The fights – however dangerous – are the fun bit for Fury, offering rare absorption and a chance to show off preternatural gifts, a place of calm for a man who can’t be idle. He is learning how to live without the sport which has defined him. “When I leave there’s bound to be a void,” he writes, referring to the fighters who’ll be left when he bows out, with “not a personality between them”. But he might say the same of his life post-boxing, too. A scholar of the game, he knows quitting may prove his toughest challenge of all. Which leads us to the retirement question. Fury writes perceptively of past fighters who have hung on too long, always promising themselves that it will be after the next fight, and then the next one after that, that they will hang up their gloves. By the end of the book, as he surveys the potential contenders, he appears indistinguishable from all those predecessors who didn’t know when to say goodbye. Can he walk away from the spotlight, the discipline and the glory? What will come afterwards, just living at home with his beloved wife, Paris, and their six children? He says he’ll be happy to walk the dogs. In the meantime, he’ll be fighting British heavyweight Derek Chisora (for the third time) on Saturday 3 December. The dogs, it seems, can wait. In 2015 Tyson Fury was poised for a shot at the dominant heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko and certain he would win, despite the long odds on his upsetting the steely Ukrainian. “He was thirty-nine years old and clearly slowing down…For some reason, he couldn’t see his end was on the horizon, but I could.” It’s my most insightful book yet – the laughs, the hard times, the family man, the craziness of what it’s like to be Tyson. I hope you like it and I hope it might help you, whatever you’re going through. Remember, Nothing is impossible.” Declan Ryan is a poet and critic who writes on boxing and literature. His first poetry collection, “Crisis Actor”, is forthcoming from Faber & Faber in 2023.

Sometimes, the whole “Gypsy King” showman drama – being carried to the ring on a throne in one of the Wilder fights – may occlude Fury’s genuinely impressive achievements in the ring. The man himself says it’s just an act, designed to maximise attention and therefore viewers and profit. Perhaps, but this is a guy who refers to himself in the third person and it’s just possible that the act has taken up more permanent residence in his personality. Larger than life is all very well for the length of a boxing promotion, but it can soon become tiring in life. I’ve learned that it’s not the material things that matter, and despite my ‘success’ I know my mental health struggles won’t go away and it’s a daily fight. Gloves Off is not a case of bare-fisted self-exposure, but instead a carefully edited version of events. There is no mention, for example, of Daniel Kinahan, the alleged Irish gangster based in Dubai, whom Fury publicly thanked in 2020 for his work as a boxing promoter. And when Fury refers to his father being sentenced to 11 years in prison in 2011 (he served four), he merely says that it was “for getting involved in a fight”, which makes it sound like a spot of fisticuffs. In fact, John Fury gouged a man’s eye out, leaving him half-blind. Family life, his traveller upbringing, beating Deontay Wilder in the ring and more are just some of the never-before-told topics he will be touch upon in the book.