TYSON FURY was NOT responsible for the broken rib that cost little brother Tommy his life-changing Jake Paul fight.
The 22-year-old Love Island hunk pulled out of his Florida clash with the YouTube celebrity 12 days out from their scheduled showdown, blaming a bacterial chest infection and broken rib.
And a video later emerged that showed a Team Fury training session from inside their Morecambe gym with the 33-year-old WBC king hammering a huge medicine ball into hus sibling’s stomach.
But Tommy has insisted that the age-old boxing drill designed to strengthen abdominal muscles and build up resistance to body punches was not how he suffered the sickening injury.
The reality TV star told the Unibet Lowdown: “I can confirm that Tyson with the medical ball was not what broke my rib.
“I have been having that done to me in the gym my entire life, in every single training session.
“I can take that and 10x more than that, that video is not how it happened.
“My body was getting weaker and weaker by the day but I decided to have a little spar and took a little clip to my rib and something didn’t feel right.
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“I went and had an MRI, in the tunnel for 1hr 45 minutes and the doctor said ‘I have been doing this for 20 years and that is a fractured rib’.
“I said it would be fine but my dad, Tyson and the doctor told me I could not fight.
“And another doctor told me that, if I had boxed, I could have ended up with a perforated lung. You cannot fight with a broken rib.
“The chest was one thing but a broken rib was the icing on the cake.
“Even now I don’t think I have fully swallowed that pill and I don’t think I will, because it was such an easy night for me.
“If you have seen the fight you will have seen how easy it would have been for me.”
Paul later went on to knock out replacement opponent Tyron Woodley, the ex-UFC champion who he beat on points in August.
In reaction, Tommy said: “It’s a pretty bad place you’re in when the commentators who commentate your fight says, ‘It’s getting pretty hard to watch now.
“And joking between the commentators, ‘Who won that round?’ ‘Well nobody’. And that when on for well more than half the fight.
“I was watching it and it was very upsetting for me to sit there and watch it. I’m not going to beat around the bush, because it was.
“Because, I know if I had been in there, he wouldn’t of being going no six or seven rounds, whatever it was.
“It wouldn’t have been going there, because for the first four or five rounds, the guy didn’t even throw a punch.”
- Watch the full Unibet Lowdown interview with Dev Sahni here at 12pm
