Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua's first face-to-face press conference in London offered a surprisingly controlled start to a fight that has been years in the making. There were taunts, but there was also mutual respect, and Johnny Nelson believes the calm will not last once the countdown to Friday December 11 gets tighter.
The two heavyweights are scheduled to meet at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff, and this week marked the public beginning of the build-up. After so much back-and-forth, many expected the first press conference to erupt immediately, but instead the atmosphere was more restrained than dramatic.
Johnny Nelson: the rivalry is only warming up
Nelson said the mood caught plenty of people off guard. He admitted: “don't let smiles fool you - they'll be hating each other!”
He also felt the scale of the occasion might have produced more noise than it did. “I think after all these years of all the back-and-forth and Tyson calling him every name under the sun and AJ being super cool and Eddie Hearn saying what he's saying, I thought when they sat in front of each other on Wednesday, if I'm honest - maybe I got taken away with all the hype - but I thought there was really going to be a real ruckus,” he said.
Instead, Nelson described the meeting as much more orderly. “But they were like a couple of businessmen that went there to say: 'Right, we're going to tick all the boxes',” he said.
That matters because the public has already heard plenty from both sides. The first press conference was not the flashpoint many expected, but Nelson believes that only means the real tension has been delayed, not avoided.
The build-up still has room to boil over
Nelson expects the next 10 weeks to become increasingly intense. “The build-up to this fight as the weeks roll on, the words will get worse,” he said. “Tyson's potty mouth will get in the way and things will be said, litigation and threats and everything.”
His message is simple: the press conference was only a beginning. “Even up until the first bell goes, it is going to be drama,” he said. “So that was a soft launch of what to expect.”
He added that the smiles should not be mistaken for peace. “I think the smiling shocked everybody,” Nelson said. “It's like a kettle boiling and thinking: 'Right, they're finally in the room together.'”
For Nelson, the most striking part was the change in tone from years of public rivalry to a more measured head-to-head. “For the first time we've seen them head-to-head, these guys were just grown up,” he said. “They were boys, now they're men. They've got children, they've got responsibilities.”
That may explain why the first meeting looked more controlled than combative. But Nelson still expects the mood to change sharply as December 11 comes closer, with the fight itself likely to bring the rivalry back to the surface in full.
