“A CHAMPION is someone who gets up when they can’t”

So said legendary American heavyweight, Jack Dempsey, whose very name is synonymous with the hardest of hard times endured by the US working class in the decade following the first world war.

This particular quote breathes verisimilitude into the cliche that boxing is a metaphor for life, which for the vast majority of us has and does involve getting up at precisely the point at which we don’t believe we can.

Getting up off the canvas in boxing ring captures the essence of the human spirit, which at its finest moments refuses to be defeated. “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” one of Italy’s finest, Antonio Gramsci, regaled us with, and who could argue otherwise?

That in life there is no final defeat and no final victory, only struggle, is a sentiment that marks the difference between those whom, per Leon Trotsky, worship the accomplished fact, and those who refuse to.

In boxing, titles are won and lost on the same basis, which is why when Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk steps into the ring in Riyadh on May 18 to face Tyson Fury for the title of undisputed, he will do so psychologically and physically prepared to prove that in boxing as in life it is not always the case that a good big ‘un will always beat a good little ‘un.

By all accounts Fury has got himself into the shape of his life for this, his upcoming 35th fight as a professional. Crazy to think that the British heavyweight Gypsy King’s first fight in the pro ranks was on a Carl Froch undercard in Nottingham all the way back in 2008.

It is also crazy to think that the world’s most highly paid prizefighter, who will receive a fee in excess of $100 million to face Usyk in Riyadh, never enjoyed the platform of an Olympic, Commonwealth or world amateur title when he started out, and thus was forced to do it and come up the hard way.

Usyk, on the other hand, won every amateur title there was to be won in his time. His challenge came in resonating with the UK and US markets, whose fans prefer their champions to be homegrown with names they can pronounce even when half pissed while struggling with a kebab.

But then neither Fury nor Usyk could ever have predicted the mad direction which heavyweight boxing has gone in with the advent of Saudi investment and interest in the sport in recent times.

Fury clearly doesn’t need to fight to pay the mortgage anymore. He is in a position to buy most anything he desires, which makes you wonder what continues to drive him to get out of bed each morning and put his body and mind through the rigours of a training camp at the age of 35?

Fame, adulation, glory, a sense of accomplishment? All of the above? Whatever it may be, he is clearly revelling in the competitiveness and challenges that any fighter faces and must overcome. Most fighters fail to overcome those challenges at a given point in their careers and disappear into obscurity with only memories to comfort them. Stand-out champions such as Fury and Usyk stand out for exactly their ability to do so.

Usyk’s approach to the 6’9 challenge presented by Fury on May 18 will be intriguing to witness. The tough and omni-skilled Ukrainian either must know something that everyone else does not, or he has bitten off more than he can chew and is destined for his first defeat as a professional, along with the loss of the three heavyweight belts he currently holding.

Another intriguing contest, one just passed, involved Saul “Canelo” Alvarez against fellow undefeated Mexican Jaime Munguia.

The question posed and which Alvarez answered emphatically, was if the veteran Mexican icon still had enough in the tank to deal with a hungry young warrior in the shape of Munguia.

The answer was yes on the night at the Fortress in Vegas.

The real battle in the lead up to the fight was the increasingly bitter exchanges between Canelo and his former long term promoter Oscar De La Hoya. The hostility and animus between them was coterminous with the most nasty of divorces imaginable.

De La Hoya, once literally boxing’s golden boy as a fighter, is currently enjoying a renaissance as a promoter, having just steered the sport’s current golden boy, Ryan Garcia, to victory over Devin Haney.

Munguia, another of De La Hoya’s fighters, is without doubt one to watch in the storied 168lb super-middleweight division, especially with Alvarez now being in the back end of his own career.

Whether in Riyadh or Vegas, wherever top-flight boxing lands there is never any shortage of controversy to go round. Tyson Fury brings his own unique brand of chaos and unpredictability to the pressers, and so next week all eyes will be on his interactions with Usyk, his team, and the boxing media.

It’s a circus, a travelling circus, in which the clowns currently hold the whip hand. The danger is that they succeed in making clowns of the rest of us. Indeed, at 25 quid a pop for the right to watch proceedings via pay-per-view, it may be time to start getting those clown wigs ready for action.