The KSI-Fury fight was wrestling-style choreographed fraud

Jim White, The Independent

Back in 2006, a filmmaker called Stevan Riley turned his camera on the annual Varsity boxing match between the students of Oxford and Cambridge universities and in the process produced a wonderful film called Blue Blood. Embedded with the Oxford team, by chance Riley was able to deliver one of the funniest moments in documentary history. It involves a self-satisfied undergraduate who turns up at the university boxing club and announces he wants to join the team. He has no experience in the sport, he tells the coach, but he is studying philosophy. And he insists that while he may have the physique of an undernourished shrimp, as an advocate of stoicism he has a brain sufficiently well trained to withstand any pain. Mind over matter and all that.

Looking at the nerdish newcomer, the coach is sceptical to say the least. But the lad is adamant. So the coach suggests the best thing is to give him a couple of minutes sparring to test his theoretical resilience. And he puts him in the ring with an established member of the team (who he quietly advises to take it easy). The pair begin and within seconds the regular has landed a sharp blow to the end of the newcomer’s nose. At which the wannabe Marcus Aurelius falls to the canvas, clutching his face, blubbing. “Ow, ow, ow,” he cries, “that really hurt.”

As the lad discovered, boxing is not a sport for the faint-hearted. It is ferocious, damaging and, for the uninitiated, extremely dangerous. It takes years of exhaustive training to become a contender; dozens of scraps in the undercard before there is a chance of the big time. There can be no short cuts. Or at least that used to be the case. On Saturday, Olajide Olayinka Williams Olatunji, a full-time social media influencer known as KSI, whose YouTube channel has some 24 million subscribers, took to the ring at the AO Arena in Manchester. He was up against Tommy Fury, the younger brother of the heavyweight world champion Tyson, who began his working life training to become a professional fighter before being diverted from the ring to appear on the reality show Love Island. An engagement about as elevated as those white-collar bouts that punctuate the courses at City of London dinners, this was a fight with nothing riding on it. No belts were at stake, no titles were being fought over, in terms of quality purists would have been better off going to watch an evening at the York Hall Bethnal Green.

Yet, thanks to the social media prowess of the two participants, it was a fight promoted with all the razzmatazz of a championship showdown. The television channel DAZN pushed it as if it were the most significant scrap in the sporting calendar, the must-see-and-be-seen-at event of the year. For those unable to attend (and all 21,000 tickets in the Arena, incredibly, sold out within half an hour of going on sale) it was available to watch live on television. At a cost: £19.99 or $54.99 in USA. Astonishingly, 1.3 million people forked out, generating revenue close to £26m. The kind of cash that the sport’s leading contenders like Anthony Joshua and Fury’s big brother would be pushed to match.

And what a waste of money it proved to be. This was a fight less DAZN than DZULL. Eighteen minutes of grappling and grabbing, clinching and shoving with barely a punch thrown. There is more visceral excitement in Prime Minister’s Questions than there was in that ring. Fury, as the professional fighter should, won. But only just. Initially it was on a split decision which was amended to unanimous after one of the judges — having presumably fallen asleep at the critical moment — admitted he had totted up his scorecard incorrectly the first time. But the lack of quality will ultimately prove irrelevant. Boxing enthusiasts may have watched through their fingers, but the financial returns mean this will not be the last example of this kind of wretched parody.