Tyson Fury: ‘I’ll be glad when it’s all over – no more Mr Celebrity Boxer’

‘I am suffering all the time,” Tyson Fury says calmly of his constant struggle with depression as we look out of the window at the very start of fight week. We’re just a five-minute stroll from Wembley Stadium where, on Saturdaynight, Fury will apparently make his final walk to the ring as the world heavyweight champion when he defends his WBC title against Dillian Whyte in front of a roaring crowd of 94,000.

But now, on an ordinary Tuesday morning, the 6ft 9in giant talks softly about his mental health and retirement while people two floors below gawp up at him. They can see his huge frame from street level and men and women, young and old, wave enthusiastically. They’re shouting his name but behind the thick sheet of glazed glass we can barely hear them.

Fury waves back as he says of his bleak moments: “I’ve learnt to manage it a bit better now. Before I didn’t really understand it. Now I know more and what to do to manage the problem.”

This week it was reported that one in 10 deaths in the Irish travelling community are caused by suicide. Fury, the self-proclaimed Gypsy King, is proud of his heritage, but he shakes his head. “I don’t think it’s just Ireland. It’s the whole world. It’s the biggest killer of men under 35[in Britain].”

At that very moment a group of boys are jumping up and down in excitement on the street outside. “All right, boys?” he says gently.

He turns back to me. “It’s a massive, massive problem. It’s like a pandemic. Lots of people are taking their lives today because they don’t know where to go, they don’t know what to do.”

I have interviewed Fury many times and we often end up back where we started – on the day in November 2011 when I went to see him at his home, which was then a modest bungalow