Tim Tszyu got everything he needed, and nothing he didn’t from his famous father Kostya
Too often in boxing the price of a famous surname is a destructive father-son relationship. Tim Tszyu and his dad Kostya are the exception.
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Once the bludgeoning was complete the time finally was finally right for Tim Tszyu to tell everybody what the night was really about.
So Jeff Horn wiped the sweat from face, puffy and scrubbed raw in certain places, and Tszyu looked into a television camera and, with the same big black poddy calf eyes that Bill Mordey spoke of his father, he told the pay-per-view audience, “My name is Tim.”
His intentions were never more clear than that.
Nobody could blame him for trying to distance himself and his father. Almost all the hype around his young career is attached to his surname.
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Yet it remains a double-edged sword. Many could not see past the surname and watched Tim Tszyu fight for no better reason than to reminisce about his dad, such were the similarities.
At the same time, if his surname was Smith or Jones or, heaven forbid, Kent, there was not a chance in five he would headline a pay-per-view event 15 fights into his young career. The name was on the marquee.
With each blow, though, the sword is swinging more Tim’s way.
And this relationship, between father and son, is intent on working despite the odds.
While many fans want the romance of Kostya returning to Australia to work in his son’s corner, the more sensible say that with Kostya living in Russia, given the troubled relationships fathers training sons have in the fight game, a metre closer would be too close.
The gold standard was Ces Waters, who stood over the Waters dynasty with a menace that took the horror of murder to reveal.
Ces always sold himself as a kindly old man, if a bit eccentric. He used to give me goat’s milk as a Christmas gift.
By then Dean Waters had shot dead a man on the orders of his father, who was later revealed as a jealous, sexual deviate. Once the horror of Dean’s upbringing was laid bare in court, the tales of humiliation and mind control were so disturbing that the jury, some sobbing, believed they had no choice but to find Dean not guilty.
Tim Tszyu grew up tugging the edge of his father’s boxing trunks.
When Kostya would return from a fight in Las Vegas Tim would ride his shoulders through the airport, perched behind the sunglasses that often hid his father’s bruised eyes.
We saw him kiss his dad, bursting with joy, over the top rope at the fights in Australia. Jeff Fenech remembers Tim getting teeth before his first birthday, Kostya so proud of his kid’s advancement he fed him steak.
In truth, Kostya was not around the family home like some believe as Tim developed through the amateur ranks but his influence is strong.
The distance might be just enough, close but far enough away for Kostya to give Tim a second-hand education in the fight game.
Tim tells the story of Kostya as a young boy inside the Soviet regime fighting for his success and of how his trainer took him aside one day and gave him a baby chick.
He told Kostya to take it home and feed it and keep it warm and care for it, that the chick’s survival was all on him, and Kostya, always the best student, dutifully did so.
One day the trainer called in Kostya and his chicken and told Kostya to break the chicken’s neck. Then he told him to pluck it, cook it and eat it.
The trainer was teaching the young Kostya, first hand, the killer instinct required to be a fighter.
It explains the sliver of ice inside Kostya’s heart.
Nowadays, the trainer would be hauled in front of child services. For Tim, it was a lesson in the realities of a brutal sport.
The story was told from a father to his son, the imparting of knowledge, so Tim did not have to experience the act himself while still getting the message.
Fathers have not always been so kind.
Roy Jones Jr was basically brutalised by his father as a boy fighter, thrown in against bigger opponents by his dad and regularly given hidings. Big Roy ridiculed Roy Jr when the big kids beat him up.
It got so Roy hated his father. It got so he contemplated suicide.
Then one day Roy bought a dog to breed and was away from home when his friend let the dog loose and it nipped his sister.
Big Roy took out his gun and shot the dog dead right where it was.
“That did it for me,” Roy Jr told American sports show Highly Questionable. “I’m out, because the next time you gonna kill something, you gonna die with it.
“That was it for me.”
For Big Roy, the brutality needed to be a first-hand experience. Kostya has saved Tim from that.
Zab Judah, easily Kostya’s most famous knockout, had a fractured relationship with his father Yoel.
Floyd Mayweather Jr began his career with his father Floyd Sr in the corner and later banned him, replacing him with his uncle Roger, another Kostya victim, only for the pair to mend their relationship late in Floyd Jr’s career. Oscar de la Hoya, Buster Douglas … for every good one there are 10 bad.
Tim Tszyu successful repeated famous Loma & Usyk trick with #5coins pic.twitter.com/yUl9vHUhbU
— #JoshuaPulev (@BatmanBoxing) December 3, 2020
The great difference is in almost each case the son was outperforming the father and therefore, with great damage, the breakdown would come from the father’s ambition.
It could spill into full-blown tragedy.
Leavander Johnson got beaten to death by Jesus Chavez in 2005 while his father Bill, who had an unwavering belief in his son’s ability to get the job done, was in the corner, failing to throw in the towel when his son took a pummelling in the 11th.
Tim Tszyu is a young man looking to forge his own path in the fight game while his father, one of the greats, sits back and encourages his son from afar.
The greatest gift Kostya could give Tim is already passed on.
Tim walks into the ring each time armed with his father’s style, the poise and tremendous balance, the tremendous boxing intellect.
His job is done.
* * * * * * * * * *
TWO points for a field goal will end in more draws, more extra time.
There is no other way the two point field goal – taken when a team is behind by two – advantages a team that the one-point field goal does not already do.
If that’s what the NRL is seeking, then it is a good thing.
The problem with collections of people who come together under titles like “innovation committee” is that they believe they have to come up with some radical change otherwise it looks like they are not doing their job.
They can hardly walk out and say let’s leave the way it is for the moment, it’s going well enough. It would be seen as a waste of sandwiches.
All the new rules mean nothing if the referees don’t start finding the courage to actually start refereeing the game as they see it, and that begins with penalising teams who are deliberately bending the rules to gain advantage.
The refs lack courage, burned by public criticism, and coaches know this and coach their teams to exploit the rules knowing the ref will soon put his whistle in his pocket.
That is the simple truth and, until that is addressed, all the rest is window dressing.
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