By Victor Salazar
New York, NY - Steve Cunningham tasted the heavyweight waters on multiple occasions after spending the majority of his career at cruiserweight. On April 16th he makes his return to the cruiserweight division when he challenges Krzysztof Glowacki of Poland for the WBO championship, at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
While Cunningham campaigned at cruiserweight he took on Tyson Fury at The Theater in Madison Square Garden. In that bout, which took place in April of 2013, Cunningham dropped Fury with a big right hand in the second round. Fury recovered and used his size to lean on Cunningham - a tactic which wore down the smaller fighter and eventually led to Cunningham getting knocked out.
From that performance not many gave Fury a shot at upsetting Wladimir Klitschko last November, but Cunningham said he was not surprised at the outcome.
But Fury managed to pull it off by boxing his way to a twelve round unanimous decision to capture the IBO/WBA/IBF/WBO heavyweight belts.
“I thought was possible but I didn’t think he could beat Wlad like that,” Cunningham told BoxingScene.com. “You know Wlad looked a little confused. The rematch should be fun but hats off to Team Fury and Tyson, you know they did their job, they did what they were supposed to do.”
Cunningham says with Fury at the top of the division, the heavyweight division is as live as its ever been. Fury and Klitschko will face each other in a rematch in the coming months.
Fury, he won the fight and now he’s the heavyweight world champion right now and really its good. He’s livening up that division right now. It’s a well needed pill for the cold that was in the heavyweight division. It’s very interesting.”
