Former WBO welterweight champion Jeff Horn admits he felt "betrayed" when he was informed that a former member of his training team, Dundee Kim, had been helping undefeated rising junior middleweight star Tim Tszyu.
Horn and Tszyu are scheduled to collide in a highly anticipated Australian grudge match before the end of the year. Their respective promoters are looking at late August and early September.
Kim, a strength and conditioning coach, had worked with Horn for six years and sixteen fights.
Kim had parted ways with Horn's team in January.
According to Kim, some of the facts were exaggerated about his relationship with Tszyu.
He says he's not working with Tszyu in any formal capacity, but admits to doing some work with him during a training session.
Regardless of that, Horn was not pleased when he found out.
“I had absolutely no idea that it was happening,” Horn told Fox Sports. “I was quite disappointed in how it all kind of unfolded and how it happened. … I was like, ‘Huh? What?’ … So I made sure I jumped on and had a look, and it didn’t look very good, that’s for sure.
“I’m still, I guess, disappointed that he’d be even working with him, showing him those few things that I saw on TV about it, and Dundee hasn’t reached out to me at all.
“With what I saw, and I’ve had no calls or anything from him, I feel a little bit betrayed that he’s kind of gone behind my back to kind of share how I move and things to Tim Tszyu."
Horn says Kim broke away from the team, because he was tired of working under head trainer Glenn Rushton. Kim had his own ambitions to be a head trainer.
“I think Dundee just wanted to kind of do it all himself, and become a full-on boxing coach himself,” Horn said. "He didn’t kind of want to be overshadowed by someone like Glenn [Rushton], because I guess Glenn probably has done that a little bit.”
There were also some some disagreeing views between Horn and Kim when it came to compensation.
