Tommy Fury on Jake Paul: ‘I’m fighting an idiot … he’s fought old men, MMA fighters and basketball players’

Tommy Fury doesn’t care much if Jake Paul wants to continue fighting and making huge sums of money doing it but he expects his days of parading around as a serious professional boxer will come to a dramatic end on Sunday in Saudi Arabia.

After months of trash talk and two previously cancelled fights, the 23-year-old half-brother of heavyweight boxing champion Tyson Fury is anxiously awaiting his opportunity to finally throw hands with Paul even if he’s not looking at this as a legitimate challenge.

With a perfect 8-0 record in his own career, Fury sees his upcoming fight with Paul as a chance to finally pull back the curtain on a spectacle that’s somehow captured the attention of the combat sports world yet in reality it’s nothing more than a sideshow.

“This fight is a massive event but at the end of the day I’m fighting Jake Paul,” Fury told MMA Fighting. “I’m not fighting Sergey Kovalev or ‘Canelo’ Alvarez. I’m fighting an idiot. This man’s going to have a reality check. He’s fought old men, MMA fighters and basketball players, whatever you name it and when he first steps up against me in the opening few seconds, he’ll understand that this is too tall of an order for him to complete.

“He can look good against anybody, Floyd Mayweather said it best, but the minute he gets in there with anybody with half an idea, he’s beat. At the end of the day, I’ll be very, very surprised if this fight makes it out of the first or second round to be honest.”

Through six fights, Paul remains undefeated with four knockouts on his resume and wins over ex-UFC champions Anderson Silva and Tyron Woodley.

While those victories had some name value attached to them due to the reputation Silva and Woodley earned through their MMA career, Fury scoffs at the idea that either were a true test of boxing skills.

That’s why Fury is quick to shoot down the notion that Paul has done anything worth noting in his career so far because his level of competiton has been supbar at best.

“I’m a real man and if I seen something that I was impressed by, I would say it,” Fury said. “I don’t care who you are, beating a 50-year-old man or 47 or whatever [Anderson Silva] was, beating a 40-year-old man [in Tyron Woodley], who was 5-foot-7 and a welterweight, it’s not impressive to me. These guys are in a completely different sport to what I’m in. I’m in the sport of professional boxing. I don’t know what sport he’s in.

“He gets in the ring and he fights all comers. He’s fighting NBA stars, wrestlers, MMA guys, whatever you want. I fight strictly boxers and we all know that MMA fighters are not the best boxers. I’ve had a career in boxing for a long time now. I’ve been sparring since I was 11 and 12 [years old] and I’ve sparred a lot of MMA fighters and they don’t make the best boxers and rightly so. They’re training in 10 other combats of fighting. When you get a person in front of you who’s just training boxing for all of his life, it’s a bit different. Jake Paul is going to understand how different on Feb. 26.”

While he’s happy to earn a hefty paycheck for his efforts, Fury says Paul is nowhere near his level when it comes to boxing, although the former Love Island reality show star is currently listed as an underdog by sportsbooks taking action on the fight.

Fury doesn’t necessarily take offense but he ultimately just chalks it up to the hype and the buzz surrounding Paul rather than anyone actually having faith in his abilities as a boxer.

“If he came down to the gym, my dad wouldn’t even let me spar people like him,” Fury said about Paul. “He physically wouldn’t [allow it]. I’m sparring champions in the gym, undefeated proper professional men and you want me to go to Saudi Arabia to fight Jake Paul, it’s not an issue.

“Social media the way it is these days, it’s built into what it is. Everybody with the talk, the back and forth with their opinions, it’s somehow formed a 50/50 fight. Well, I can assure everybody that on Feb. 26, this is a one horse race and Jake Paul will be knocked out. I can put my whole life on it.”

While Fury has every intention of separating Paul from consciousness when they finally clash, he doesn’t actually wish him any ill will when it comes to whatever career he’ll have afterwards.

More than anything, Fury just wants to expose Paul as a charlatan but if “The Problem Child” wants to continue fighting, there are plenty of social influencers awaiting him.

“I don’t know [what he will do next] because he’s not in the same sport as me,” Fury said. “Yeah, he’s in boxing but when I knock him out and when he loses to me and then he says ‘well I fought Tyson Fury’s brother’ or ‘I fought a proper boxer, who’s done this all his life, I didn’t do bad for a kid out of YouTube’ or whatever he’s going to say. Yeah, then he could easily go and fight Deji, go and fight KSI, cause these guys are all at the same level.

“You can be the king of the YouTubers if he wants. He can have that title but will he ever box against another professional boxer again? Definitely not. There’s no way because he won’t be able to. After a beating that bad, he will never look at or mention another professional boxer ever again. Can he fight YouTubers and still make huge fights, 100-percent. Do whatever you want. As far professional boxing is concerned, Jake Paul will never, ever look in the eyes of a professional man ever, ever again.”