Darren Till and Mike Perry’s spar, for whatever reason, has gone down in mixed martial arts history folklore.

Whether it’s because of the pair’s characters, the way the entire enterprise came to be or because of the duo’s eventual falling out, the spar the two shared some years back still gets brought up to this day. Despite that, and despite Perry’s recent assertions that he had gotten the better of the Liverpudlian, Till remains unswayed. Think what you want, he won’t share his opinion on what happened.

“I’ll never, ever say,” Till said, speaking on Anything Goes with James English. “Never, ever say. I don’t think—he’s actually said loads of times, ‘I beat Darren, I busted his face up.’ If that makes him feel good and sleep at night, that’s great for him, but this is the thing.

“I could go to Tyson Fury’s gym now and beat him up in a spar — he’s actually come to my gym and we sparred and I took him down, I’m an MMA fighter — imagine me going around saying, ‘I beat Tyson in a boxing spar today.’ That sparring means absolutely fuck all. Jackshit. You didn’t get paid for it, no one’s seen it. Sparring’s different. You don’t have the nerves, the crowd, everything involved.

“So for me to sit here and go, ‘I won Mike Perry in the spar,’ that’s bullshit, because even if I did or I didn’t it doesn’t mean a thing, because then we could fight and he could just go boom — knock me cleanout. What really matters? The spar that I beat in him or the knockout that he just placed on me in front of everyone? He’s come out and said loads of times, ‘I battered Darren in that spar’.”

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