The day Tyson Fury threatened to beat me up with a 6ft 6in, 25st goon who was going to 'break my jaw with one punch'... and this is the pathetic reason why: OLIVER HOLT

Tyson Fury and I have anniversaries coming up this winter.

In November, it will be 10 years since the Gypsy King, one of the finest fighters of his era, won the world heavyweight championship for the first time. A few weeks before that, it will be 10 years since we last spoke.

It is a wild guess but I suspect Fury has happier memories of the victory over Wladimir Klitschko in Dusseldorf that catapulted him to superstardom than the interview we conducted in his spartan room at a hotel attached to what was then called the Macron Stadium, in Bolton.

Fury, now 37 and supposedly on yet another comeback trail, was already an accomplished fighter by then. But he had struggled to land the big fight he craved and he knew that even though his chances of upsetting the veteran champion were being widely discounted, the title fight with Klitschko was his big shot at becoming a somebody.

He relished the platform the build-up gave him, too, and soon after we had started talking, he launched into a stream of consciousness about his religious beliefs, the ills besetting the world, the perversions that he saw afflicting humanity and the reckoning that was to be visited on us all. He also said Klitschko and his brother, Vitali, now the mayor of Kyiv, were followers of Satan.

‘To be honest with you,’ he said, ‘I know Klitschko is a devil-worshipper. They are involved in bigger circles and stuff like that and they do magic tricks and whatever. You can go on YouTube and watch them playing with magic.’

When I reported what he had said in The Mail on Sunday, though, Fury was furious. He unleashed a fusillade of abuse and threats against me that ended with him promising to have me beaten up by his associates.

It started when he foretold imminent Armageddon. ‘We live in an evil world,’ Fury said. ‘The devil is very strong at the minute, very strong, and I believe the end is near. The Bible tells me the end is near. The world tells me the end is near. Just a short, few years, I reckon, away from being finished.

‘Abusing the planet, the wars in the Middle East, the famines, the earthquakes, the natural disasters, all these things are talked about 2,000 years ago before they even happened. Prophesised. So now it’s all coming true…

‘There are only three things that need to be accomplished before the devil comes home: one of them is homosexuality being legal in countries, one of them is abortion and the other one’s paedophilia.

‘When I say paedophiles can be made legal, that sounds like crazy talk doesn’t it? But back in the 1950s and early 60s, for them first two to be made legal would have been looked on as crazy. If I would have told you 120 years ago, that a 1,000-tonne aeroplane is going to float through the sky, a piece of steel — ludicrous.

‘When Christopher Columbus said the world was round, he’s an idiot. All these things that happen in the world, wise men already know they’re going to happen and they see what they really are.

‘Foolish people follow the system, get caught up in media news, what the Government wants you to believe and all the higher powers want you to believe and go down the same path as all the sheep in the cattle market.’

Fury’s conflation of homosexuality and paedophilia, in particular, was met with shock and outrage and his reaction was to shoot the messenger. He did a round of media interviews, accusing me of making it all up or of misquoting him or of taking his words out of context.

‘It’s ok Ollie, no hard feelings,’ Fury wrote on Twitter. ‘I only talk the truth! I’m man enuf to stand on my beliefs! U sad person!!!

‘Ollie Holt is a spineless excuse of a man, who try’s to bring others down to his sad level. I’ll pray for u Ollie. I do stand up for my beliefs but it’s the way it’s written! The headline! ... Bottom line is Ollie u r a bitch!!!!!!!! & what a bitch!!!! Loser !!!!’

That was the beginning. Soon afterwards, he gave an hour-long interview to popular boxing outlet iFL TV where he outlined his plans for taking revenge on me for what I had reported. In the process of fresh denials that he had said what he said, he went on to repeat some of his calumnies.

As his entourage grinned in the background, Fury talked about what was going to happen to me: ‘See big Shane there? Have a look at big Shane. He’s 6ft 6in and 25st. He’s going to break your jaw completely with one straight right hand.

‘I ain’t going to do it, ‘cos I’ll get in trouble. But the big fella, there – he’ll annihilate him, won’t he? So Oliver, take a good look at him, ‘cos that’s the face you’re going to see before you hit the deck.’

Next, Fury pointed to another member of his entourage. ‘That’s the face you’re going to see when he’s jumping on your head,’ Fury said. ‘What are you going to do to him, Cliff?” The man called Cliff replied: "I’m going to f*** him up."'

I was asked if I wanted to get the police involved but I declined. Maybe I was being complacent but it felt more like slapstick than anything. The thing that was most dangerous about Fury was his views and the message they sent out to those who needed precious little encouragement to victimise the gay community.

Still, it was slightly unnerving. Fury’s dad, John, had just got out of jail after serving a sentence for gouging out a man’s eye at a car auction. Big Shane, referenced above, was Tyson’s brother. It wasn’t like getting on the wrong side of the Brady Bunch.

It was also disconcerting to be part of the story. Fury claimed repeatedly that he had been misquoted so I was asked to do interviews, too, to defend my interview.

Some of my colleagues in other media outlets took the side of Fury and wrote pieces defending him.

That was partly why, after Fury made fresh attempts to discredit me and the paper’s reporting, we took the decision to publish the full transcript of the interview that had taken place in that Bolton hotel and the audio that went with it.

I asked myself a few questions about it, too. Perhaps my own conduct was less than impeccable. When Fury made his remarks about homosexuality and paedophilia, I had suggested to him that people would be offended by his views but I didn’t challenge him particularly vigorously when he stated them. Perhaps I should have done.

My view was that it is the role of a newspaper interviewer, in contrast to a broadcast interviewer, to allow the subject to speak. The interview was about his views, not mine. It was about his beliefs, not mine. It was about his philosophy, not mine. That’s still my view.

Some also aired understandable concerns about the effect on his mental health of the criticism he had faced. But Fury had spoken before in highly disparaging terms about homosexuality. And he has spoken about it since. This was not especially new. He was not shy about airing his unpalatable prejudices.

I know the damage that those prejudices and that rabble-rousing can wreak on vulnerable people in the gay community who often already feel isolated, mocked and prey to serial casual discrimination.

I didn’t want to be party to that or to be silent about that. And nor did this newspaper.

Fury’s prejudices are not confined to sexuality, either. ‘Everyone just do what you can,’ he said in a 2016 interview, ‘listen to the Government, follow everybody like sheep, be brainwashed by all the Zionist, Jewish people who own all the banks, all the papers all the TV stations. Be brainwashed by them all.’

He has bragged about his association with alleged crime boss Daniel Kinahan, served a backdated, two-year drugs ban after returning adverse findings for the banned anabolic steroid nandrolone and said of women boxers that he believes: ‘A woman's best place is in the kitchen and on her back. That's my personal belief. Making me a good cup of tea - that's what I believe.’

But the last 10 years have been good to him. He fought an epic trilogy with Deontay Wilder and spent much of the decade rightly regarded as the lineal heavyweight champion before being twice outclassed by Oleksandr Usyk in title fights in Saudi Arabia.

No one believes he will not come out of retirement. His promoter Frank Warren's comments on Tuesday about a potential return next summer add fuel to the idea that there is an inevitability about a fight between him and Anthony Joshua, which the British public has wanted to see for a long time.

So, then. Plenty of material for that 10th anniversary interview.