KSI and Tommy Fury are kidding themselves if they think that was real boxing

Misfits Boxing’s offering is there to be enjoyed – difficulty comes if its practitioners confuse what they are doing with the real sport

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, making a complete ass of himself.
Such was the impression formed from Tommy Fury and KSI’s YouTuber cuddling fight, a DAZN/Misfits Boxing event I watched on pay-per-view TV this Saturday night so you don’t have to. Fury, a professional boxer of sorts, and KSI, a multi-hyphenate rapper-filmmaker-celebrity-whatever with millions of fans online, fought for six rounds and the judges gave a majority verdict in favour of Fury.
KSI felt he had been “robbed”; any boxing fans tuning in might have felt the same about their £19.99 landing squarely in DAZN’s bank account with the timing and accuracy that the punches so clearly lacked. In fairness to KSI, he showed heart to get in there, and he had a game plan: stay as far away as possible, jump around a bit, leap in with a jab and then grab onto his opponent. Fury could not solve this puzzle – the boxing equivalent of the Daily Star tea-break crossword – and the worry for him must surely be that he has found his level in this dingbat circus.
However, Fury’s was not even the most embarrassing performance of the evening: a so-called co-headline event saw Logan Paul, another YouTube celebrity, defeat one Dillon Danis, who has fought professionally in Mixed Martial Arts. Danis, having spent the build-up making vile threats and comments about Paul and his fiancee Nina Agdal – she has filed for a restraining order – continued to be an absolute buffoon, throwing himself onto the canvas to try and kick up at Paul with both legs, and also rugby-tackling him. He then attacked Paul after the final bell, security jumped in the ring, and Danis tried to fight the men in black bomber jackets, throwing more shots at the bouncers than he had managed in the six-round contest.
You could call it a grotesque parody or pantomime of a proper sport, but then that is the appeal. Based on the sold-out arena in Manchester, the volume of social media traffic and the pay-per-view viewing results, this has been a huge success.
The trick Misfits Boxing has pulled off is to create something sort of like an elite sport that people talk about and get excited about as if it were an actual elite sport. Rivalries, rematches, trilogies, grudge-matches, legacies, champions, this is all the language of proper boxing, and many of the fans experience Misfits Boxing as such. Add in a controversial points decision, a chance for people to feel outraged that the judges are blind or bent, and you have got an excellent entertainment product that has reach into a consumer group that a lot of the sports covered on this website can only dream of.
The fandom, generally young and generally male, comes across as giddy, excited, lacking in judgment or context. But why shouldn’t it? If you are 16, then what have you got to compare anything against? Just as someone who has grown up only watching the IPL is unlikely to see the merits of Sir Alastair Cook patiently compiling a three-hour 50 on a Chelmsford green-top, for some fans, this isn’t a bastardisation of boxing, it is boxing. The inspiration, obviously, is World Wrestling Entertainment, that gloriously American art-form of heels and faces, kayfabe, storyline and gimmick, although the fans in Manchester were not above roundly booing The Star Spangled Banner when that was sung before the Paul-Danis fight.
Let people enjoy it, if that is what they like. The only difficulty comes if its practitioners confuse what they are doing with the real sport. One of the guys on Saturday’s undercard, an American called Nurideen Shahid Shabazz who makes daft TikTok videos under the name Deen The Great, won his bout against another lad and then challenged actual boxers Gervonta Davis and Ryan Garcia to fight him. The Ring magazine ranks Davis as the second-best active lightweight in the world, Garcia number four, making that a preposterous and conceivably fatal scheme from Deen. Tommy Fury may have unwittingly shown that the gap between professional and joker is not necessarily all that wide all the time, but you would very much hope that the likes of Deen The Great do not get to find out.