“Moses is very talented but also very young and raw. Whatever Moses is at 21, in five years’ time, 10 years’ time, he’ll be 10 times better, 10 times stronger, more experienced. He’s an amazing boxer, talented.
“But here’s the thing: he was in there against a battle-hardened veteran in Hrgovic who’s been in the game 20 years, who’s fought a hundred fights as an amateur and all styles around the world. And as we saw for the first six, seven rounds, Moses outclassed him. But when it came to the stretch, the championship distance, the young man wasn’t ready to go down the straight with a veteran who trained hard, looked in fantastic shape, dedicated himself, and is in the prime of his life at 34.
“Knocking out a low-level man is different to knocking out a world-class man. Different power, different toughness, different everything. I said to everybody who would listen, this is too soon. This guy needs another four, five fights. What’s the rush? He’s 21.”
‘Itauma knocked himself out’
Fury accepts that “when you are trying to build somebody into a superstar and beat records, they put them in early, they made a mistake and it’s cost them”.
He adds: “Not only has it cost Moses the hundred-million-dollar career as a superstar athlete – like LeBron James and all those people – when you’ve been banjoed like that it’s difficult to turn that around mentally. It’s about getting the balance right, getting with somebody who’s not that dangerous, who’s durable, who can take punishment and give him the rounds.
“It’s not rocket science. If you go from not going past four rounds to jumping into a 12-round world-title fight without winning anything along the way… if you look at my career, I won English, Irish, British, Commonwealth, European, every international belt there was along the way and every world-title belt, too: Lineal, Ring Magazine, everything you can think of… I did it the traditional route.
“And it’s done like that for a reason because when you finally get to that point when I was 27 – and I was 24-0 when I fought Wladimir Klitschko, even though I was a 10-1 underdog – I was ready.