A smiling Fury made his entrance in typical fashion – dancing onto the stage and playing to the crowd before crossing immediately to shake Makhmudov’s hand.<\/p>\n
There has been little animosity between the pair during fight week. Fury even blew a kiss at his opponent during a promotional appearance earlier in the week.<\/p>\n
The news conference itself felt at times like a rerun of the previous launch news conference when the fight was first revealed. Makhmudov rarely engaged in any back-and-forth despite the host’s attempts to spark a war of words.<\/p>\n
Makhmudov spent most of the time glancing at his phone, drawing criticism from heavyweight great Lennox Lewis who was part of the TV broadcast. <\/p>\n
The 36-year-old did address one unusual training method \u2013 wrestling a bear. “But I don’t want to try this anymore because it was so scary,” he added.<\/p>\n
Eventually, Fury – whose record stands at 34 wins from 37 fights, with 24 knockouts, alongside two defeats and one draw – seized the spotlight. <\/p>\n
He described himself as “speedy, skilful, handsome and destructive”.<\/p>\n
“I’ve never lost my speed of reactions. I’ve still got it \u2013 100%,” he added. “I’m looking for as good a performance as it can be after [nearly] 16 months out. I must have done 500 rounds of sparring to prepare.”<\/p>\n
The ‘Gypsy King’ later wandered over to join the broadcast team, where he could be heard shouting: “I’m on top of the world, baby.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A smiling Fury made his entrance in typical fashion – dancing onto the stage and playing to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":522147,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[2560,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-522146","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=522146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/522147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=522146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=522146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=522146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}