David Haye: ‘Tyson Fury is just a clown’
This interview appears in the current edition of Sport magazine. , and follow on
Less than a fortnight ahead of his fight against Tyson Fury, David Haye is sporting a visible injury.
Sport is talking to him in his spartan boxing gym, hidden away in a secluded part of central London.
“Not a lot of people know about this place,” he says, sitting on the ring apron and casting his eyes around the brickwork as trains rumble past overhead. “Well, a few more do now. I had the drug testers here this morning. Taking urine, blood... who knows what else? Stools?”
He laughs. “If it’s helping them to catch the people who are doing that s**t, then I’m all for it. Still, it took her a few goes to find my vein,” he says, stretching out a right arm with the muscular heft of a Boa constrictor and pointing to a small bruise.
This minor blemish aside, Haye looks in terrific shape: the archetypal athlete with slim, tapered waist, wide shoulders and defined muscles. Still, seeing him up close is a different experience to encountering most heavyweights.
Meet man-mountains such as Lennox Lewis or Wladimir Klitschko, and you’re immediately struck by their abnormal enormity... the sheer scale of them. You gaze up, wondering why they’re trying to hand you a large dinner plate, before realising that it’s just their giant mitt being extended forward to shake your puny paw.
By mortal standards, Haye is a big man. But at around 210lbs and at 6ft 3ins, he is small for a heavyweight boxer. The man he’s fighting next weekend is 6ft 9ins and 254lbs. ‘The Hayemaker’ has fought and beaten even bigger opponents than this in his career, of course, but even he admits that giving away six inches in height and more than three stone in weight is not to his advantage.
“Anyone with his dimensions could do someone with my dimensions a lot of damage if I get it wrong,” says Haye evenly. “If I bob when I should weave or if I duck when I should dive, this guy could land something dangerous.
“I can’t afford for that to happen, so you have to respect him. I respect the fact that he’s got to 21 fights unbeaten. I respect the fact that he’s talked his way into a big fight. I also respect the fact that he’s got the British public interested in a fight that I think is a mismatch.”
And there’s the rub. Although he talks of respecting Fury, the Bermondsey big-hitter clearly believes he is on a different talent level to his opponent. While Haye is the pre-fight favourite, however, there are many in the boxing industry picking Fury - and several who think there are as many question marks over the 32-year-old Haye as there are over the less experienced, 25-year-old Fury.
One worry is that Haye has fought just twice in almost three years - most recently in July 2012, when he stopped Dereck Chisora at Upton Park.
“Every time I’ve got back into the ring for sparring for the last five years, it’s been after a big, long lay-off,” explains Haye. “So you always think: ‘Is it still gonna be there? Am I going to get old overnight?’ A year is a long time in boxing. Most fighters have two or three fights in a year, and I’ve had none.”
His method of handling the ring rust is to test himself against sparring partners of the very highest class.
“For this camp, we’ve had Deontay Wilder - 29 fights, 29 wins, 29 knockouts - so I’m starting my preparation, after having been out of the ring for over a year, getting clumped by someone who’s just had a fight two weeks ago. It’s hard, and you take some lumps early doors, but it’s like getting chucked in the deep end: you’ve got to keep swimming. That’s my philosophy.
"I don’t like to ease myself back into it slowly, sparring with nobodies. I’ve had great big guys like Alexander Dimitrenko, Mariusz Wach and Richard Towers raining down bombs on me all day, so I quickly discover whether I’ve got it or not. Fortunately for me, I’ve still got a little something in reserve.”
Before he began training, Haye spent time with the motormouth Fury as they fulfilled publicity obligations. Haye has utilised the media to grab attention in the past. He once said of 7ft-plus Nikolai Valuev: “He is the ugliest thing I have ever seen. I have watched Lord of the Rings and films with strange-looking people, but for a human being to look like he does is pretty shocking.”
He later told the world that Audley Harrison was going to get “violated in that ring”. So it was a surprise to see Haye being drowned out by Fury’s own brand of outlandish braggadocio. The general opinion was that, if verbal sparring counts for anything, Fury had edged out his rival early on.
“I’ve heard his press conferences and interviews in the past,” says Haye. “When it wasn’t me sitting there, I found it hilarious. But when you’re sitting there and it’s directed at you, you’re thinking: ‘I really can’t be bothered to hear this.’ I know what he’s going to say before he says it. It’s all stupid, none of it makes sense, he keeps contradicting himself. He’s just a clown. I didn’t really want to be there or to talk to him. I only wanted to be there to let everyone know that I’m looking forward to the fight. I just can’t wait for when all the talking stops and it comes down to actually fighting. Because that’s what I do best.”
There’s an irony in the fact that Haye is now on the receiving end of the treatment he’s dished out to other fighters in the past: the brash young upstart irritating the senior professional with his headline-grabbing claims.
With Haye, there was always a sense that this was a calculated strategy designed to garner him publicity. But Fury often cuts a more openly eccentric figure - how much does Haye feel the Mancunian is being genuine in how he acts?
“I honestly don’t know,” he admits. “We did the [Sky Sports'] Ringside show and the press conference. They’re the two times I’ve met him. He didn’t come across as the nicest chap; not the type of guy I’d want to go and have a drink with. I’d like to think he was putting on all that crazy crap a little bit, but he seems a bit too natural at it, to be honest. I think he just genuinely is that much of a dick.”
As well as being not fully aware of the sincerity behind Fury’s bluster, Haye admits it’s going to be something of a guessing game as to his opponent’s tactics in their fight. For all his big talk, one obvious way for a fighter with Fury’s vast size and reach advantages to approach a fast, hard-hitting counter-puncher like Haye would be to stand off him, jab and force Haye to come forward.
“He’s never been in the ring with anyone like me, so you never know how he might respond,” says Haye. “He may try and tuck up really tight and walk me down. He might just think ‘I don’t want to get anywhere near this guy’ and stand off me - or he might come and try and knock me out of the ring. We’re unsure what he brings to the table at the highest level. I know what he does when he fights people that aren’t very good - we’ve all seen that - but I’m not in that category, so I can’t expect him to do the same thing with me.
“I do have to be careful, because when you corner an animal - even if you don’t think it’s a dangerous animal - when it feels threatened, it can lash out. Put someone in the hot seat and you’ve got to expect anything. He’s not been in training camp for 12 weeks to come out there and give me a hug. He wants to punch my face in.”
Haye doesn’t necessarily need to let young giants try to whack him in the kisser these days. He’s been healthily remunerated throughout his career, thrived on reality TV when he was last man standing in 2012’s I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! and retired from boxing - briefly - in October 2011.
He also keeps his hand in with other projects, launching his own bookazine, mobile game and most recently co-creating his own sporting health shake: Lean Plant-Based Protein.
The question is, with so many irons in the fire and options outside of the sport, what keeps drawing Haye back to boxing?
“Because I love it,” he replies simply. “I still do other things that keep me entertained, but I’m a born fighter. I do like a break, just to switch off from boxing mentally and physically, because the preparation you put your body through drains so much energy out of you. You can’t do it too often. Now, every time I get into training, I have got my hunger and love for the sport back.”
“It’s the public as well,” he says on the motivation for his ring return. “People coming up to me saying: ‘When are you fighting next... why don’t you knock out Tyson Fury for us’?”
Haye does acknowledge, however, that putting his body through the rigours of a training camp doesn’t get easier over time: “It’s hard. My body is in bits the whole time. I’m always tired, my back is killing me, my knees... I can definitely feel that I’m getting older. I don’t recover as well as I did ten years ago. But I’m doing stuff better than I used to - I’m pushing more weight, I’m running faster, jumping higher than I did when I was 22. Although I felt a little fresher back then, I still feel I’m producing the goods at the ripe old age of 32. Wait, 33 next month!”
Haye opens his eyes wide in mock terror as he contemplates the onset of 33. Yet one area where he certainly seems to have improved with age is in durability. After all, the younger vintage Haye was knocked down by journeyman Lolenga Mock in 2003, and then stopped when he punched himself out against cruiserweight Carl Thompson a year later - the latter being his only loss aside from the points defeat he suffered against Wladimir Klitschko in 2011.
“I know that I take a better shot now than I did once,” he confirms. “That punch that Wladimir Klitschko hit me with - if he’d hit me with that seven years prior, I’d have been sleeping on the canvas. But over time your neck muscles, your jaw, your physical strength all improve.”
Haye’s passive display in his loss to the younger Klitschko brother, and his toe injury excuses in the aftermath, marked a low point in his public perception. Looking back, does he wish he’d done things differently?
“I never look at life like that,” he replies. “If I was to fight him again, I’d obviously do things differently - but I’m never the type of person to wish I’d done this or wish I didn’t say that.
“Whatever happens, happens. I lost fair and square to him, so there’s nothing for me to complain about. I’d love the opportunity to do it again. Whether or not he gives me the opportunity to do that remains to be seen. But it’s these fights against the likes of Tyson Fury that get the world excited. And that will also get me closer to a title shot, whether it’s against Wladimir in a rematch or Vitali [Klitschko], who’s recently made a bit of noise about fighting me.
“Now, whether he’s said that because he’s got some political thing he wants to push through and he needs his name in the public... I don’t know what his game is. But I certainly do want a heavyweight title back around my waist and back in Britain.”
That may be Haye’s ultimate goal before he retires, but he’s fully focused on the large figure of Fury first. And, the way Haye sees things, it may not be physical factors that will cause Fury’s demise.
“He’s lost it mentally in a few fights I’ve seen,” says Haye. “In his last couple of fights, he was emotionally all over the place. He’s a bit erratic. But maybe he’ll realise the enormity of this fight when he gets out there.
“It’s going either one of two ways: he’s either going to lose it completely, or he’ll rise to the occasion. When he’s fighting guys like [Fury’s last opponent] Steve Cunningham, who can’t punch his way out of a wet paper bag, and he gets knocked down, it’s going to put big question marks in his own mind.
“Everyone knows that Cunningham is quite skilful, but can’t punch. Whereas with me, the first thing everyone who’s fought me says is: ‘He punches f**king hard.’ Every single person I’ve been in the ring with has had to respect my power. Anyone who hasn’t respected it has been knocked down within seconds.
“John Ruiz is a two-time world champion who’s renowned for his toughness - he had been in there with the likes of Evander Holyfield, going the distance three times. Within the first minute of fighting me, he was on his backside because he didn’t respect me. He thought he could charge across the ring and rough me up.
“So if Fury wants to come out and act like that - to try and impose himself on me - it’s going to be a really short fight. But however he tries to play it, Tyson Fury is going to get knocked spark out.”
Photography by Charlie Gray. Other pictures by Getty Images