Forget Prince Harry – Tyson Fury is the royal Britain needs

The boxer’s journey from a hospital incubator to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas has been circuitous, and features a redemption arc like no other, writes Matthew Norman

The so-called Gypsy King celebrates his latest victory (Reuters)

British royalty comes in myriad shapes and sizes – by no means all of them savoury, as a certain Duke of York has taken pains of late to remind us.

Yet royalty, real and ersatz, has never known a character like Tyson Fury, the self-styled Gypsy King who last night beat Deontay Wilder to become the world heavyweight champion.

Fury’s achievement retains a powerful flavour of Hollywood kitsch. In a few years, it will no doubt be recreated in a biopic that may win someone the first Best Actor Oscar since Robert De Niro won for Raging Bull. Just this once, however, the writers will wish to downplay the bald facts rather than inflate them. Next to these, the Rocky franchise begins to resemble a series of lethally academic Open University lectures broadcast on BBC2 in 1967.

The belief-beggaring tale of this 6ft 9in goliath’s ascent to the top tier of the heavyweight pantheon began in Manchester 31 years ago. The child born prematurely to a family of travellers tipped the scales at less than a pound. He was not expected to live.

In a typically itinerant gypsy life, his journey from an incubator to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas has been circuitous, and features a redemption arc like no other.

In 2017, the child who entered this world weighing a few ounces was nearing 30 stone. Banned from boxing after a performance-enhancing substance was found in his blood, he was instead using recreational drugs and verging on alcoholism, and contemplating suicide.

Three years on, after processing to the ring on a golden throne flanked by mock pharaonic slaves, he did what absolutely everyone in the big fight game other than himself and his trainer knew was impossible: he dismantled Deontay Wilder, the murderous one-punch demolition ball boxing has known since the original Tyson (watching in disbelief at ringside) in his heyday supplied Fury with his forename.

However moral one considers a game predicated on inflicting brain damage – and when Wilder’s camp threw in the towel, he was in danger of just that – this was surely the single most monumental performance of a British athlete ever.

In the post-fight interview, shortly before he treated us to a tuneful rendition of “American Pie”, Fury attributed his ungodly powers of recovery to “my lord and saviour, Jesus Christ”. It would take a militant atheist to rule out entirely the possibility that Fury is right. Fourteen months ago, in the 12th and final round of their drawn first encounter, Fury appeared to be unconscious when he crashed to the canvas courtesy of a savage Wilder combination. The fact he recovered his senses, rose on the count of nine, and ended the fight on the offensive, remains one of the greatest miracles of this endlessly mysterious age.

But like the man himself, the Lazarus act far transcends the narrow confines of professional boxing. He has come back off the floor from infinitely worse than the Wilder right-left combo that seemed to have concluded their first fight.

At a time when second chances are so seldom afforded those who grossly offend against common decency, albeit without wiping a gruesome slate wholly clean, Fury salvaged his public persona from a sequence of grotesquely idiotic, inflammatory remarks (about homosexuality and immigration, among other subjects) with abundantly sincere apologies.

More impressively, he has recreated himself as a mental health warrior, speaking about his own mental health, and using his platform to proselytise the value of exercise in alleviating depression. A deceptively thoughtful guy, he talks about this with none of the glibness you might anticipate from the born-again pugilist. He refrains from peddling a miracle cure. “Mental illness never goes away,” he said a while ago. “You can’t defeat it, you’ve got to learn to manage and maintain – and I seem to be doing a good job of that at the moment.” Not half.

With Prince Harry currently fixating on whether he can trademark “SussexRoyal”, Fury’s emergence as an eloquent advocate for mental health is perfectly-timed.

His blood isn’t blue; nor is the crown he wore into the ring real. Nonetheless, Tyson Fury became British royalty today. What’s more, if he continues to radiate redemption, and to offer himself as inspiration to those in pain who have mislaid hope, his legend might even outlast that of House Windsor.