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It wasn’t a fight that had much real buzz going in last September, as pretty much everybody expected Tyson Fury to handle Otto Wallin with ease, but the LINEAL!!!!!!!! heavyweight champion had plenty of trouble with Wallin that night in Las Vegas, winning a decision with at least some controversy.
While the scoring wasn’t itself necessarily controversial, the fact that Fury had been cut horribly on a legal punch proved to be, as there was plenty of argument that a lesser fight, with an A-side who had less invested into his career, would have been stopped at some point on that level of a cut, and Wallin would have scored a massive upset win.
But that wasn’t to be. Wallin (20-1, 13 KO) didn’t get the cards, and Fury (30-0-1, 21 KO) marched on to a decisive seventh round TKO of Deontay Wilder in their February rematch, grabbing the WBC title in the process.
The 29-year-old Wallin, originally from Sweden and now based in New York, has recently battled coronavirus-like symptoms, but promoter Dmitriy Salita says the fighter’s ultimate goal is to get a second chance against Fury.
“Tyson Fury is the king of the division. Outside of him, it’s wide open and I believe Otto is the best of the pack,” Salita told Sky Sports, adding that Wallin would be ready for another fight with Fury after “two or three” fights. That might not be possible, as Fury said again in March that he still plans to fight two more times himself and then retire from the sport. We know one of those will be a third fight with Wilder, tentatively scheduled for Oct. 3 after being postponed from a July target date. And after that, an undisputed clash with Anthony Joshua, perhaps, may prove to be too big a deal to pass up. And if not Joshua, Dillian Whyte would be waiting in the wings by early 2021, provided he gets past Alexander Povetkin.
In other words, yeah, a lot can happen, but there may not be time for Wallin to have “two or three” fights and then face Fury. If he wants Fury again, he and Salita might want to try forcing the issue. If Tyson sticks to his word (and as weird as he is, he usually does), he’ll be gone from the ring before Wallin’s current plan.