Boxing champ Tim Tszyu steps out of his father Kostya’s shadow
He’s talented and fiercely driven, like his dad. Tim Tszyu’s big dream? “To break out of my father’s legacy and start my own.”
Tim Tszyu is lifting weights with his teeth. Five kilograms attached to a towel gripped between his jaws until his neck muscles ache. Then come razor-sharp jabs that split newspaper pages in half. Now five 20-cent pieces are placed on a small block of wood. Tszyu gets in his fight stance. His trainer flips the coins in the air. Tszyu catches all five before they hit the floor. It happens so quickly I can’t fathom how he’s done it. He turns and smiles at a nice old bloke called Boris, who’s watching every drill, towel and water at the ready. “He means everything to me. Everything,” Tszyu says. Boris is as Russian as a shot of vodka. His English is on the ropes but he knows enough to nod at his grandson and say: “He is my life.”
The biggest name in Australian boxing is training at the Tszyu Boxing Academy in the Sydney suburb of Rockdale. It’s the fight club built by his father, Kostya Tszyu, The Thunder From Down Under, the gold-toothed, rat-tailed, python-owning, Bentley-driving, undisputed light-welterweight champion of the world. One of the most popular, famous and successful Australian boxers in history. His 26-year-old son is a chip off the old block, pounding revered former world champion Jeff Horn in a Townsville superfight last August to become the face of the sport in this country. It’s quite the face. Doesn’t have a scratch. No fat lip, no busted nose, no cauliflower ear. You sure you’re a boxer? “I don’t get hit very often,” he grins.
Tszyu did more than beat Horn. He beat him up. And then the dethroned king of Australian boxing wrapped an arm around the young fella with the famous surname and whispered in his ear while sweat and slobber and blood trickled onto the canvas: “ It’s your turn to fly the flag for Australia.”
Tszyu is slogging through a four T-shirt training session on a Wednesday afternoon. Every time a T-shirt becomes too sweat-soaked he whips it off, blows his nose in it and tosses it away. Boris grabs it and places it in a plastic shopping bag. In the first hour of Tszyu’s three-hour routine, his shadow boxing, skipping, bobbing and weaving is done in total silence. In the second hour, there’s a sudden thunderclap of gloves hitting the pads held by his trainer, Igor Goloubev. As the punches gain velocity and intent, Tszyu starts making distinct noises. Tsst, tsst, tsst. A hissing intensity. Left, right, left. Tsst, tsst, tsst. In the third hour, when his punches have developed a frightening force, when Goloubev is wearing what looks like a suit of armour to take them, the gentleman boxer gets the look of a stone-cold killer. For the most thunderous blows, when every last centimetre of his heart and soul and legs and hips and shoulders are going into them, Tszyu makes a different noise. These punches are released and snapped back like a cobra spitting venom. Bap! Bap! Bap! And then he retreats to his corner so Boris can wipe his grandson’s soaked brow with a yellow towel. He pours water down his parched throat and then puts everything back in the plastic shopping bag.
I ask Boris what he feels for Tim. He gets embarrassed and laughs and looks at his feet and says, “I love him.” Why? “He’s a strong man,” Boris says. “But he’s a good man. This is very important.”
Seventy-three posters and photographs of Kostya Tszyu – son of Boris, father of Tim – hang on the walls. Promos for his fights. Judgement Day. Kostya Tszyu v Calvin Grove. Newcastle Entertainment Centre. April 5, 1998. When Tim is skipping absent-mindedly in front of the main mirrors, his eyes shift up and to the left, where his dad’s image is staring back at him on a banner that reads Kostya Tszyu vs. Livingstone Bramble. The physical resemblance is uncanny. Snapshots of Kostya are everywhere, flying in the face of stories about the supposedly fractured relationship between father and son, between the Sydney-based apple that has fallen 14,000km from the Moscow-based tree. “That’s all bullshit,” Tim says.
Headlines before the Tszyu-Horn fight ran along similar lines. The Bitter Reason Kostya Tszyu Won’t Attend His Son’s Mega-Fight. Bitter Family Split Behind Tszyu’s Absence. Nothing but uninformed, scandalous clickbait, mate, according to Tszyu Jr, who leans back on a white lounge under a photograph of himself as a toddler on Kostya’s knee. “I’ll tell you the truth about all that.’’
Kostya Tszyu moved from Russia to Australia in 1992 to help Jeff Fenech train for a fight against Azumah Nelson and start his own professional career. He relocated from poverty-stricken Serov, in the foothills of the Ural Mountains, with the prettiest girl in his village, Natasha. They married in Sydney and had two sons, Tim and Nikita, and a daughter, Anastasia. His notoriously intense approach to boxing made him a mostly absent parent. When Kostya’s career finished in 2005, the family tried living in Moscow. Natasha and the kids returned to Sydney but Kostya has been in Moscow since 2007, flying the coop permanently when Tim was 13. Kostya, who is remarried and has two young children, has admitted he was hardly a doting dad the first time round. In an interview on Fox Sports during a rare visit to Australia, he said: “I was so busy. I was very strict. Very disciplined. Doing my own stuff. Everyone was shut out. I’m thinking, I was good? Or not good to them?”
Tim considers these quotes. Kostya was good? Or not good to you? “Dad missed a lot of my childhood,” he says. “He was a tough man. A strict man. But I completely understood that. We all knew from a young age that we were in a different life compared to the lives of other kids. It was just the way dad was. He had unbelievable discipline. Insane discipline. There was stuff that needed to be done and nothing was going to stop him doing it. It was the thing that made him so successful. The only thing. It was what differentiated him from everyone else.”
I’d been warned off asking Tszyu about his father but it’s the topic he seems most invested in. “I remember in primary school, we’d have to get up and [do] early morning runs,” he says. “In Year 3 I came second in cross-country. I came home and the usual parent would say, ‘Well done, son!’ But second was unacceptable to my dad. I had to come first every year after that. There was no such thing as being satisfied with trying hard. Everything you did, you had to come first. And you could never give up. That was the big message. I’m very honoured to have had a dad who brought us up like that.” Why? “It taught me you’ve got to be hungry in life.”
Was he peeved when the tree moved 14,000km from the apple? “No,” Tszyu says. “Honestly, no. It made life more… relaxing! We tried living in Moscow for a year but realised we’d rather be here in Australia. Dad stayed but we were so used to life here, we just wanted to come back. It was a rich-and-famous life in Russia but we were just simple kids from Australia who didn’t really enjoy that. Dad’s such a big name there and we were getting treated in a special way by school teachers. We had a personal driver when we were only kids. We had no real friends. Everyone wanted to be our friend, but we didn’t really have any friends. When we got back home to Sydney, the first thing I did was catch a train from Hurstville to Miranda to go to the cinema with my mates. That feeling to me was like, ‘Wow, this is 150,000 times better than what I was experiencing in Russia.’ Funny, eh? I’ve never forgotten that train trip. It was freedom.”
He swears there’s no family rift. “My mum and my dad, it’s just the kind of thing that can happen in a marriage. There’s no bitterness. My parents are on good terms. They just went their separate ways,” says Tszyu, who lives with his partner of four years, 27-year-old Alexandra Constantine.
As a toddler, he could make a fist before he could form a sentence; he could give someone a whack before he could walk. He did gymnastics, played junior representative soccer, had his first fight as a 15-year-old. He was an outstanding junior. Grabbed a Golden Gloves title. Won 32 of his 33 amateur fights – the only loss was a contentious countback – before turning pro in 2016.
And then he quit boxing for three years in his late teens, enrolling in a business degree at the University of Technology Sydney, only to discover he preferred hitting blokes over books. “Yeah, I stopped [boxing] when Dad left for Russia,” he says. “I had a few injuries, tried to do other things, but I was in a bit of a lost position. I came back to the gym here and started managing it. That was what I was going to do. Run my dad’s gym. I did some sparring and felt a tingle. Felt something stirring in me. I think I knew, in my heart, that I would always regret it if I didn’t give it a proper go. I knew how to box. I knew how to punch before I knew how to walk. I’d been around it my whole life. And then I watched Creed. You know that movie? His dad was a famous boxer. It’s in his blood. He gives up his day job to chase the dream. I watched Creed and I thought, ‘That’s my life’.”
Boris gets a towel and threads it through a 5kg weight. Tszyu jams the towel into his mouth and lifts the weight 10 times. They move to a part of the gym where there’s a famous photograph of Muhammad Ali when he was still Cassius Clay. Goboulev holds a sheet of newspaper in front of Tszyu’s face. He unleashes a straight right. The paper folds around his fist, meaning the spitting cobra punch hasn’t snapped back fast enough. The idea is for Tszyu to hit the paper at full throttle and then rip it with the speed of his recoil. On the fourth attempt, the paper splits in two. Goboulev nods quietly. Boris punches the sky. Tszyu gives him a grin. Then the coins come out. One, two, three, four, five. Bap! Bap! Bap! Bap! Bap! Boris laughs his head off.
One of Tim’s T-shirts reads Team Tszyu 2. It’s more than a nod to being the second Tszyu to put up the dukes. It’s the second time round for his entourage, too. His trainer, Goboulev, was Kostya’s trainer. His manager, Glen Jennings, was Kostya’s manager. And then there’s Boris, a round-faced and no-nonsense man who’s at every training session, every fitness drill, doing everything for his grandson that he previously did for his son. “My grandfather is very important to me,” Tszyu says. “He keeps me grounded. He’s like the godfather to us all. That’s what we call him. The godfather.”
Townsville, August 26, 2020: Tim Tszyu entered the Horn fight as the son of Kostya. “I agree. No doubt about that,” he says. Broadcaster Ben Damon began the coverage by saying, “A million questions about to be answered. The proven warrior or the emerging star?” Tszyu remembers the wrestling-style clenches with the brawling Horn, and how hard Horn was breathing. Got him. He remembers staring at Horn’s legs. They were starting to wobble. Got him. A procession of body shots. To the ribs. The liver. Tsst, tsst, tsst. Horn stumbled and staggered as if they came laced with vodka shots. He twice hit the deck as Tszyu stalked him, calm and composed, in total control. He landed punch after punch after punch. Bap! Bap! Bap! It was a beautiful performance from Tszyu, the sweet science in all its brutal yet intricate glory. Horn’s camp threw in the towel after the eighth round. Damon answered his own question: “A lot of people are learning that Tim Tszyu is better than they thought. Wow.” He walked out of the Townsville ring as his own man. A new Tszyu. “I definitely think that’s the case,” he says.
Tszyu has had 17 professional fights for 17 wins. “It’s addictive,” he says. “When you land a clean shot, that’s the real addiction.” What’s your favourite punch? “Every punch gives you a different feeling and emotion. You can’t go wrong with a straight right. It just goes right through them. The uppercut’s always a good one but my favourite is the left rip to the body. There’s nothing like it. A rip straight into the ribs. They can recover from shots to the head. With body shots, you see the life being drained out of them.”
Exhibit A: Horn. A broken man by the end. “Exactly right,” Tszyu says. “I wanted to break him down. And I did. That’s what it was, body shot after body shot. It broke him physically. It broke him spiritually. I could see it in his face, legs, his whole body. I could see him breaking. I could hear it in the way he was breathing. I could see him start thinking about survival more than winning. Body shot after body shot. That was it. There’s no feeling like it. You know every rip is hurting them. Boxing can be cruel like that. Your opponent is right there in front of me. It’s kill or be killed. You’re not just breaking him down. You are taking that man’s soul.”
He’s now the No.1-ranked WBO super welterweight fighter in the world. If he beats Irishman Dennis Hogan on March 31 in Newcastle, where Kostya fought and won seven times, next stop is likely to be a world title fight. Is that the dream here? The weights between the teeth, punching the page of a newspaper, catching coins, running 8km every morning, working yourself to a standstill every afternoon under the photos and posters of your father … what’s the actual dream here? “The dream is to break out of my father’s legacy and start my own,” he says. “I feel like people started recognising me as Tim, and not the son of Kostya, after I beat Horn. I never minded all the father-son talk, to be honest with you. I’m super-proud of everything my dad did. He’s the greatest Australian boxer of all time and he always will be in my eyes. I want to continue that family legacy but to do it, I have to create my own. The dream is to step away from who my father was and to do those incredible things myself. To be my own man. But the dream goes further than that.”
Goes where? “Fame and money doesn’t motivate me. What motivates me is the desire to win but on top of that, the dream is to inspire as many people as I can to never stop chasing their own.
I can become a one-time, two-time, three-time world champion, but if I can make a change in the world, a change as simple as motivating people to make the most of their own lives, that is huge to me. I believe boxing can do that. When boxing is at its best, the reach is incredible. That’s when you can have an impact beyond just providing for your family and achieving your own goals. The whole world stops and watches a big fight. I want to have a fight that makes the world stop and watch.”
Seventy three posters and photographs of Kostya. He’s nowhere to be seen but he’s everywhere while his son and his father get to work. Tszyu shakes his head and grins and says: “My dad used to give us these mental tests. This was from a very young age, he used to make us do these insane ab workouts. Professional boxers can’t do five minutes of the workout we used to do. He’d make us do it for half an hour when I was, like, 12 or 13 years old. It must have rubbed off.”
How so? “I still like to put myself through some punishment. Just to test myself. I do little things like not eating for two days, just to see how strong I am mentally. I want to know I can say no to something even when I really want to say yes. I’ve done 25km runs, things like that, to see how far I can push myself. Because boxing is 80 per cent about your brain. We learn specific physical movements over and again until it becomes muscle memory. After it becomes muscle memory, it becomes instinct. When you have two fighters going on instinct, that’s when you have yourself an interesting fight. It doesn’t matter how tired I am or the physical suffering. I need a strong mind to take my opponent out, and so you have to train and test your mind as much as your body.”
Tszyu is into his third hour and fourth T-shirt. He’s warming down. Boris packs up the drink bottles and the towel and puts them in his plastic shopping bag. I have gained the impression of a gentleman boxer. There’s no trash talk before his fights. No grandstanding in the gym. “There’s no need for all that stuff,” he says. “I’m a simple professional and I love what I do. But I’m also very competitive and I know that in boxing, your fists do your talking and not your mouth. A gentleman boxer? I don’t know about that. It’s a bad man’s sport. When I get in the ring, I ain’t no gentleman. I’ve got no mercy for no one and they’ve got no mercy for me. We want to take each other out. A fire lights inside me when I get into a ring and as I’ve said, it’s kill or be killed. There’s no way I’m going to be on the wrong side of that.”
There’s a photograph of Kostya with Russell Crowe. A picture of Kostya and Tim with Mike Tyson. “Tyson started kissing dad’s hands and sort of bowing to him,” Tszyu laughs. “What is it with boxers? They get all weird when they retire.” A photo of the Tszyus with Jeff Fenech, the legendary Marrickville Mauler, who tells me on the phone: “I’m not bullshitting you, Tim can do what Kostya did. He’s that good. But he has to stay hungry now he’s getting success, popularity, money. If you lose your hunger in boxing, you’re a dead man.”
Poster upon poster. Kostya Tszyu v Hector Lopez. Hyatt Regency, Tampa, Florida, Jan 11 1994. Kostya’s books and DVDS, they’re all here. When Tim looks in the mirror, he can see his father up on the walls and his grandfather in the reflection. Three generations of men. “It’s a family affair,” he says.
Tim says he’s been to Russia “about 15 times” since Kostya moved there. His father is now married to Tatiana, who used to be his personal assistant. Kostya had said it’s impossible to be in love with someone you work with, so he sacked her. They have two young children, Aleksander and Viktoria, who aren’t doing 30-minute ab workouts and early morning runs while their father cracks the whip. “Dad and I have talked about … us,” Tszyu says. “It’s funny, you know. When I go to Russia to see him, his little kids are running around and mucking up and I’m like, ‘Dad! What is this?! We weren’t allowed to do this stuff! This wouldn’t have happened when I was growing up!’ He says he was a different man then. He’s become very soft and I don’t blame him. He’s gone through a lot in boxing and in his life, so he deserves to be nice and relaxed now. When I was as small as his kids are now, I would have been told, ‘Sit over there, you must do this and that’. But dad is just at a different stage of his life now. You can see he’s more happy and relaxed. The way he is with his kids now, I can see he’s trying to enjoy every moment with them. He missed out on a lot of things with us. It’s just the way it is. We talk all the time as a father and son – but in terms of my boxing career, he’s not involved at all.”
Kostya has been ringside for only one of his son’s fights. “I want to keep it that way,” Tim says. “No offence to my dad, but he’s a control freak. He’s an alpha. If he gets involved in my boxing, he won’t be able to help himself. He’ll want to run the show. He’ll want to take over. That won’t work here. This is the path I’m on, with the team I’ve got, and while I respect his opinions, we’re doing things our way and he’s not involved. And it creates a better relationship with dad because business doesn’t get in the way. He’s super-proud and happy for me. I’m proud of him and I’m happy in my own life. He’s my father and I love him but I’ll be happy for him to not be at any of my fights. I would actually prefer it.” What about a world title fight? Would you want him there for that? “Not really, no,” he says. “We’ll see. But I’m used to the way things are. I like the way they are. I remember that fight he did come to, I could hear him in the crowd. He can’t control his emotions. Better for him to stay home and watch it. He can sit back and relax and try to enjoy it. He knows what I am doing with my life – and he also knows I am doing it myself.”
There wouldn’t be 73 posters and photographs of Kostya on the walls if he resented him. He wouldn’t be using the entourage his father did. I ask Boris to compare son and grandson. “Same as Kostya,” Boris says. “And different to Kostya. Same, but different.” On Kostya’s 50th birthday, Tim supposedly told his old man they look the same “but I’m taller and better-looking”. He slaps his thigh and says, “Yeah, I did tell him that. And he agreed. What else could he say? Facts are facts!”
Memories of an afternoon at the Tszyu Boxing Academy? The coins. The weights lifted by teeth. The newspaper. The tsst, tsst, tsst. The Bap! Bap! Bap! Above all, Boris, the dear old thing, minding his own business, constantly by his grandson’s side while somehow always staying out of his way. The politeness of him. The old-fashioned decency.
They end up alone on the lounge. It’s such a tender scene it nearly brings a tear to my eye. They don’t talk much. There’s lots of nods and glances and understanding and routine. You’ll rarely see two people more comfortable in each other’s company. Old man, young man. At one stage, Tszyu puts a hand on Boris’s shoulder and just stares into his eyes. I think he’s going to say something. Thank you. I love you. Something like that. All they do is smile and then get back to work. It is beautiful.
“I have so much respect for him,” Tszyu says. “He’s by the book. Everything has to be done right. Every last detail. There’s no short cuts. Not ever. There’s no arguing. We speak on the phone two times a day. We see each other three times a day. He’s always calling me up and saying, ‘How are you feeling? Everything OK?’ He knows what’s involved in boxing because he’s been through it all with my dad. He knows there’s a mix of emotions. If I ever have a problem, I call him. Every time.
“I know he’s always thinking about me. I think right now I’m probably his purpose for living. I think what we’re doing probably makes him feel alive. I’m glad about that. I know what we have is special. Every time I win a fight, the person I look for is him. He’s my best mate in this world. And he is a father figure in my life.”
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