‘Dad is a soft guy now’: Inside the Tszyu family reunion
When Tim Tszyu caught up with his father in Thailand for a training camp last month, he encountered a very different man to the one who raised him.
This was no longer Kostya Tszyu, the stone-cold killer. Nor the disciplinarian father who pushed his kids to their physical breaking point. Or the aloof champion too busy pulverising opponents to do the usual dad stuff with his kids.
Tim and Kostya Tszyu share a moment after training.
“My dad’s a soft guy now,” Tszyu said. “You know, he’s a completely, completely different man. In a good way, he’s calmed down.”
Kostya Tszyu has been described as many things. Undisputed world champion. Hall of famer. The Thunder from Down Under. But soft?
Tim and Kostya Tszyu train in Thailand.
“His relationship with his kids now, the new little ones, the two little ones, is completely different,” Tszyu said of his father’s new family in Russia. “The way they were raised is completely different to the way we were raised. He’s a softer man now, you know.”
There appeared nothing soft about Kostya during Tim’s Thai training camp. The images of the pair working out together on social media were stunning: the shadow boxing together in front of the iconic Big Buddha in Phuket, as well as pad sessions in stifling heat at one of the local gyms.
Even at 54, Kostya looks like he could still punch on with the best of them.
“I’m telling him, ‘You gotta get Ricky Hatton back, man’,” Tim jokingly said of a rematch with one of only two men to vanquish Kostya. “Yeah, he’s still got it.”
Yet Tszyu discovered a more mellow man behind Kostya’s tough exterior. Not that there is any resentment over his spartan upbringing.
“Never,” Tszyu said. “Due to the way he raised us and the way he made us become, I became a world champion. “And we’re on the path towards becoming multiple world champions.
“You know what I realised, that there’s the one per cent and then there’s the 0.1 per cent. In Australia you’re here with a lot of the – not to be rude – but the just average, mediocre-type people.
“Sometimes when you go away, when I go on the Thailand trips and when I go to America training camps, you meet the one per cent of the people. But then there’s the 0.1 per cent and there’s not many of us that are in it.
“And then I realised that I am in that percentage with my dad and it was nice to connect and do the crazy things that not many people understand.”
Tim and Kostya have rarely seen each other since the latter shifted to Russia. Kostya has been at only one of his son’s professional fights: the very first, back in 2016. The last time they saw each other in person was in Sydney in 2019, in the lead-up to the fight between “The Soul Taker” and Jack Brubaker.
The reunion in Thailand was part of preparations for a fight that ultimately didn’t go ahead. The 29-year-old was scheduled to meet undefeated knockout specialist Vergil Ortiz, but Tszyu was forced to pull out due to the head cut he received in his last fight, a loss to Sebastian Fundora.
Regardless, it was a chance for the pair to reconnect. Grandfather Boris has been the father figure in Tszyu’s life since Kostya moved to Russia. Tszyu has struck the delicate balance between trading on the name of his famous father since moving into the professional ranks, while still carving out his own identity.
For that reason, Tszyu junior rarely speaks in depth about Kostya, but was more forthcoming about their relationship in this interview.
“A lot of it is more like, not father and son, but I guess it’s like a friendship,” Tszyu explained. “We’ve always had that relationship. He’s not that much older than me anyway, he had me when he was young. I don’t even know how old he is now actually!”
Asked if Kostya was proud of the man he had become, Tszyu said: “I think it was a proud feeling for him, you know, a proud feeling. I could see it in his eyes.”
Tim Tszyu copped a horrific head cut in his bout against Sebastian Fundora in March.Credit: Getty
Tszyu is unsure of the identity of his next opponent or when he will next fight. Terence Crawford, Errol Spence jnr, Jermell Charlo, Fundora and Ortiz are on a hit list of targets. The loss to Fundora hasn’t shaken Tszyu’s belief that his family - younger brother Nikita remains undefeated after nine professional fights - will finish as the greatest in boxing history.
“My dad and Jeff Fenech are the top two in Australian boxing,” he said. “It’s legacy, the Tszyus are literally a different breed. I’m chasing [Kostya]. I used to say I’d be happy if I am half as good. Now I’m chasing him to be even greater.”
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