Sports fans demand superlatives. It is not enough to agree that a particular hometown hero is among the all-time greats — if you don’t admit he or she is the best to ever play the game, you might wind up losing a friend. That said, there are a handful of inarguable GOATs plying their trades among us: NFL quarterback Tom Brady, NBA forward LeBron James, Portuguese soccer forward Cristiano Ronaldo, and WBC and lineal heavyweight champion Tyson Fury, to name four.

That last name likely gave you pause. Surely Fury, strangely proportioned at 6’9” and 280-plus pounds with long, gangly arms, slender legs, and enormous love handles regardless of his level of conditioning, doesn’t warrant inclusion among those finely tuned performers. Yet it’s possible that he’s the best of any of them after accounting for his era, sport, and level of competition. Fury, named after ferocious former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson and descended from a long line of Irish Traveler bare-knuckle boxing champions, has won 33 fights, lost none, and been part of a single controversial draw he almost certainly should have won.