Behind the Mask Read online

  But that’s not how I was playing it to the outside world, particularly when it came to a press conference in London, with the fight now just four weeks away. It was going to be pay-per-view on Sky Box Office as well as on the big cable company in the States, HBO, and with just a month to go the usual media hype had to be cranked up. I was ready to do just that, so I decided to arrive in style at the press conference – in a yellow Lamborghini and, dressed in a Batman costume.

  Sky’s boxing boss Adam Smith was there to host the press conference and he loved it, as did the media who were packed into the room. The Batman music went up, I ran around the room and then playfully leapt from the top table to chuck out Batman’s number one enemy, the Joker! The Klitschko camp didn’t know what to make of it, but if they thought I was just a bit of a joker, I quickly let them know that I would be all business in Germany. After changing into a smart suit, I stood up and stared down at Klitschko and told him that his reign was coming to an end. I may have been struggling in the gym, and struggling mentally myself over the last year, but I was still determined to mess with his head and let him know that I was not going to fall apart like so many of his other opponents.

  ‘You may have fought a load of peasants before but you’ve never fought a Gypsy King before, so now you’re getting knocked out!’ I roared at Klitschko. Instead of Adam Smith playing host, I just took over and pointed to the media one by one, calling on them to ask their questions. One journalist decided to direct a question to Klitschko, so I just immediately retorted, ‘Next question!’ Klitschko was the heavyweight champion of the world and I was turning it into The Tyson Fury Show. I even pointed at my wife Paris, who asked me, ‘How much do you love me?’ to which I naturally replied, ‘The whole world.’

  Klitschko, so used to being quietly respected by the majority of his opponents, was sitting bewildered as I held court. When it was time for him to speak he droned on so much about this and about that, that I got fed up and I got to my feet, offering to fight him right there and then. ‘I came in as a superhero and you seem to have superhero powers in boring people to death!’ I quipped as he naturally insisted his reign would continue when we clashed. ‘I usually train three times a day but I’ve upped it to four times a day. I normally spar around 110, 120 rounds but for this fight I’ve sparred 200 rounds,’ said Klitschko, who had reigned for nine years.

  The war of words continued when we sat across the table from each other on Sky’s The Gloves are Off and I told him exactly why he would lose – that my speed and agility would be too much for him. I knew that this would be the case if I was in great shape, but with four weeks to go I was worried about having enough in the tank to be able to deliver. But I knew I was getting to him psychologically when he denied the fact that I had beaten him in that sauna challenge during his training camp in Austria five years earlier!

  The famous military strategist Sun Tzu in his book The Art of War says that all war is based on deception, and that was the way I played it with Klitschko all the way to fight time. I knew he wasn’t going to be facing the best Tyson Fury but, crucially, he believed he was because I told everyone who would listen that I was on top of the world.

  The fight had to be postponed for a month because Klitschko got injured and that helped a little, but even then I still wasn’t where I ideally wanted to be. I did have a lot more energy and in every fight I go into I genuinely believe that in the ring I am unbeatable. There, I can see things before they happen, I anticipate so well and that is something I was born with – maybe it’s in my genes because I later learned that my grandmother Patience was sometimes a fortune teller!

  But as I have said earlier in the book, the reason I beat Wladimir Klitschko was because God empowered me to do it. There was no other way I could have won. As soon as the fight began, I had an overwhelming sense that this was my night, that I was in total control. Of course, I had to stay focused because I was aware that Klitschko was called Dr Steelhammer for a reason. He could put anyone to sleep if they switched off – in the press conference and in the ring!

  As the fight wore on, I was achieving what many people had believed was impossible, but I could hardly allow myself to think for a moment that the job was done, even right up until the twelfth and final round. As I prepared to go out for the last three minutes, I knew I was close to my dream and told myself, ‘Don’t mess it up now.’ In that last round he caught me more times with heavy shots than in the previous eleven rounds combined. I had to stand and fight to take his belt and he caught me flush with a right hand to the jaw, a punch that had buried so many opponents in the past. But I just looked back at him and laughed. If that wasn’t divine intervention, I don’t know what is.

  Every big shot he landed I just took; it must have been soul-destroying for him. I had been hurt more in sparring so there were clearly Holy hands on me that night. I had told everyone that this was going to be a changing of the guard and that a new era would be starting and that’s exactly what happened.

  I had climbed my Everest and yet when I got back to the dressing room after the fight, once the initial shock and the excitement from the ring and the victory had worn off, there were not any great feelings of emotion. It didn’t sink in then and I don’t think it has even now. I was there with my family and close friends and it was a special moment because it had been some journey to get there. I remember going to do a test for the drugs people and the pain in my feet was awful. I had developed nasty blisters because I had been moving so much in the fight, twisting and turning as I bamboozled Klitschko with my boxing – just as I had told him I would.

  ‘I wanted to land more clean punches. Tyson was quick with his hands and head movement and I couldn’t land the clean punches,’ sighed Klitschko at the post-fight press conference. But while I was the champion I probably looked as down as he did because I could already sense the depression was coming my way like the early tremors of an earthquake signalling what was to happen next. I should have felt like the king of the world, and an hour earlier hugging Paris in the ring, I did. But now my mood was swinging in another direction, even though those around me were naturally filled with joy at seeing me fulfil my dream.

  One moment that night that stands out was seeing my manager Mick Hennessy at two o’clock in the morning. Mick and I had ended up in what seemed like a remake of the Tom Cruise movie Jerry Maguire, when Jerry and his client Rod Tidwell, played by Cuba Gooding Jr, eventually hit the jackpot in the NFL when nobody else believed it was possible – when everyone else had stopped believing in them. I know that me winning the heavyweight titles was a special moment for Mick; it was more than just business for him – he shed tears of joy. But it was tears of laughter that I remember from that night. Because when you win a world title you don’t actually get to keep the belt they give you in the ring as it still belongs to the other fighter; you have to wait for your belt – or belts in this case – to be sent to you. But we didn’t realise this. We just thought we could take the belts – so we did. I went to bed pretty quickly after getting back to the hotel but I couldn’t sleep and I could hear this singing in the hallway. When I looked out the door there was Mick in his underpants, clicking his heels and dancing down the hall with all the belts! Our Jerry Maguire story was complete.

  The next morning I was still in a bit of a daze and woke up wanting to make sure that I hadn’t just dreamed about beating Wladimir Klitschko. But it was real and so was the fact that just the day before the fight, Paris had told me that she was pregnant with our third child after two years of trying to have another baby. That was such a blessing and it also meant that she obviously couldn’t fly home. So instead of flying home business class, as you might expect being the new heavyweight champion of the world, we drove from Germany to Rotterdam with my friend Dave and got on the overnight ferry to England. I had a good drink with some of the fans who had travelled to Düsseldorf. They were shocked to see the new champion on a ferry but there’s no arrogance with me, I’ll always be the s
ame guy! We sang a few songs and had some good craic. I really appreciated everyone who made that trip and believed that I could upset the odds and defeat Klitschko in his backyard, when so many others thought it was mission impossible.

  When I eventually got home, it was a touching and wonderful moment to see the kids again after being away for so long. It was back to being dad and that has always been my best job and the best time for me. I know how much the victory meant to my family and friends and that was special. But personally, although I had climbed to the mountain top, my fall was about to begin. It wouldn’t be long before the biggest fight of my life felt like nothing at all.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Dark

  June 2016, Manchester

  ‘No! Stop! Think about your kids!’

  The Ferrari screeched to a halt. My heart was pounding. I could hardly breathe.

  The smell of burnt tyre rubber and exhaust fumes filled the car. My hands were gripped to the steering wheel. I was shaking uncontrollably, tears welling up in my eyes thinking about my kids. I couldn’t believe what I had done and was in a state of shock. How had I got to this point where everything in my life counted for nothing? I had nearly thrown it all away: my life, my family, my dreams. I felt ashamed and racked with guilt.

  . . .

  I was the best heavyweight boxer on the planet when I tried to take my life in 2016. But when it comes to depression it doesn’t matter who you are. Depression doesn’t mean that you’re a weak person or a bad person; it’s an ailment that some of us have to face up to. Throughout my life, I have found that depression has made me behave in different ways. At one point, as we shall come to later in the book, I even thought I had demons inside of me because of the way I was behaving. But I have always felt something, an anxiety that could rise up from nowhere, and I haven’t always known how to handle it.

  When I was a child I would often be hit with this sudden, awful sensation of feeling alone. It would make me feel worried and nervous, and this sensation in itself would then make me even more apprehensive. Growing up in the Travellers community, if you had a problem you were seen as weak. Because of this stigma, for many years I didn’t know who to talk to about how I was feeling. I didn’t think I could be honest, or that I could open up to anyone about what I was going through. It was really only in 2017, when I was nearly thirty, that the penny dropped and I fully accepted that it was depression.

  When I started out as a professional boxer I made a decision that, on reflection now, has played a big part in exacerbating my moments of despair. I went into the paid ranks off the back of an amateur career during which I was aware of racism against Travellers. This made me an outsider, and so I felt that for me to get the attention, I needed to be an attraction in the sport, I had to play the outlaw. I had to shout my mouth off, be brash and let the natural entertainer in me take over in a shocking way. Don’t get me wrong, to this day I still like to show off and give fans some entertainment before and after my fights so that they feel they’ve had good value for money from coming to see me fight. But in the first part of my career it was different. I felt that I had to act out a role to seek publicity, and to do that I had to be controversial and to shock people with how I talked.

  To some degree, it worked. I developed a following and a certain notoriety. But playing the role of the bad guy got to the point where I didn’t know what was real and what was the act. It was as if I had lost myself along the way in my own larger-than-life WWE character, and this led to my profanity on Twitter, and to me sounding arrogant and cocky when the cameras came on. I felt that I had to be controversial to make the headlines, and that this would create interest in me in the same way that it had worked for other fighters like Muhammad Ali, Chris Eubank and Prince Naseem Hamed.

  What people don’t always understand about professional boxing is that it is not just a sport. It’s a business. Promoters want fighters who put bums on seats; television channels want characters that fans will tune in to watch. You can be an elite boxer but get paid buttons compared to someone who is more charismatic, who is more colourful or controversial, or who has a bigger fan base, even if they are not as good a fighter. In fact, talented fighters whose faces don’t fit are often pushed to the sidelines. It’s a dirty business and you have to realise that; you can’t put your head in the sand. So I went down the road of being the bad boy. For all the talent I had, I felt that if I played the nice guy I probably wouldn’t have got the chance to fight for the world title. Ultimately it came at a price, and that was my mental health issues, which had constantly bubbled away just under the surface.

  Everything came crashing down on me after I shocked everyone by beating Wladimir Klitschko in Germany in November 2015. Instead of the beginning of a golden period in my career, it was the start of two years of hell. This began when I expected to return to a hero’s welcome; after all, I had achieved more than Frank Bruno by winning more than one heavyweight belt with my victory, and I had equalled the feat of Lennox Lewis by being awarded The Ring magazine’s coveted belt, which is awarded to the lineal champion – the man who is seen as following in the footsteps of the all-time greats such as Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman and Mike Tyson.

  However, when I got back to Britain I went from being a bit of a rogue in the eyes of the boxing public to British sport’s number one bad boy. I returned to so much negativity. Most of the media didn’t want to give me any credit or praise for my victory because of the Tyson Fury they thought they knew. I confess I didn’t react as I should have done, and I regret now how I came across at times. I was angry and I felt under-appreciated. I had worked so hard to get to this point in my career; it had been my dream since I was a boy to become the heavyweight champion of the world. But now when I had finally got to the end of the rainbow, the pot of gold seemed to be missing.

  The world tells of success as such a wonderful story, the pinnacle of happiness. But my experience was that there was just a void, and it felt like everyone was trying to get something from me. This was a fate that previous heavyweight champions had suffered as well. I wanted to get back to being a dad and a husband again, but there was an emptiness, a darkness that had descended upon me.

  This feeling was compounded by the two torturous events that I mentioned at the start of this book, which had happened in the year leading up to the Klitschko fight: the death of my uncle Hughie; and Paris’s heart-breaking miscarriage when she was six months pregnant. I hadn’t fully mourned either of those losses, and I had pushed them to the back of my mind when I was training for the Klitschko fight. But now they came rising to the surface like the lava in a volcano, spilling out and sending me deeper and deeper into a mental place from which I felt I would never recover.

  I headed into 2016 in a bad way and it just got worse. It didn’t help that there was no sign of a first title defence on the horizon. If I’d had a date, I think it might have focused my mind in some way to return to training, and to look ahead to the next fight. But who really knows because I was in such bad shape. I had hoped that I would be defending my belts in America, possibly back at Madison Square Garden in New York, as that been mentioned. But then it became clear that nothing was in the pipeline, and also that a voluntary defence, which every new champion normally has, was not on the cards either. There was constant talk about a rematch with Klitschko but even that was dragging on and on.

  When I had beaten Klitschko I had won three of the main four world title belts (WBO, WBA and IBF), but I was stripped of the IBF heavyweight crown within a couple of weeks. When you hold more than one title it is hard to keep all the governing bodies happy because they all have their number one challengers who they want you to fight. But when it comes to boxing politics there are some fighters who can find themselves being treated more leniently than others. I felt like I clearly wasn’t going to have any favours done for me even though I had just become the top heavyweight on the planet.

  Part of the deal of me challenging Klitschko
was that there had to be a rematch and so I naturally expected that to happen. It was obviously going to be another massive fight and I thought I would be receiving a big pay-day. In this kind of situation, often a governing body will allow you time to deal with your rematch commitment before facing your mandatory challenger, but because I wouldn’t face the unknown Ukrainian Vyacheslav Glazkov the IBF took the belt away. The title was declared vacant and Glazkov went on to fight, and lose to, American Charles Martin. Neither man was an elite-level heavyweight and Martin’s victory opened the door to Anthony Joshua, who at this stage was unbeaten in fifteen fights. He stepped up and knocked out Martin in April 2016.

  While all this was going on, I sank to a point where I didn’t care about anything at all. I didn’t care about my wife, my kids, about living, or about dying. Nothing. I went anywhere and everywhere. I’d often get in my car and drive hundreds of miles. I drove from Lancaster to Land’s End and John o’Groats, just for the hell of it. Sometimes I’d randomly get on a plane to Dublin and spend the day just walking around the city. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I would even take flights to America on my own. If anyone recognised me or said hello and wanted to take a picture of me, that would make me angry. I wanted to shout, ‘Just leave me alone.’ I wanted to go somewhere that nobody knew me, where I could be totally isolated. I’ve since learned from doctors that when you’re suffering from mental health issues, responsibilities don’t matter because responsibilities are for rational-thinking people. But if you’re thinking the way I was, nothing matters. I couldn’t be bothered.

  Throughout the whole of 2016 it felt like I didn’t spend a single weekend at home. I was completely walking away from my responsibilities. I would go out most days with my brothers to the pub. My house was getting renovated and Paris and I were living in the caravan, and she was being left behind. The drink would make me feel good at times and I would be thinking, ‘Tyson is back.’ But it was an illusion and the next day it would hit me hard again that I was feeling worthless.