As Tyson Fury’s legs succumbed to the punches Oleksander Usyk was detonating about his temples in the 9th round of their undisputed heavyweight title clash, it brought to mind the work of renown Steeplejack, and Fury’s fellow Lancastrian, Fred Dibnah. Famous for his affable smile and fearless enterprise in climbing mill town chimneys of the type LS Lowry painted in the sky-line of post-war, industrial Manchester, Dibnah became an unlikely television personality in the 1970s and 80s. The British public became enchanted by his boyish glee as he clung on to the side of an obsolete monolith hundreds of feet above the ground with only stout boots and blue overalls to protect him.

In the gratuitous hospitality of a Saudi Arabian Saturday, a hellish Kingdom where all visitors must protest their gratitude with unstinting profusion, Fury was no more detached from the mundanity of Lowry’s flat capped factory workers, Dibnah and the grey skies and modesty of his own youth than anyone else in attendance to these grotesquely performative advertorials. With the possible exception of his vicarious father, John. A man made to ‘bleed his own blood’ having head butted a diminutive member of Average Joe’s Dodgeball team earlier in fight week.

In that 9th round, as Fury Junior’s matchstick legs betrayed the impossible heft above, it reminded this viewer of Dibnah, ambling backward in the long shadow of a Rochdale chimney stack condemned to fall by a redundancy of purpose. At that point, with his grip on his own consciousness at its most tenuous, he may have wished to be back home, or anywhere other than the tumult of losing a heavyweight title.

Continue reading “It was what is was. Usyk topples the Fury chimney. Does either man have any more to give?” →