Derek Chisora says he has shaken hands with Fury on an agreement to fight in center ring from the start of Saturday’s WBC heavyweight title fight.
Chisora is 0-2 in his two previous meetings with Fury and the last time they met, in November 2014, Fury used his size to box at distance and slowly busted up his rival and stop him.
But this time, with the WBC heavyweight title on the line, Chisora says it will be different and they shook on it at Tuesday’s media workout.
“We want to give the fans a good fight so we figured out that once the ref reads out the instructions, we’re not going to go back to our corners, we’re just going to stand there and let it go from there,” Chisora said.
“Let me tell you, that man there and me, we love to fight. We’re in the business of fighting. We’re not in the business of robbing the public of their money. We’re in the business of producing a good fight.
“After all is said and done, we will break bread together. But for however long the fight goes for, we’re going to go to war. We shook on it, traveler style. We didn’t bet on it, we just said we would stay in the middle and get on with it. We will go when the first bell goes, no walking back.”
If Chisora does have a chance of winning – and the bookmakers think that chance is a pretty remote one – getting Fury into a war is it. He admits that he has next to no chance of outboxing Fury, so his one hope is to go for a knockout.
“He won’t fight on the back foot, he will come forward,” Chisora said. “There are going to be fireworks in there.
“There is enough bad stuff happening in the world, so this needs to be exciting. This is why we’re going to do it this way, we want people to enjoy it. That’s what we’re going to do. He says he will just stand there.
“We don’t listen to our teams, we do what we want to make ourselves happy. If I listened to people, I’d be f—– retired by now.”
Ron Lewis is a senior writer for BoxingScene. He was Boxing Correspondent for The Times, where he worked from 2001-2019 – covering four Olympic Games and numerous world title fights across the globe. He has written about boxing for a wide variety of publications worldwide since the 1980s.