Tyson Fury will reject the offer of a fight with Tony Bellew for benevolent reasons.
Bellew had one strict condition on which he would be open to a bout with the returning heavyweight and that was to fight Fury before he manages to shake all of his ring rust off.
After defeating David Haye for the second time, Bellew insisted that he’d be confident against a Fury who hadn’t quite returned to his best so proposed that the pair face off in Fury’s second fight back after his comeback.
The undefeated former heavyweight champion is set to fight in Manchester on June 9 and Bellew suggested that the pair could share the ring next in an all-British showdown.
But Fury has claimed that, for Bellew’s own good, the fight should not take place.
“I don’t want to fight Tony Bellew,” Fury told FightHype. “Reason being, he’s a family man and he’s got a wife and kids. I want him to stay healthy and stay boxing and earn a few quid and go home easy to his family.
“But if he steps in the ring with the ‘Gypsy King’ and I unleash hellfire on him, he’s only a small man and I could damage and hurt him properly.
“You ain’t messing with a David Haye who’s 20 years out of date. You’re messing with someone 6ft 9in, 19 stone, in the prime of my life and can knock a wall down. I’m one of the hardest punchers in heavyweight boxing but they don’t know it.
“I don’t want to fight Tony Bellew. Tony Bellew’s a light heavyweight or a cruiserweight at best so if I go in there and hurt him, what good is that? How does that make me feel, knowing he shouldn’t even be in the ring anyway?
“Listen, we all need money but he doesn’t need money that badly to go and lose his senses and get smashed to pieces.
“And all this ‘he could knock me out’ talk, please! I could let Tony Bellew hit me right on the chin and he wouldn’t hurt me.
“Wladimir Klitschko detonated right hand after right hand on that jaw there, side on, and never wobbled me once did Dr. Ironfists. You saw what he did to Joshua with that same punch.
“Poor old Tony, it’d be like a feather duster, dusting me up and down.
“On a serious note, I don’t want to fight Tony because, at the end of the day, Tony should fight Andre Ward or someone on that level who’s a light puncher and who’s smaller, earn a few quid and pack it in.
“He’s done very well and I’m proud of him but he doesn’t want no part of this, trust me on that.
“I wouldn’t want to get in there because if I hurt him like I say then I’d be feeling bad all my life. The man’s got kids and a wife. It’s a sport at the end of the day and it’d be like putting a pit bull down with a Jack Russell. It wouldn’t be fair, would it?
“All I’d have to do is walk through him with my hands up, let him hit my arms for three or four rounds and he’d fall over from exhaustion.”
