Oliver Holt: Thanks for making the time. It’s very kind of you. I know how busy you are. First thing I was going to ask you, and it’s not really an original question, it’s a question I saw in an interview with Sean Penn in the Sunday Times Magazine and the guy…it’s a slightly actorish question, I suppose, but the interviewer asked him ‘what do you see when you look in the mirror?’ and I thought it was quite a good opening.

Tyson Fury: What do I see when I look in the mirror? One handsome man. No, I see the same person I have seen for the last 27 years, the person I believed I could be when I was a child, the person I have inspired and dreamed to be all my life and that’s the person I have seen from being that big to as big as the roof, the same guy.

OH: Do you see somebody complicated? Are you a straightforward guy?

TF: Anything but straightforward. Awkwardness to the utmost, highest level. Whatever is conventional, I am the opposite. So if you want to walk in a straight line, I am going to walk in zigzags. If you want to throw a 1-2, I’ll throw a 2-1. Whatever is back to front, that works for me in life because I don’t want to be an ordinary person because ordinary, you do ordinary things, you are on an ordinary level. I always aim for high levels in everything I do.

OH: Have you worked at being unconventional. When you say awkward, were you an awkward kid, were you an unconventional kid. Is it something that you have always been?

TF: I have always been, yeah. Even from the beginning, I have always been not straightforward. Nothing has run smoothly with me throughout my life. Everything has had ups and downs and lefts and rights and that’s just the way it has panned out for me unfortunately. Sometimes you can take a negative and make it a positive. For me, it’s worked. Because my unorthodox style of boxing and my unorthodox approach to fights and build-ups and all that sort of stuff, some people love that sort of stuff and that side because when they are an average person, they don’t see that all the time. It’s entertaining for you to see that sometimes. Some people love it, some people hate it. Some people think I’m a barm cake. I don’t really care what they think of me to be honest.

OH: I appreciate we all go through different phases of our life, phases when we are happy and phases when we are not as happy. I read a piece you did several years ago with Donald McRae in the Guardian, I’m sure you’ll remember because it is referred back to when you do these kinds of things, where you were not in a great place at the time you did that. You were talking about how sometimes you wanted to get in a car and drive it into a wall and that you went through very much highs and lows. Is that still the case? Do you still have those moments? Or are you in a happier place now than you were then.

TF: Oh yes, I still have those moments but I have learned to channel it. I have figured out a solution for me to survive in life and go on and live until I am going to die, basically. The place I was in before, I am no longer there because I have channelled it with God. Every time I stray away from the Lord’s word, I find emptiness and darkness. Which is obviously because if I am in a dark world, which the world is very evil out there and people may think I am a lunatic or whatever or a bible basher or an insane lunatic but it’s very, very true and if you believe in the word, then you believe what I am saying. We live in an evil world. The devil is very strong at the minute. Very strong. And I believe the end is near. The bible tells me the end is near. The world tells me the end is near. Just a little short few years, I reckon, away from being finished.

OH: Armageddon?

TF: Yeah.

OH: When you say the world tells you the end is near, do you mean the way we are abusing the planet and that kind of stuff?

TF: Abusing the planet, the wars in the Middle East, the famines, the earthquakes, the natural disasters, all these things are talked about 2,000 years ago before they even happened. Prophesised. So now it is all coming true. It says there will be a time when men lay with men and women lay with women and that’s accepted and it’s only in 1967 when these things were OK: abortions, being homosexual in public. So from 1967 until now. There are only three things that need to be accomplished before the Devil comes home. One of them is homosexuality being legal in countries, one of them is abortion and the other is paedophilia. So who would have thought in the 50s and early 60s that those first two would be legalised. When I say paedophiles can be made legal, that sounds like crazy talk doesn’t it but back in the 50s and early 60s, for them first two to be made legal would have been looked on as a crazy man again. If I would have told you 120 years ago that a thousand tonne aeroplane was going to float through the sky, a piece of steel, ludicrous. When Christopher Columbus said the world was round, he’s an idiot. All these things that happen in the world, wise men already know they are going to happen and they see what they really are. Foolish people follow the system, get caught up in media news, what the government want you to believe and the world and all the higher powers want you to believe and want you to be in the system, want you go down the same path as all the sheep in the cattle market.

OH: As you’ve already said, you probably don’t care, but a lot of people will be uncomfortable with that kind of view of homosexuality, that it is something wrong.

TF: To be honest, this is a free world we live in and an evil world. For me, people can say ‘oh, you’re against abortions and you’re against paedophilia, you’re against homosexuality, you’re against whatever’ but my faith and my culture is all based on the bible. The bible was written a long time ago, wasn’t it, from the beginning of time until now so if I follow that and that tells me it’s wrong, then it’s wrong for me. That’s just my opinion. How many people have different opinions in this world? (Pointing to a bottle on the table) Every different person has a different opinion of what that bottle really is or what colour is or something. If I say that bottle is clear, there will be someone out there telling me that bottle is green or blue or whatever. That’s just their opinion and my opinion. Well, my opinion is I follow what the Lord says, or try to. And what opinions of people out there who are doing what they are doing, they are following what they want to do. They are living for themselves. I am trying to live for God.

OH: Has your faith grown stronger in the last few years? I read a couple of things that you flirted with Islam. Is it a Christian faith you have embraced?

TF: To be honest, I wouldn’t say I’m a part of any cult group or religious stamp. For me, religion is just about politics, money and war. It’s all about power and a control method to control people. I wouldn’t say I’m a member of Islam, I’m a member of Christianity, I’m a member of Buddhism, I’m a member of anything like that. I’m having a personal relationship with the Almighty. Whatever you could call that, you could call it. But I don’t put myself in any groups at all. Just like these political parties, member of that, member of that, member of that. I’m an independent candidate, basically, for God. That’s what I want to be. I don’t want to be grouped in anybody’s religion. I believe that all religion, all it does is causes death.

OH: Well, I agree with you about that.

TF: That’s from a man, the outlook would say ‘oh he’s a religious guy, he goes to church, he reads the scriptures’. For me, it’s not about religion. It’s about having a one on one relationship with your creator. For people who don’t understand, that might sound stupid, or for non-believers, but as proof as that bottle is on that table, that’s how strong I know there’s an after-life. And the reason being that is, because if we just was born to die for 70 years or 90 or 15 or 20 years, then what is the point in being born in the beginning. What is it for? To buy a house and a car and get old and die? For me, that would be a pointless life lived. Because all we are doing, we suffer throughout this life. We come into it as children, we get older and older and the older we get, the more responsibilities we get, the more stress becomes on us and the more we start thinking about stuff and the pressures of the world and you get caught up in worldly things. ie wanting, wanting, wanting all the time. Throughout history, money has always been an object where if a man had a billion, he’d want 10 billion. You have only got to look at King Saul, the anointed king of Israel. King David. They were given the world basically. They had everything that money could buy. Riches that today don’t exist. Because everything today, we live in a microwave generation basically. It’s like everything is built in seconds. It’s not took time. It’s mass produced in a factory somewhere, made out of cardboard, plastic. There you go, take that home, break in two weeks. But years ago, back in the day, they were hand built out of gold and precious metals. They had much more riches than they do today basically and things were built properly and they lasted for thousands of years. Even then, they couldn’t behave themselves. When they were given everything the world had to offer but still couldn’t behave and still defied God. So history doesn’t like tales of truth. So all mankind has to do is look back in the past to see what the future is going to hold. The past tells me that no matter what we have in life, we are always going to chase, chase, chase. When is enough enough?

OH: When is enough enough? That applies to you, too. In terms of your career, the purses you earn, do you ask yourself those questions as well? I guess what I’m trying to grope towards here is how does this relate to boxing?

TF: It’s got nothing to do with boxing, I don’t think. My faith and my outlook on life has nothing to do with my way of earning a few quid, basically. I don’t just see it as a way of earning some money. I believe I can be used much more beneficial to spread the word of God throughout the world than maybe a thousand pastors could throughout their churches. They get a hundred people, or two hundred or a thousand people in their church. I can just go on Twitter, put one message on, over a quarter of a million of people have seen it. As a world champion, millions and millions of people around the world could see the light. So I could be used that way. But it’s no good me being used and setting a bad example. People have to see me change. It says ‘you will know somebody good by their fruits’. Which means, you will know by looking at their actions what they are about. A lot of the time, you see people change for the better but then they are just classed as lunatics and they have lost their marbles and all of that. Because what matters to man in world, whether it’s having a different house, having more money, having different cars, buying stuff, going to nice places, and enjoying things and enjoying the worldly assets that have been given to us in this world, but if we live for this world, we have to enjoy them things. These are the most important things to us. But if we don’t just live for this world and we are promised and we do believe there’s another life, then surely this doesn’t really matter what happens here. This is only a shell and I didn’t realise that this is only a shell and it’s not really a concern to me what happens to flesh until a close relative of mine died last year, which was my uncle Hughie, I was very close to him. Our tradition, with being travellers, when the dead die, we bring them back to the house and they lay them out in the coffin in their own home and they are there for seven days, they are mourned for seven days with candles and all that sort of stuff. When I walked in and I saw him laying in a box, it wasn’t him. It was an empty shell, just like that bottle’s empty, it’s going in the bin, it’s useless. The person I knew before was no longer there. Gone. It didn’t even look the same person. People may say it was just a dead body lying there. I’ve seen him a thousand times before. I have spent years with him. I know what he looks like and I know how he was. He was no longer there. He was gone from that place. He wasn’t there no more. Gone.

OH: Where was that, Tyson? Where was he taken back to?

TF: To his house in Lancaster. He was no longer there. Where was he? He was no longer there. Where was he? Do we just switch off like just switching a light bulb off and it’s finished? People say ‘you don’t know you was born so you won’t know you’re dying. When you go to sleep, you switch off but do you really switch off when you go to sleep or do we leave our bodies and go somewhere else because how real sometimes do we dream? When you dream it feels so realistic doesn’t it and you actually feel that you’re there. Maybe you’re in another dimension when you’re asleep and…sometimes when you have a dream or something, you remember it for the first five minutes and the longer it goes on, it disappears, it goes, you don’t remember anything and the big details have gone. Maybe that happens. That we really do travel somewhere else and we really are, mindly, somewhere else. They say we only use a small portion of our brains so maybe when we die, the full brain is unlocked, maybe we can time travel, maybe we can be anywhere at once. Maybe we can teleport. All these words and stuff, they’re not new words. Teleport and all that ain’t a new word because it’s written in the scriptures.

OH: Do you think your uncle’s death triggered some of this transformation in you, some of this embrace of faith in you?

TF: No, I have been involved and been around it my whole life. I wouldn’t say I was brought up as a bible-thumper or anything like that. I wasn’t religiously going to church every day but I was always brought up around it. I was always brought up around boxing, not necessarily forced to do it every day, but I was in the environment where I would learn and I was in the environment where I would learn about God. But I never took it seriously at all. I knew I read the bible, I did this and bits and pieces, on and off, on and off, doing this, doing that, doing this, as you do as a young kid. When I got married, I was 20 years old, I was trying to be a good person, I was trying to live right and do all the right things, everything was running smoothly. I was really happy at home. Everything was going well for me. Everything I touched seemed to turn to gold. I couldn’t fail. Whatever I done was really nice and happy and good. Then I started going down the wrong roads and going out partying and drinking and all that sort of stuff and forgetting about that, forgetting about what I really was based on and going somewhere else. It’s hard for a young good looking fella to go out and have some drinks and that and be approached by beautiful women, left, right and centre, practically chucking theirselves at me as a young man. It’s a hard temptation just to say ‘excuse me’. But the more I said ‘no’, the more I was being tempt and that is, for the first year or so, being a young married person and all that sort of stuff, I was very, very, very strong. The more I said ‘no’, the more I’d be tempted, the more my wife would accuse me of doing stuff, even though I wasn’t doing anything until it come to a point where you think ‘well, I’m being accused of it, it’s happening to me all the time, what do I do?’ Therefore, you are seeing yourself giving in to temptation and going down the wrong road completely. Taking your eye off the ball where really what I needed to do was get on my knees and beg for resistance and help.

OH: Is that what you did eventually?

TF: Yeah. That’s when I was going all these bad depression things. It wasn’t depression. The doctor didn’t say ‘you’ve got depression’ or whatever but you know when you’re down, don’t you.

OH: A kind of self-loathing?

TF: I was having bad days every day. Waking up in a bad mood, going to sleep in a bad mood daily. And it was because I took my eye off what was right and what was wrong. I went down the road of man. Every time I do that – take my eye off the Lord and go down what I want to do as a human being, what we are all programmed to do – it goes wrong for me. I go in a bad place. Depression. Everything goes wrong. I get fat. It is a terrible, horrible zone for me to go in. I never want to go there. I never knew how to control it. It has taken me 27 years to really know how to control my emotions.

OH: What flicked the switch then?

TF: I have been praying to God from being as small as I can remember. Always said my prayers at night time and that sort of stuff. I did believe in God. I believed in Jesus the Son, I believed in the Father and the Holy Spirit. All that sort of stuff, I believed in. It’s okay believing. The Devil believes in God. Demons believe in God. There are people out there who tell me that the Devil doesn’t exit and demons don’t exist. But there’s people like you who come here and do these interviews, there’s also people who practise exorcisms and casting demons out of people, that’s what they do for a living. Are they getting paid for something that’s totally ludicrous? Do they go to school and educate theirselves all their lives to do this for nothing. Just because we don’t see this as individuals doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist because there are bad things and good things going out there around the world all the time. Why are there so many priests and people of God and celibicism and all that sort of stuff and Buddhist monks who don’t talk forever, it can’t just be baloney can it, because why would man waste his precious time on earth if it was the only thing that was going to be beneficial to him. So I may sound daft but I’m actually not daft when it comes to it. I know what’s going on out there.

OH: What flicked the switch? Was there a moment?

TF: I got on my knees and I spoke to God and I said ‘listen, I believe, I’m going to do, I ain’t just going to say with this, please forgive me all the time, forgive me for this, help me to do that, forgive me for this.’ It says you have to repent for your sins but it is all right repenting and then going out and doing the same thing. I knew when I was repenting, I was going to keep repeat offending. It’s like these little petty criminals, they keep going to jail for six or seven weeks, they get out, they keep reoffending, they’re back in all their lives, reoffending and reoffending and not learning from their mistakes. How many times can a man be forgiven for his sins for the same thing, day in day out, day in day out, day in day out. There’s got to be a number. So I got down on my knees and I said ‘I believe, I am going to do it, actions speak louder than words’.

OH: How long ago was this?

TF: This was like a month ago or something like that. Even during this training camp, I have been in good mood, bad mood. I call it dipping. I dip in personality. I go up and down. But for the past month, nothing. I’ve kept positive the whole time. High spirited, perfect. You know how I do it. I take it one hour at a time. I don’t take even day by day. I just take hour by hour. I try and be good for that hour. I used to do a lot of swearing, naturally. It was just like saying hello and goodbye. Swearing to me wasn’t like doing something bad. It was my vocabulary. It was just coming out in sentences. I said to the Lord ‘please help me stop swearing’. I was begging to be helped to stop swearing for so long. I just kept doing it and doing it. Until one day I said ‘right, help me, I am going to do it myself, with your help. Only me can stop me doing all these things.’ It came to a point where I was counting how many times I would be swearing in a day. It would come down from like every second word until it was once or twice and I would try my best to, oi, before I even think about what I say, I know I’ve not got to say any bad things. When you are on to yourself all the time and you are checking yourself everything you do, you can change your ways and that is how I take it hour by hour and I try and be the best I can be hour by hour. It worked for me. It took me 27 years but it worked. People say to me ‘I’m sick of you, you’re in a good mood all the time.’ I phone my brother and I go ‘hi Shane, what are you doing’. And he says ‘you’re in a good mood again are you’. It’s like I’m constantly in a good mood. So if that’s making me happy and reading that bible is making me happy, it ain’t hurting anybody out there is it. I’ve got a mental hold on my mind so it must be beneficial to me. So there you are.

OH: Where was it where you got down on your knees?

TF: It was in here, in this room. I have had people come over to me and I have had experiences throughout my life and sometimes I have had people put in my path like preachers and spiritual people and all that and I have just ignored them, ‘he’s a lunatic, him’. Just like everybody else will think of me now, the way I’m talking. I’ve often thought that about other people. When you see a man who’s filled up with God, you think he’s round the bend. I don’t know if you’ve ever met many people like that but when a man’s highly spirited for the Lord, you’re thinking ‘he’s a nutcase, he’s lost his marbles’. If ever you want to get rid of somebody, you don’t want to talk to them, mention God. ‘Yeah, God, see you later’. Darkness don’t want to hear about the light. Evil don’t want to hear goodness. That’s my job, to spread the word. That’s what I’m doing. Look at me, how happy I am. I’m absolutely overflowing with joy and happiness for God. I’m in a beautiful place at the moment.

OH: I don’t know if you follow football but the Brazilian footballer Kaka after various big profile matches, he gets down on his knees and lifts his shirt up and it says ‘I believe in Jesus’ and you’re right, people think he’s a bit of a lunatic. Do you think that you become an ambassador, proselytiser, whatever, to spread the word mor? Do you think you will do something at the fights to reflect that?

TF: Definitely. All the fights I have had since I was professional, the first thing I have done is thank the Lord for my victory, every single time. Before the interview, I have always got scripture things on me and stuff like that. Kaka had a shirt on saying ‘I believe in Jesus’. For my biggest fight at the time, the first Chisora fight, I had a shirt on and on the back of it, it said ‘I found Jesus’. After the fight, when it was live on Channel 5 and millions of people watched it, people came over to me and said ‘how did you find Jesus, did you bump into him or whatever?’ Not just being clever but trying to know what I was talking about. I tried to tell them the best way I could explain. But sometimes I find myself quoting stuff and talking about stuff that has just come to me. I must have read it out of there and not clicked that I knew much about it until the subject comes up and then, bang, I’m on it. I can talk about it all the time.

OH: I’m not ignoring what you said before about the two things being separate but apart from the fact that you are in a happier place and a good mood, how do you think this embrace of faith will affect the fight?

TF: To be honest, people have been fighting throughout centuries. You have to fight for everything you want in life, whether it’s physical or not physical. Even through the scriptures that I believe in, people were fighting. Even when they had no chance, they were still fighting. The great story of David and Goliath, Goliath was a big monster of a man and a champion of a man who had never been beat and beat everybody and killed everybody and then this young guy came forward, child, who believed in God and done it and God gave him the power because of what was right and what was wrong. What was right will always prevail over wrong in the long run. Good will always prevail over evil no matter what it is, not necessarily right now but as time goes on it will always come back round.

OH: Do you see something of that in you versus Klitschko?

TF: Yes. To be honest with you, I know Klitschko is a devil worshipper.

OH: Right.

TF: They are involved in bigger circles and stuff like that and they do magic tricks and whatever.

OH: Do they?

TF: Yeah. Yeah, you can go on YouTube and watch him playing with magic and all that sort of stuff, Wladimir, and all these rock stars and singers and these famous people, it’s common knowledge that they are all involved in a cult group of Satan worshippers and all that sort of stuff. There again, a man who does evil things and worships an evil one, how can he win over a man who wants to do good things and preach good stuff? It ain’t going to happen. He can’t beat me now. Now I know what he is, a devil-worshipper, I know he has no chance of beating me.

OH: And now you know what you are?

TF: Basically. He has no chance of beating me now. God will not let him defeat me. Not at all. I am almost 1000% certain that he can’t beat me through what he does and his actions and what I do and what my actions are. If I want to do good things and do good to others and try and help people and that and you’ve got a man who wants to do bad things and preaching bad stuff and is all about money, gain and holding everything close to him and evil stuff conspiring and all that sort of stuff. Who’s going to be victorious in the long run.

OH: It’s an interesting point of view. Generally I think the Klitschkos are seen as boring and not particularly good for the fight game but I think the general view of them is as vaguely decent people but I guess people haven’t looked…

TF: I’ve figured them out. We’ve figured them out. We’ve been on to them. We’ve studied background, the lot. We’ve really come up with what they are. A lot of these famous people, successful people, they are all members of cult groups that worship the devil in different ways. Maybe I’m going to get in trouble. Maybe I’ll have someone come here and try and assassinate me for saying it.

OH: Well, they’re powerful people, certainly, aren’t they, within Ukraine, I think, for sure?

TF: Very much so. And you know, good overcomes evil and he who practises evil will never prosper. They live for this world. I don’t. The be all and end all of everything is their careers and money and what they can do and what they can achieve in life. My be all and end all is passing through here, trying to do a few good things on the way, helping people, it’s all about a test for me, going to a different planet, a different place, a heaven, where we are promised better life. If I can make it there, that’s my ultimate ambition, is to go to heaven. It ain’t about winning the titles for me. I’ve often said it’s not about belts, it’s not about all that sort of stuff and what they think success is. People think success is being rich and having a nice house and driving nice cars and being Mr Flash. Success isn’t that. Success is being happy and content in yourself in what you are doing in that period of your life.

OH: That can give you a fearlessness in the ring.

TF: That’s why I’m so fearless.

OH: We have seen that before in other fights. I’m going to forget the guy’s game now but when Eubank fought the Irish guy…

TF: Steve Collins.

OH: He was very unsettled, wasn’t he, by Steve Collins because he felt that Steve Collins had an edge over him psychologically and the same thing, this kind of talk, may have the same kind of effect on Wladimir.

TF: I think it has already. Wladimir is a control freak. He loves to have everything under control. He loves to know everything is there, there. Everything is placed right, the lot. He is very, very controlled. Everything is channelled. Everything he does is thought and planned out. It’s all about routine for him. So when you get someone who doesn’t value him for the sake of like…He tells people to look left, they look left. He says look right, they look right. He tells people how long they are going to interview him for, he tells them how many snaps of photographs they are going to have. He’s in control of everything. When he walked into that press conference in London, he was in control of nothing. He was in the unknown territory. He had never been there before for a long, long time. It was about the Tyson Fury show. It was nothing about Klitschko. His speech, his talk was boring, it was long, people were falling asleep. He even said himself ‘try to stay awake for the next ten minutes’ to the crowd. I’m inside of his mind. How I know this is because Wladimir does a stare off and then he says ‘okay, no problem’ but look how long he wanted to prove he wasn’t bothered about me for. He was stood there. I was looking at him and I had him. I had got him involved, out of his zone, involved in a fight, there and then because he didn’t want to look away. He didn’t want to look away. I had him. I had control of his mind. He says he’s a psychologist and he’s going to give me therapy and all this but I was already inside his mind on the day. I had drawn him into psychological warfare there and then because he was worried that if he would look away I had an edge on him. It doesn’t really matter but it mattered to him on the day. I got him to admit when we sat round the table that he is a manufactured fighter. I don’t know if you saw that or not. We were sat round the table and I think he was expecting me to be all jumpy like I was at the press conference an hour before but then when I sat down, mind change, sensible, calm, cool, collected. He’s on the back foot. He doesn’t know what to do. He was preparing for me to go full attack then. In fact, I was reserved and spoke to him as a sensible man and knowledgeable about boxing. I had him right into himself through things I witnessed through my own eyes and we were there together and he said he couldn’t remember what I was talking about. He remembered certain assets of what I was talking about but the main bullet points he couldn’t remember those. But he knows and I know he was lying. It’s like us being in this room now, we are having this conversation about you and then me saying ‘I never said it’ but you know and I know I did say it so you know I am lying to you and everybody else so I have already lost that battle because we know it’s the truth’. So he done that. And then I was going on about how he’s a manufactured fighter. And then he said ‘you know what, I am a manufactured fighter but my brother’s not’. I said ‘you don’t need to tell me, Wladimir, I know you’re a manufactured fighter, thank you very much for admitting it’. He must be kicking himself because I laid traps every time and he fell into them, fell into them, fell into them. That’s why he called the fight off. He wasn’t injured. I even said to him there and then around the table ‘you’ve got the same look in your eyes as when I was going to fight David Haye. I see fear of the unknown and unpredictability. I even see you getting an injury. You might even get injured on the plane home.’ The next day, injury and he’s out.

OH: If you win and obviously you believe you are going to win and many people believe you’re going to win, how will you use the platform of being the world heavyweight champion.

TF: Like I said, I’ll use it to spread the good news and the good word and try and do good things with the power I have at this time of life rather than doing bad things and getting involved in showing off and bragging and bouncing up and down in a big car and with a big watch. I’m not about that. I’m about spreading the good news, doing good things, setting up charities, rehabilitation centres that I’ve only just started to be. I’ve done bits and pieces throughout my career but now I want to be more involved, hands on with people. I don’t know if you saw it recently but I had a bit of a time in going on about politics and changing the communities and setting up places for alcoholics and drug addicts, all that sort of stuff, come and change their life, rather than just people talking about it and saying ‘oh, he’s a drug addict, him, avoid him’. I want to change the people who need help. Not just saying, you should go and get some help but hand it to them.

OH: Do you think this embrace of faith that you’ve had, you said in many ways you have had a disordered life and disordered childhood, that faith brings some order to that?

TF: Yeah, definitely. I’m all about faith, me. Without faith, I have nothing. Like I said, I don’t believe in the world itself. I believe in an afterlife. So if I then deny what my morals are, then I’m not a man or nothing else. I may as well just be nothing. Have no gender.

OH: Will you keep fighting after this fight? I have seen various times you have thought aloud about retiring after this fight.

TF: I think people have misperceived what I have said when I have said ‘I am only thinking about this fight and nothing afterwards, I could retire’. That is the truth. I am not looking at anything else apart from this fight. Whatever happens, whether I retire or carry on, whatever, it’s undecided because I only take one fight at a time. I can only focus and give all my energy to this point.

OH: Last thing really, this has been terrific and this is a slightly different sort of area, when you look at the world heavyweight scene, what sort of health do you think it’s in? It’s been disparaged quite a lot in recent years, the heavyweight boxing scene, do you think it’s starting to grow again?

TF: Yeah, most definitely, you’ve had total Klitschko domination for ten years and there have been a couple of lads come through and had a little quick flash in the pan with the title and had it took off them. Whether they’re good for the sport or bad for the sport, as sportsmen, I think they’re very good, they’re phenomenally good. They are good at what they do, they are great athletes, they are great role models for the sport. What they do in their personal lives, which is what I’ve been talking about, is none of my business basically. But as sportsmen, you cannot fault these guys. They’ve sorted out the game completely. They have brought a new way of boxing. Clinical, straight-punching, no razzamatazz. Not the typical American flair that we used to see in the 70s and Mike Tyson days and Ali days. They have changed it to European style boxing. Like European cars, Mercedes, and then you’ve got the big American flash cars and all the chrome and big giant engines. Then again, when you compare car to car, refined, in your face, elegant, loud, it’s the same with all the things that they do. You’ve got to admire them for that. They live for the game. They live it, live it, live it, live it. They don’t go overweight. They are very dedicated to the sport. I think Wladimir especially, could have handled anybody in history on his day. He’s been knocked out three times, let’s not forget that. Lamont Brewster.

OH: Chris Byrd?

TF: Not Chris Byrd, that’s the other brother. Wladimir had the loss to Ross Puritty, who was a journeyman level fighter and then he had the loss to Lamon Brewster, then he had the loss to Corrie Sanders, the South African, so he’s not indestructible but he’s resurrected his career from having the three knock out losses very close together to being unbeaten in eleven years and 26 title defences. So he’s definitely done something with his life and he’s got to be admired for that. I think there are a lot of young guns coming up around the world. As boxing fans we are very negative towards champions because when they are active and around you don’t appreciate them. As great as Muhammad Ali was and Joe Frazier and George Foreman, in those days, they couldn’t do nothing right and couldn’t do nothing wrong. As great as Frank Bruno was, people said he wasn’t that good when he was round and he couldn’t take a punch and he was robotic but when he’s gone, he was great and Ali was great. Same with Eubank, Eubank’s more famous now than when he was fighting. People didn’t like him when he was fighting. But now they like him. They only appreciate you after you’ve gone and realise how good a champion you were. That’s the same with everything, isn’t it. It’s like the one good person you have in your life and you treat bad all the time and you realise how good it was when they’ve gone. You only want them when you’ve not got them any more.

OH: Last question: you said it was only a month ago when you got down on your knees in here and had your re-embrace of faith and everything. Do you feel like this is not just a flash in the pan, it’s something that you’re going to persevere with, it’s something that, you’ve found a new way and it’s something that’s working for you and you’re going to stick with it?

TF: Most definitely, yeah. I’m not going to change this now. I’m going to stick with this throughout my life now. Because it’s what I know is positive for me, what can make me happy and drive me to go on every day, get up in the morning.

OH: Wicked.

TF: Perfect. Thank you very much.

OH: Thank you, Tyson. I really enjoyed that. It was fascinating.

TF: A bit different to your average boxing interview but I try to be as open as I can.