The Usyk-Fury megafight takes a mighty hit. Cathal Kelly explains why

The last boxing megafight was probably Floyd Mayweather versus Conor McGregor in 2017. There have been some big swings since then – the Alvarez-Golovkin trilogy, for instance. But that was the last one that got people at your office who you like, but never see outside work, to hold a pay-per-view bacchanal. It was the last fight that people who don’t watch fights felt they needed to see in real time.

It wasn’t a good fight. It was like watching a mongoose toy with a snake, if the snake had never seen a mongoose before. But it had a genuine sense of history. That is the most precious commodity in sports right now.

Oleksandr Usyk versus Tyson Fury was meant to be the next fight like that.

Usyk, a grim and compelling Ukrainian, may be the best fighter in the world. Remarkably, he’s also a heavyweight. Technically gifted fighters are, generally speaking, little fellows. Usyk is an XXL ballet dancer with a couple of hammers taped to the end of his arms.

Fury is the world’s biggest, oldest comeback kid. He doesn’t look like much. If you saw him at the grocery store, you might think he was a retired strip-club bouncer. But he absorbs punishment like few men in history. And, as they say over there, he could talk for England. Fury may be the most compelling ranter in the game, and that’s saying something.

Between them, the two men hold all the heavyweight belts. A fight would unite them again for the first time this century.

Beyond the base statistics, all the perfect metaphors were laid in place. Fury wants to prove he’s an all-timer. Usyk is doing it for his embattled country. Their personalities are diametrically opposed – fire and ice. The two of them don’t like each other much, promising a lot of fun insults. If we were lucky, we might have got a brawl at the weigh-in.

They had a date and place – April 29 at Wembley Stadium in London. The height of spring, a gorgeous open-air coliseum, 90,000 people on hand. It was going to be magical.

Most of us have rumbled in no jungles nor have we been to Manila, never mind been thrilled from there. This was our chance.

But no.

After months of negotiation, it was announced this week that the fight’s off. You know, that doesn’t mean the fight’s off off. It’s not as though there’s an international fight court and you only get one shot at things. But if it’s not off, announcing that it’s off is an unusual approach.

More great fights have been missed in history than have come off. So this isn’t odd. But rarely is the person to blame so obvious. The person to blame here is Fury.

It was Fury who publicly raged that Usyk wanted to split the (astronomical) purse even-steven.

“They want 50 per cent,” Fury sneered in an Instagram video apparently shot while toodling around a department store. “From where I’m standing, Usyk, you and your team are worth 30 per cent. You either take it or you leave it.”

A couple of hours later, Usyk took it. I’m not sure I’d want Usyk to be my agent, but I like the cut of his jib. All he asked was that Fury agree to donate a million pounds to the Ukrainian relief effort – a PR win-win if ever there was one.

Having cornered himself, Fury found another reason to hold off the fight. He didn’t want a rematch clause in the contract. Agreements to fight again after a big bout have become boilerplate, but Usyk agreed to that, too.

You were beginning to get the sense that one of these guys has more self-confidence than the other.

Despite all of Usyk’s concessions, no agreement could be reached. As of Wednesday, both fighters were reportedly seeking new fights with different opponents. The Usyk camp blamed the Fury camp. The Fury camp didn’t bother saying anything because they already look ridiculous.

“It’s just crazy,” heavyweight Anthony Joshua told the Guardian, adding that it was good people could actually see the problems that boxers such as Usyk have to put up with to make a fight.

He would know. While Joshua was busy trying to avoid big fights with big names in order to inflate his paydays down the road, he lost a can’t-lose fight to a former construction worker. His career never recovered.

If Usyk and Fury were young guys, you’d figure they’ll work it out eventually. But they are 36 and (an ancient looking) 34, respectively. If the recent pattern holds, they will finally agree to meet long after they have both lost their vim, looking for one last, sad purse.

One of the good and bad things about sports in the modern era is that everybody eventually plays everyone else. We are not left wondering how Russians would do against NHL competition. They’re all here. Every good tennis player goes to every major. Every great soccer team will meet every other great one.

Not all that long ago, this was not the case. But now it’s taken for granted.

So there is something wistful about the iconic match-ups that do not come to pass, or don’t come to pass when they should have. Boxing has this problem acutely. It’s the primary reason more people don’t follow boxing. Evidently, they’re okay with that. If they weren’t, they’d change.

Reading about Usyk and Fury on Thursday morning made me think of something else.

On Wednesday night, Connor McDavid scored a video-game goal to win it for the Oilers in overtime. He came in off the wing and deked the goalie, but hit the post from a tight angle. Less than 10 seconds later, he got the puck in the same position, did the same move, took the same shot and scored. Lunacy. An ‘is this the real life/is this just fantasy?’ sports moment.

Watching it, you were left thinking that we may never see this generational player in a Stanley Cup final or an Olympics. If so, it’s the road not taken. On one level, that would be a low-stakes tragedy. But on another, it’s so odd that it’s remarkable.