Wednesday, December 10
SYDNEY, Australia – The latest reminder of the extent to which in so many territories boxing remains a niche sport was provided on Wednesday morning in Sydney, where Tim Tszyu – Australia’s highest-profile active fighter – promoted his contest on December 17 with Anthony Velazquez at an event hosted by the rugby league team South Sydney Rabbitohs.
Tszyu is not only Australia’s highest-profile active fighter and the son of the retired junior-welterweight champion Kostya – perhaps the finest Australian fighter of them all – he is also the figurehead of the era increasingly recognised as the most successful Australian boxing has ever known, he is fighting in his home city for the first time in almost three years, and he has the support of No Limit and Main Event, the country’s leading promoter and the pay-per-view arm of the influential broadcaster Foxtel.
According to Matt Rose of No Limit, a party of 50 associated with the Rabbitohs will attend the 157lbs catchweight contest between Tszyu and Velazquez at the regrettably named TikTok Entertainment Centre. At the Rabbitohs’ training ground, however, there was little question that for all that Tszyu and his date with Velazquez benefitted from being associated with the team he is a long-term follower of, the Rabbitohs – and not Tszyu – were the priority of the majority of the media in attendance.
Representatives of some of Australia’s leading newspapers were present, which – in other territories at least – boxing promoters sometimes recognise as half the battle, but in an atypical opportunity for those present to interview Tszyu and the Rabbitohs player Cody Walker side by side, Walker was the one who spoke for considerably longer. Among the questions Tszyu answered were about the support he receives from the Rabbitohs – “We’ll be all there to support him next Wednesday to see that redemption story and see him raise his hand,” Walker said – but Tszyu was holding and then wearing a Rabbitohs shirt with his name on the back and will have seen the value in what was unfolding every bit as much as Rose.
Rugby league, AFL and cricket represent the three biggest sporting passions of one of the world’s most sports-obsessed cultures, and it is also the Australian summer. AFL is particularly popular in Perth and Melbourne, the city that hosts the Australian Open – one of the four tennis grand slams. Rugby league, and therefore the Rabbitohs, is popular in Sydney. At a time when the Ashes series between Australia and England is dominating the cricket agenda – and inevitably received considerably more attention than Jai Opetaia-Huseyin Cinkara – a boxer reaching a non-boxing audience was unquestionably No Limit’s aim.
Rose, incidentally, works with three Rabbitohs players. No Limit also recently signed Nelson Asofa-Solomona, the tallest player in NRL history, and will oversee his becoming a professional boxer.
For his part, Tsyzu, wearing sunglasses, looked healthy and strolled around with the relaxed demeanour of a tourist on their way to a hotel swimming pool. BoxingScene previously witnessed him that relaxed on the eve of a fight when he travelled to Orlando, Florida to challenge the heavy-handed IBF junior-middleweight champion Bakhram Murtazaliev in 2024. But what ultimately seemed far more relevant at the Rabbitohs’ training ground is not that he lost that night to Murtazaliev – it was that despite having a defeat on his record by the time he arrived in Orlando, Tszyu believed he had deserved the decision in his previous contest against Sebastian Fundora and what could be detected was the air of invincibility worn by a fighter who didn’t believe that they could lose. Murtazaliev, damagingly, taught Tszyu beyond doubt that he could, and in their rematch Fundora then reminded him of that reality once again.
When he lost to Fundora the second time, unlike during their first fight and against Murtazaliev, Tszyu looked a defeated fighter in every way in which he had once believed himself invincible. That he has rediscovered so much of that confidence says so much about how positive it has been for him to work with his new trainer Pedro Diaz in Miami, so close to where he lost to Murtazaliev. Diaz, of Cuba, may never prove capable of correcting the shortcomings in Tszyu’s technique, but after three damaging defeats in four fights the rediscovery of his confidence – which may yet be tested on fight night – is even more beneficial than any attention delivered and pay-per-view revenue generated by any other sport could ever be.
