Five-and-a-half months after the Mismatch of the Millennium, David Tua will again step into the ring in pursuit of his heavyweight championship dream.
Tonight's opponent at West Auckland's Trusts Stadium - Friday the 13th Ahunanya - is expected to give Tua a much sterner test than Shane Cameron, who was blown out in the first round and KO'd in the second in Hamilton in October.
Ahunanya has shared the ring with some decent pros, has never been knocked out and also took care of Cameron. At 38, this is the last roll of the dice for the Las Vegas-based Nigerian cabbie. He has plenty to fight for.
His ebullient manager, Luis Tapia, has guaranteed his man Friday will win.
Such big talk is pretty much mandatory in professional boxing, but in reality there is little in Ahunanya's record to suggest he can trouble Tua.He may be undefeated in his past five fights, but the five before that failed to produce a single victory.
The theory that Ahunanya could dominate the late rounds if he can survive the early going appears based more on hope than reality. Ahunanya has fought into the 12th round just three times in a 32-fight career. One of those was the bloody get out of jail stoppage of Cameron, the other two he lost.
He has also not fought for more than two years.
Ahunanya's invincibility is also a good part myth. He may never have been knocked out, but he has twice been stopped inside the distance. Lance Whitaker busted his eye in the fourth round in 2004, and Sultan Ibragimov cut him with a head-butt and took the victory as he was leading on all three judges' score cards after nine rounds.
Still, you don't have to look far to find knowledgeable boxing types who believe Friday has a decent shot at upsetting the home-town hero.
"If Friday Ahunanya comes out and decides to take Tua on then he has got a good chance of winning it," said Lance Revill, a former fighter and referee and now president of the NZPBA.
Revill doesn't buy the line that even Cameron - who proved to be in a different stratosphere from Tua - was beating Ahunanya before he was cut. "No, he wasn't," Revill said. "Friday ... did a demolition job on him."
Ahunanya could win, then, but Revill stopped short of predicting he would. "I'm not going to call it."
Tua's trainer, Roger Bloodworth, studied the Cameron-Ahunanya fight but didn't read much into it.
"Every fighter has tendencies but it doesn't mean that Friday is going to fight Tua the same way he fought Cameron," Bloodworth said.
"They are two different fighters."
With Tua looking focused and in impressive shape at 108.7kg - just 900g more than for the Cameron fight - Ahunanya may be about to discover just how different the solid Samoan is from his last Kiwi victim.
"No doubt about it, I know he is a real powerful dude, but I have done my homework," said Ahunanya, a trim enough-looking 104.1kg.
"This is a make or break fight."
The claims from Tua's management that victory would lead to a world title shot are optimistic in the extreme but, with defeat almost certain to torpedo that goal, Tua also has no shortage of motivation. "I'm willing to die for what is about to take place," he said. "I'm ready for it."
FIGHT NIGHT
Tua v Ahunanya: Live on Maori TV from 8pm tonight.
Source: nzherald.co.nz
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