Tyson Fury to fight on September 28

By Tim Royner

Boxingnews24.com

Former heavyweight champion Tyson Fury revealed this week that he has a fight date already scheduled on September 28th after he gets done with his warm-up match against the highly ranked #2 WBO Tom Schwarz on June 15. Fury (27-0-1, 19 KOs) doesn’t have an opponent yet for the September 28th date, but it’s expected to be someone along the same lines as Schwarz. In other words, a fighter with limited talented an inflated ranking by one of the sanctioning bodies.

Top Rank Boxing, the new co-promoters for the 30-year-old Fury, want to build him up in the United States by putting him in showcase fights where he looks good against beatable opposition.

“I’ll be fighting on September 28th. In the next six months I’ll be active. I’ve got three dates,” Fury said to BT Sport.

When a fighter is given three fight dates in six months, that’s an alarm bell that suggests that he’s going to be put in with poor opposition. There’s nothing wrong with Fury fighting obscure contenders and/or journeyman level opposition. He missed a lot of action when he was out of boxing from late 2015 to 2018. You can’t blame Fury for fighting moderate level opposition. He didn’t finish well in his last fight against WBC heavyweight champion Deontay Wilder in getting knocked down in the 9th and 12th rounds. By fighting guys that aren’t rated highly in the real sense, it gives Fury and his new promoters a chance to make sure that there wasn’t any lasting damage from his fight with Wilder. Fury even wonders himself whether he’ll be the same after the way Wilder knocked him down.

“I won’t make the same mistake Wladimir Klitschko made thinking this is a routine defense,” Fury said about his fight against the 24-year-old 6’5″ Tom Schwarz on June 15. “This isn’t a routine defense. This is a dangerous hungry lion, who is coming to knock me out. He’s got 16 knockouts in 24 wins. I think he’s as good a boxer that’s out there, to be honest. As good as anyone out there. Underestimate him and I’ll be chinned for sure. I don’t think anybody can out-box me. I’m the most elite boxer on the planet, always. So he’s got to knock me out. You’ve seen Deontay Wilder put me on the canvas twice. So maybe Tom Schwarz can do it. Nobody really knows how a fighter recovers and acts after they’ve been knocked down like I was in my last fight. So maybe the chin’s gone, and maybe it’s not. We won’t know until we watch the fight, will we? I might get chinned by Tom Schwarz. I’m not underestimating anybody, because I know they’re gunning for that one opportunity to show what they’ve got. This is the big game. Welcome to the big time. It’s Las Vegas. The lineal championship will be on the line. I’ll be training like a Trojan warrior like I always do. This is England vs. Germany. This is the greatest rivalry on the planet,” Fury said.

As you can see, Fury is getting a little carried away in working up a lather talking about his mismatch against the German fighter Schwarz. Hopefully this race to the bottom doesn’t become the norm for Fury. It would be a waste of his career. This will be Fury’s fourth fight back, and his third mismatch. He’s had two fodder-level opponents in Pianeta and Sefera, and Schwarz will be his third. It doesn’t matter that the World Boxing Organization has Schwarz rated #2 with their organization and the IBF has him at #9. If you saw how pedestrian Schwarz looked in his fight against Senad Gashi in their fight last year in April, you’ll know that he has no business being ranked as high as he is with those organizations. The way Schwarz struggled against Gashi, he looks more like a heavyweight belongs outside of the top 15. Gashi head-butted Schwarz in the sixth round, and he went down. Gashi ended up being disqualified. It looked to a lot of boxing fans like Schwarz flopped in order to win by a disqualification. That looked bad, but what was worse was how Schwarz struggled the entire fight. He looked lost against a guy that should have been an easy for him, given his high ranking with the WBO.

We don’t know whether Fury’s punch resistance will be the same after the Wilder fight. The 12th round knockdown of Fury in which he was clearly unconscious might have done something to his ability to take a punch. We’ll have to see how well Fury stands up to the shots of Schwarz on June 15th. Luckily for Fury, Schwarz isn’t a puncher, because if he was, he might finish the job that Deontay started.

Since returning from his long layoff from boxing, Fury has beaten Sefer Seferi and Francisco Pianeta, and fought to a 12 round draw against Wilder. Fury was going to fight a rematch with Wilder, but he signed with Top Rank and they nixed those plans and chose to match him against Schwarz on June 15th at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada. The fight was be shown on ESPN.R