There is a scene in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan in which the ballet director Thomas implores Nina, played by Natalie Portman, to observe Mila Kunis’ Lily. “Watch the way she moves,” he says. “Imprecise, but effortless. She’s not faking it.”
The viewer is by then already aware that the naturally talented and dedicated ballet dancer Nina is beyond burdened by the demands of her profession, and to the extent that her position is potentially at risk. Lily, by comparison, lacks her exceptional abilities, and yet embraces her existence with a freedom that frees her of the tension and weight of expectation haunting Nina. Lily experiences the same joy dancing in an empty room as she would on the grandest stage; Nina can no longer take any pleasure from what has long been her most cherished activity of all.
Black Swan is an exploration of the price of perfection, the overpowering desire for artistic excellence, and its consequences on mental health. The comparison between Nina and Lily and Michael Zerafa and Nikita Tszyu may appear an unlikely one, and yet to observe both fighters on the eve of what is by some distance Tszyu’s biggest fight is to not only be presented with that unlikely comparison, but to observe that Tszyu, not Zerafa, is the one behaving like the experienced world-title challenger who has fought and succeeded on similar stages before.
At Monday’s grand arrivals the 27-year-old Tszyu, almost inexplicably wearing a kimono and dirty white trainers, couldn’t have juxtaposed the immaculately groomed “Pretty Boy” Zerafa anymore had he tried. Tszyu often gave the impression that he would have behaved similarly had there not been so many observers and cameras present; Zerafa, shoulders tense, hands fidgeting and back occasionally slumped, like he would have relished being somewhere else instead of putting so much effort into attempting to appear how he believed he should.
Regardless of his being undefeated, the 11-0 Tszyu is far from unaware of the ills of his chosen sport. It was he who threw in the towel to rescue his older brother Tim from the heavy-handed Bakhram Murtazaliev in 2024 – it perhaps is because he is so relatively unburdened that he was the first to recognise that that was what was needed – and if he has his own scars they are the consequence of how the career of his celebrated father Kostya came to an end.
His manager Glenn Jennings – once Kostya’s manager, and Tim’s manager until his dismissal before the conclusion of 2025 – accurately describes the younger Tszyu as a “free spirit”. Others who know him less well and observers who don’t know him at all have lazily described him as “weird”. Tszyu gives the impression that he is as unmoved by one description as he is the other; he has little need for others to know or understand him and recognises that the time will come when very few care about him at all. He understands that boxing has never cared for him and that it never will – and it therefore doesn’t matter to what extent he does or doesn’t conform. His profession, like the wider world, is often unnecessarily complicated and he cares not for complications. In many respects he cares for very little. He’s also not the epitome of a free spirit, but spiritually, unlike his opponent on Friday at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre, he is unquestionably free.
“I don’t think too much about [fighting Zerafa],” he tells BoxingScene. “I have quite a peaceful environment at home. Literally, I only really think about it when I have to do these interviews. Obviously when I’m in the gym we’re preparing for a certain kind of thing – practicing certain things – but I’m not overthinking him in general. I just know what we’re focusing on and why we’re focusing on it. I think the environment you have at home really dictates. My wife has created a very peaceful place for me to just come home and boxing is not in the talks at all. Her name’s Nikita as well. Two Nikitas [laughs].
“I can completely unwind from this boxing – this is chaotic. There’s a lot of sharks in this industry and you can easily get lost in it, and she brings an environment that I get to completely disconnect from it all. She doesn’t even have social media – she has no idea what’s going on in the world. She’s literally just interacting with the dogs and my daughter [six-month old Curiosity], and I come home and I’m essentially telling her what’s happening around the world.
“[We have] four dogs. Two huskies, they’re like cats in a dog’s body, a French bulldog, and a cavalier, so a little bit of everything.
“It’s peaceful in terms of it’s a disconnect. It’s a bubble. It’s very chaotic at home, actually. My hands are always full, especially feeding all of them – they’re all jumping at me. It’s peace in chaos.
“Every fight’s a big risk. Every fight you’re putting your life on the line. I like to think that every single time I get into the ring I’m risking everything. If I lost any one of my earlier fights, the same – I would not be in a good position.
“I’m actually kind of used to this. I’ve had so much attention for my first fights, and this feels like the same, same.
“It’s a fucked sport, bro. That’s why I try not to get caught up in it. I understand that there’s more to life than boxing, and wins happen, losses happen, and not to hold on to things too much. At the end of the day, after the careers are finished, people are gonna stop giving attention to you, and people stop giving a shit.”
While he spoke, Tszyu was sat in a corner of the Tszyu Fight Club in Rockdale, Sydney in which posters of his father and brother dominate the walls. After every question he was asked he paused to consider both the question and how he wanted to respond to it before answering. He was an unusual blend of detached and engaged. Fighters frequently lie to themselves, contradict themselves and knowingly lie to others – lying can become a means of survival – but everything he said that afternoon ultimately made sense.
“It’s a lot, because he’s a name that’s always been lingering around before I even got into the professional rankings; professional boxing,” he responded when he asked how personal the rivalry with the 33-year-old Zerafa is to him. “He had that altercation with my brother; the fight was meant to happen. I’ve always known the name. I remember the disrespectful things that he said about my family, so there is a little personal side to it. I’m still solely focused on him.
“You can say whatever you want about me, but to attack someone else that I love, that’s not right. Especially in the circumstances of what the attack was. If you’re just making fun of them, whatever. But when he said the ‘Micky Hatton’ line – making fun of my dad after Ricky Hatton, the loss [in 2005] – that was a very traumatic moment in our family. Seeing my father go through that wasn’t easy, and to go that low…
“My dad was scheduled to be able to progress within his career. I think there was a deal with Showtime – a five-fight deal; second or third fight – and that would have been a huge leap in his career, the biggest thing for him. For that to be stripped away, seeing him, the way he reacted after the fight – he was closed off.
“I guess it could have – I don’t know if it led to the divorce of my parents, moving back and forth to Russia. Essentially, our entire life kind of shifted from there. It was kind of like a break in the water.
“I genuinely think that [Zerafa] doesn’t [dislike me]. I think it’s just the money side of things – why he wanted to get this fight. It’s the only real, big fight for him left in the Australian scene.
“[If he loses] it’s a hard one to come back from, that’s for sure, ‘cause I’m still quite early in my career, and he’s obviously on the tail end of his career. He’s achieved a lot and reached those world-title challenges, but losing to someone like me, this early…
“That’s what I’ve just been envisioning for this last three, four months. Five months. Six months, actually, since my last fight. Since August I’ve known that this fight was going to happen – that this was the next one that they had planned, and I’ve been training, pretty much non-stop, since.”
If there is a temptation for Zerafa to feign disliking Tszyu in an attempt to promote their pay-per-view contest he has resisted it. He speaks openly about liking him – theirs is an all-Australian contest that is in demand largely because of the rivalry that has long existed between he and the older Tszyu – and yet while Tszyu is equally open about disliking him, when they are in each other’s presence the tense one isn’t Tszyu.
Since shaving his blond locks, Tszyu’s appearance has lost some of its youth and innocence. At Wednesday’s public press conference in the intense heat of Brisbane he couldn’t have looked less intimidating while wearing a towel to protect his scalp – and yet alongside the carefully curated Zerafa he consistently presents so many of the qualities his opponent lacks.
It is the 39-fight Zerafa who has previously fought for a world title, and whose reputation and abilities mean that he has previously been involved in high-profile domestic match-ups and won. But there so often appear to be two Zerafas – the often fluid, experienced boxer potentially capable of being too smart and schooled for the raw, aggressive Tszyu, and the one who has experienced defeat and fears it again, who overthinks his movements inside and outside of the boxing ring, the Nina to the Lily of Tszyu.
“He’s rangy,” Tszyu said of the opponent he will fight at a catchweight of 157lbs. “He’s very sharp with his punches. He’s got a lot of intelligence. He’s got a good mind – a thinking fighter. I don’t think he’s a crazy, tough brawler or anything, but he has that potential as well. He’d prefer to be fighting at distance, but he’s able to fight up close as well.
“He can be a little bit repetitive. He has a bit of a weak spirit, and when things get uncomfortable he starts to panic, from what I’ve assessed. He knows that as well. He’s very much aware of it. Some of things he’s been saying in the lead up to the fight – he’s always been talking about the mental preparation that he’s doing. He’s always trying to say he did 10km here, before doing these interviews. I can see he’s trying to overcompensate.
“‘I’m definitely ready for this – I know that I’m gonna be fit, I’m gonna be stronger than you.’ He’s even talking about doing ice baths at the end of the day. I’ve got an ice bath at the gym – I jump in after a hard session, just to remove any bit of inflammation. He was talking about ‘I do it after training, at the end of the day, when the body’s nice and cold, because mentally that’s how you build’, and he’s trying to overcompensate to build his mental side. He’s said he’s got a mental coach of some sort. These little things – he’s trying to convince himself of that.
“Physically, he’s at his peak. I don’t think he can reach any higher. I think he’s reached the peak. Sometimes he dips down but sometimes he can reach and be there, and I think this fight – obviously the magnitude of it – he will be at his best.
“He’s a smaller fighter than me. He told me that he walks around around 76kgs [168lbs], whereas I walk around 82, usually. I drop down to 69, and he drops down to 72, so he’s usually doing quite an easy weight cut. For him to drop down to 71 is still a little bit harder – not that crazy hard. For me, it’s kind of easier. I don’t know who it favours. It kind of looks like it favours me, ‘cause I get to cut less and he gets to cut more, but I’m a little bit bigger than him in general. We’ll come into the fight the same kind of weight.
“I’ve really implemented a lot of recovery into my routine. I’ve learned to not push it as well. Not to really kill myself, because I know that I’ve got to perform on these certain days during the week. Tuesdays and Thursdays when I’m sparring, and I can’t be messing up any other days overtraining myself. We’re obviously not sparring for the whole six months. There’s a certain window where we’re sparring and doing that real intense training, and just doing a lot of foundational stuff.
“Physically I’m in a very good position. I don’t think I’m at my peak physically. In this last preparation is when I’ve really started to notice my body really physically maturing. All my earlier fights I was doing good but I was on a pretty steady incline. This one I can really feel a big jump, and that’s because of the magnitude of the fight – the moment coming, and there’s more focus towards it.”
It may yet be that Zerafa performs like a considerably more confident fighter than he has presented and therefore is too experienced and cultured for his Tszyu. Tszyu stopped Lulzim Ismaili inside a round in his past fight in August and 12 months earlier, against Koen Mazoudier, responded to his uncle and trainer Igor Goloubev questioning whether he was too exhausted to continue at the end of the eighth round by dramatically stopping Mazoudier in the ninth.
Since the victory over Ismaili, Tim Tszyu has dismissed Jennings and Goloubev and recruited a new team to revive his cruelly faltering career. He has looked jaded – scarred in a way in which his brother hasn’t but Zerafa often has – and yet despite observing his decline, his younger brother Nikita, significantly closer to his sibling than father, seems almost entirely unaffected by what has been.
“Tim’s mentally strong,” he said. “He’s a strong person, and I know that the decisions that he’s made are good for him.
“I guess it was a little bit hard. It was more of a shock that he went that way, but at the same time I wasn’t surprised. But he’s on his own journey. That’s what he wants to do – that’s how he should go. For me it’s different.
“The way I look at my time is I see us more as like a story. We’re all going to learn together; we’re gonna develop together, and whatever happens happens. I like to think that the people that are with me from the start are going to be with me until the end, and once the gloves are laced up, we can all sit around a fire and reminisce on the beautiful career that we all had – not just me. As much as an individual sport that it is, there’s a team behind it.
“This is the first chapter of the best years of me. Those first 10 fights I had were all about learning and relearning the sport – I don’t know if you know about my history but I had an amateur career for five or six years, then I stopped boxing for eight years to pursue education, and just got back into it. There was a lot of stuff that I lost – a lot of abilities that just didn’t come to me, and I had my first fight after only three months of training, so I’ve been learning on the go.
“In terms of my boxing career I’d have been a lot better [if I’d continued], for sure, but in terms of life – the experience that I’ve had – I do not regret it. I know, in my head, I’m in a very good position.”
