Anthony Joshua has embraced a warrior’s life, and he feels that boxers are not like the rest of the civilized people. Their life is filled with hurting their opponents and inflicting pain.
IBF/WBA/WBO heavyweight champion Joshua (24-1, 22 KOs) will be doing his best to make WBC champion Tyson Fury suffer when the two meet this June for their undisputed championship.
With five months to go before the mega-fight, Joshua is already hard at work in training camp. The way he’s looking right now, you would believe that his match with the unbeaten Fur (30-0-1, 21 KOs) is only weeks away instead of many months.
“Some people may not understand it, I’ve realized in this life that 99% of the population are civilized people,” said Joshua on social media. “The job I’ve chosen is for the uncivilized. This is a sport of combat and war. We’re not civilized people, we’re warriors – and I love it.”
The way that Fury was talking this weekend, he sounds mentally beaten down already. He is complaining about how he’ll have been out of the ring for 18 months by the time he fights Joshua, and he’s not happy about it.
Fury’s management tried to get a fight for him last December, but they couldn’t put anything together. Although Fury has been training hard throughout the shutdown, it’s not the same thing obviously as being inside the ring fighting elite-level contenders.
Joshua recently defended against his IBF mandatory Kubrat Pulev last December, and he fought well in knocking out the big Bulgarian in the ninth round. AJ looked likes improved greatly from the fighter that lost to Andy Ruiz Jr in 2019.
Joshua is boxing well, and the uppercut that he was using against Pulev looked lethal. If Joshua hits Fury with that same punch, it’s going to be an early night for him.
It’s going to be interesting to see what kind of game plan Fury uses to try and beat Joshua. Will he bulk up to the 270 and try to overwhelm Joshua with size as he did against Deontay Wilder, or will he come in a trim 250 and look to box AJ the way that Wladimir Klitschko was doing for long stretches in their fight in 2017
Trying to use size to beat Joshua may prove to be a mistake for Fury because it’ll put him in harm’s way of his punches. Fury fought Wilder at medium to close range all night in their rematch last year, and he got away with it. Wilder doesn’t have an inside game to speak of, but Joshua does. If Fury fights like that against Joshua, he’s going to be inviting trouble.
