By Keith Idec
Antonio Tarver is not among those that think Steve Cunningham was wrongfully denied a win he earned against Vyacheslav Glazkov.
Tarver (31-6, 22 KOs, 1 NC), who’ll face Cunningham on Friday night at Prudential Center in Newark, N.J., doesn’t believe Cunningham did enough to convince judges he won that 12-round IBF heavyweight elimination match March 14 in Montreal. Ukraine’s Glazkov (20-0-1, 12 KOs) defeated Philadelphia’s Cunningham (28-7, 13 KOs) by unanimous decision (116-112, 116-112, 115-113) in a bout HBO broadcast from Bell Centre.
“A lot of people thought he won the fight,” Tarver told BoxingScene.com. “But at the same time, you’ve got to close the show. That’s what separates me from the rest of these guys. You’ve got to close the show. I’m not going to sit there and box the same way, round after round after round after round, without making any adjustments, without taking it to another level, without trying to find that magic trick that’ll get a guy out of there.
“When I fight every second of every minute, I’m setting booby traps, I’m setting land mines, I’m trying to knock that guy out or make him make one fatal mistake. There were just no adjustments [from Cunningham against Glazkov]. If you saw one round, you saw them all. They just sat there and they threw punches. One guy go, the next guy go. One guy go, the next guy go. Didn’t nobody take control of the fight. So it went 12 rounds and he cried about the decision. But he didn’t put his ass on the line to stop the fight or make an emphatic statement in the fight. So it’s hard to judge fights like that. I know that from experience.”
The 12-round Tarver-Cunningham match will headline a Premier Boxing Champions telecast on Spike. The broadcast is set to start at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Friday night with another scheduled 12-rounder that’ll pit Germany’s Marco Huck (38-2-1, 26 KOs), the WBO cruiserweight champion, against Polish southpaw Krzysztof Glowacki (24-0, 15 KOs).
Keith Idec covers boxing for The Record and Herald News, of Woodland Park, N.J., and BoxingScene.com. He can be reached on Twitter @Idecboxing.