powerful punchers ever.
But the date was set for 2 December 2018, less than six months after Fury’s return.
What ensued was one of the division’s most enthralling fights in years as the Briton survived two knockdowns in a brilliant draw in Los Angeles, where he demonstrated his movement and counter-punching were back to their very best.
He had been floored in the ninth round and then brutally dropped in the 12th, where he lay motionless on the canvas before somehow making the count.
“The resurrection in the 12th round, when he gets up miraculously, suddenly makes Tyson Fury an incredible commodity,” says Bunce. “It made Tyson Fury a massive global star.”
Fury quickly called out Joshua.
"We’re the best two heavyweights on the planet,” he said of himself and Wilder. “There is another heavyweight who is a chicken. Joshua, where are you?"
With Wilder focused on a rematch with Fury, any chance of Joshua fulfilling his quest to become undisputed heavyweight champion was on hold. So he took the opportunity to head to New York’s Madison Square Garden – boxing’s spiritual home - to make a highly anticipated US debut he hoped would grow his profile.
He had been scheduled to face Jarrell Miller but the American failed multiple drugs tests and so Andy Ruiz Jr was drafted in as a replacement.
Joshua, unbeaten in 22 professional fights, was a heavy favourite to defend his belts for a seventh time against a boxer who, according to Bellew, looked “in no kind of shape”.
“This guy's asking for selfies on a stage,” adds the former cruiserweight world champion. “He's took his top off. He looks like Johnny Vegas. And I'm just like, what's going on?”
But Ruiz would deliver one of the sport’s biggest shocks, flooring Joshua four times on his way to winning in seven rounds and taking the IBF, WBA and WBO world titles.
All talk of facing Fury, or Wilder, was now off. Joshua’s priority was a Ruiz rematch to regain the belts.
“It was just devastating for him,” Jonas says. “Sometimes I think in this country, we build people up, but we kind of half want to see them knocked down as well.”
Joshua has never liked losing – Ileyemi says as a child he never used to move on to a new video game unless he had won the one they were playing, and once when they were racing each other to the shop to buy milk Joshua didn’t turn round when his cousin fell off his bike.
Anything other than a win in the rematch with Ruiz would have been “catastrophic” for his career, Joshua said, and so six months later he had his belts back with a unanimous points victory against an opponent who later admitted three months of partying had left him “overweight”.
It would not be long before Fury too was winning a rematch – and in quite some style.
He produced a masterclass to stop Wilder in the seventh round, flooring him twice, to become WBC heavyweight world champion.
Two Britons now held all the belts.
Fury v Joshua for the right to be called undisputed champion was the fight everyone wanted to see more than ever.
It had started to sound like the pair would fight in 2021, with Hearn saying they had agreed a two-fight deal.
“This is going to be the biggest sporting event ever to grace the planet earth,” Fury had said, confirming the first fight would be on 14 August.
But one part of the puzzle just did not fit: Wilder had a rematch clause and an arbitration hearing concluded he had a contractual right to face Fury for a third time and by 15 September.
Wilder had requested an eye-watering $20m (£14m) to step aside to allow the Fury-Joshua bout to go ahead.
In the end, Fury had no choice and Joshua had to look elsewhere.
After the prospect of a fight with Fury collapsed, the WBO ordered Joshua to defend his title against mandatory challenger Oleksandr Usyk in his next fight or he would be stripped of his belt.
Ukrainian Usyk, like Joshua an Olympic champion at London 2012, had been an undisputed world champion at cruiserweight before moving up to heavyweight.
This would be the first time he would be fighting for a world title as a heavyweight and Joshua was putting all three of his belts on the line for the meeting at London’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
In front of 65,000 fans, the uncharacteristically passive Briton was outclassed over 12 rounds. Devastated, he headed to hospital with an eye injury and the damage to his career – and the prospect of a meeting with Fury - was also severe.
“Joshua at that point was doubting himself after the Ruiz fight, so he's trying to find smarter ways to win fights,” says Bunce. “He's trying to work on tactics in his head that he doesn't need to do. The old AJ, I'm convinced would have beaten Usyk. That AJ before he was dropped against Andy Ruiz would have beaten Usyk because he was fearless and reckless and he was more aggressive.”
Joshua took a more aggressive approach in the rematch in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, but it was not enough against a brilliant Usyk, who retained the titles with a win by split decision.
The Briton’s frustrations boiled over as he picked up two of Usyk’s belts and dropped them out of the ring. He later broke down in the news conference, saying his emotional response had revealed a “crack in the armour”.
It was now Usyk who was calling out Fury for an undisputed title fight.
‘Super fights’ are notoriously difficult to make, with rival promoters, egos, finance and broadcaster commitments feeding the complexity. Even issues such as which boxer walks out first can be cause for great wrangling.
In the end, of course, money talks.
And when oil-rich Saudi Arabia got involved in boxing, it changed everything.
Accused of investing in sport and using high-profile events to improve its international reputation in the face of criticism for its human rights violations, the Gulf kingdom has hosted huge fights such as Joshua-Usyk.
It was the Saudis who managed to get Fury-Usyk over the line after more than a year of failed negotiations, during which Fury claimed he had offered Joshua a 60-40 purse split to try to get their fight made in the meantime.
“The monies were just off the wall,” says Fury’s promoter Frank Warren. “I don't think it will happen again … the pair of them have had a great experience, a great Saudi experience as far as finance is concerned.”
Famous faces like Cristiano Ronaldo were in the crowd as Usyk became boxing’s first four-belt undisputed heavyweight champion with a split decision win.
It was Fury’s first loss in a 16-year professional career and he would go on to suffer his second with another close defeat on points in the rematch later in the year.
And it was a huge spanner in the works of the Fury-Joshua rivalry, with neither now holding any of the belts.
Fury immediately announced his retirement from boxing after the second Usyk defeat – the fifth time he had officially retired.
He was arguably more famous out of the ring by now, thanks to his Netflix reality documentary series, and it would be quite easy to imagine that this time he would stay retired if not for his history of U-turns.
Joshua, meanwhile, had missed the chance to regain a world title when he lost to fellow Briton Daniel Dubois in September 2024 in a fight where the IBF title was on the line after Usyk had vacated it just five weeks after becoming undisputed champion in the first Fury fight.
It led to questions over his future but he decided to continue boxing, although his next bout was a controversial and heavily mismatched contest against YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul.
He won and immediately called out Fury.
"It's unfinished business from an era that promised all these fights but didn't always deliver," says boxing commentator Max Kellerman.
"They're fighting for the championship of each other."
However, just days after the Paul fight, Joshua was injured in a car crash in Nigeria which killed two members of his team.
“Would we ever see AJ in a ring again?” says Jonas. “Because mentally, I don't know how you get over that.”
This rivalry is, however, an itch that will always need to be scratched.
Fury’s latest retirement lasted less than a year, while Joshua was back in the gym just 19 days after the crash.
A few months later, Hearn had announced that Joshua had signed a deal to fight Fury. It was not until September that it was officially confirmed by Saudi boxing powerbroker Turki Alalshikh, who has this fight on a ‘wishlist’ he has made while in ill health.
Even then Fury said a couple of days later that it was still in jeopardy because of a row between rival promoters.
But they have since shared a platform at a news conference and the stage is set for a fight that has as much appeal now – if not more – than when they almost met so many other times.
"It's a bit of a soap opera, but it's the live soap opera that we're all seeing in front of our very eyes," says Nelson.
"It's like watching a series and thinking, 'I've got to watch this to the end.'"
Past their peak? Almost certainly. No longer fighting to be undisputed champion? Definitely. But that has never been the point. This is about one question only.
Fury or Joshua?
After 10 years, we’re finally going to get an answer.
Credits
Written by Sonia Oxley
Sub-edited by Joe Rimmer
Graphics by Andy Dicks
Images by Getty Images
