Boxer Jeff Horn safely back in his nest

As far as Joanna Horn is concerned, her boxing husband Jeff walked away a two-time winner from his losing fight with Tim Tszyu on Wednesday night.

Jeff Horn and his relieved wife Joanna with daughters Isabelle, 2, and Charlotte, 13 months, at home on Thursday. Picture: Annette Dew

As far as Joanna Horn is concerned, her boxing husband Jeff walked away a two-time winner from his losing fight with Tim Tszyu on Wednesday night. The first win happened when he left the ring alive. The second win happened on Thursday morning when he simply woke up.

“She gets those bad thoughts every time,” Jeff “The Hornet” Horn said, returning to his home on Brisbane’s southside and embracing his wife and young daughters, Isabelle and Charlotte, in a hug that lasted almost as long as a boxing round. “She worries I’m going to die in my sleep.”

Such is life for the wife of a champion Queenslander who never gives up and never goes down, even when the world is begging him to do so.

It’s Horn’s heart that Joanna admires most in her husband, and it’s his heart that keeps her up at night worrying.

It was that famous underdog spirit, Horn said, that was running through his trainer Glenn Rushton’s mind at the end of the eighth round on Wednesday night when he controversially asked a clearly battered and certainly beaten Horn: “Have you got a punch left in you? Give us a minute.”

Influential figures across the boxing world, including former champion Jeff Fenech, criticised Rushton for such apparent dis­regard for Horn’s welfare. Some even called for a suspension of his trainer’s licence.

“All this hooha about him being hurt is just nonsense, it’s just grandstanding from Fenech,” Rushton said on Thursday.

“I don’t often appreciate the stuff Fenech says. He speaks first and thinks second, and he’s not a measured thinker.

“Looking after Jeff is our No 1 concern at all times and the whole corner was on board. We all agreed he needed to show something and dig deep and lift his game. He wasn’t injured, he just wasn’t hungry enough.”

Horn, who loves his trainer like family, said: “Glenn knows how much of a warrior I am, so he knows what I’m capable of. But the other guys in the corner were very adamant that I’d probably had enough. I probably wasn’t going to be able to win the fight from there so they were happy for me to call it quits a bit earlier.

“I guess Glenn’s got that hope inside him. He thinks I can still throw that one more punch. But I’ve got to leave it up to the team’s hands at that point and go, ‘Well, whatever you guys reckon’. But I’m not going to give up.”

It’s the central theme of the Jeff Horn story — pushing through the impossible, never going down. A couple of bully thugs in his teens once asked him to kneel and accept an inevitable battering. Instead of kneeling, he stood tall and walked himself to his nearest gym on the southside of Brisbane and found himself a punching bag. Then, in 2017, he found himself a page in Australian sporting history, defeating the seemingly invincible WBO welterweight champion Manny Pacquiao in Brisbane.

“It’s the will to win,” the former schoolteacher said. “I’m a very competitive person. I’ll keep trying until I’m stopped, until I just can’t fight anymore.”

Horn wasn’t ready to call an end to his boxing story. “I’m definitely disappointed with how I performed but I guess it’s all credit to Tim,” he said. “He was very good and I can’t take anything away from him. I wish him all the best for the future. I’m just relieved now that I can have a break and reassess what’s next.”