Perhaps the greatest surprise about heavyweight champion Tyson Fury is that he chose boxing instead of MMA, but then again he’s an old-fashioned guy.

Fury believes the Old Testament is not just a document but documentary. He argues that his pronouncements, equally apocalyptic and bigoted, are supported by the scriptures, and he has a point. Fury is full of rage and hate speech, but then so is the bible. How can such “righteousness,” he asks, be wrong?

A week before beating Vladimir Klitschko, Fury gave a jaw-dropping interview to Oliver Holt of the Daily Mail, one that put every ounce of his lunatic world view on display. Since his victory, he’s been considered by most in his native England (and the few others who still care about his sport) as the Donald Trump of prizefighting, in the lead despite being a crude caricature of evil. 

From Holt:

Tyson Fury is sitting on a sofa in his hotel room. His bed is unmade. A pillow lies on the floor. An empty water bottle sits on the table. Apart from that, the room is bare. The conversation has just started and Fury is talking in a stream of consciousness, fast and freely. Things turn dark very, very quickly.

‘We live in an evil world,’ he says. ‘The devil is very strong at the minute, very strong, and I believe the end is near. The bible tells me the end is near. The world tells me the end is near. Just a short few years, I reckon, away from being finished.

‘Abusing the planet, the wars in the Middle East, the famines, the earthquakes, the natural disasters, all these things are talked about 2000 years ago before they even happened. Prophesised. So now it’s all coming true…’

There is a breathlessness about his speech and an intensity, too. He is an articulate man and his words are littered with references to the scriptures. It feels as if he has taken sections of the Old Testament and swallowed them whole. There is no filter. He begins to make sweeping and repugnant statements about what he interprets as the evils that he says are hurrying us towards the apocalypse. It is hard not to feel worried about his mental well-being. He says that always happens when men are ‘filled up with God’.

‘There are only three things that need to be accomplished before the devil comes home: one of them is homosexuality being legal in countries, one of them is abortion and the other one’s paedophilia. Who would have thought in the 50s and 60s that those first two would be legalised?

…

‘This is a funny world we live in and an evil world,’ Fury says. ‘People can say, “Oh, you are against abortions, you are against paedophilia, you are against homosexuality, you’re against whatever”, but my faith and my culture is all based on the bible. The bible was written a long time ago, from the beginning of time until now, and if I follow that and it tells me it’s wrong, then it’s wrong for me. That’s just my opinion.•