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Tua's time Slugging Samoan ready for Lewis
Updated: Friday November 10, 2000 2:48 PM
By Nick Charles, CNNSI.com LAS VEGAS -- What's a nice guy from the South Pacific doing halfway up a mountain in the high desert of Nevada? It's the road David Tua has had to climb to become the number one contender in the world and finally get a crack at the WBC-IBF heavyweight title when he fights Lennox Lewis Saturday night. "With respect to Lennox and the rest of the crew that he has fought, I'm none of them," asserted Tua. "I'm none of them. I'm David Tua and I come to fight. And if you are not well prepared, you are going to be in a lot of trouble." The Samoan slugger says he first developed his crushing left hook cutting grass with a bush knife. And before he was a teenager Tua was reluctantly forced to put his power to work. "When I was young, I didn't like to be a fighter," Tua recalled. "I tried my very best to avoid them sparring sessions in the afternoon that my father used to put me through. You know he used line up all these grown up men and he used to make me box them." But when the Tua family moved to New Zealand when he was 11, David committed himself to being a boxer. And after winning a bronze medal in the 1992 Olympics, he turned pro. He's won 37 of 38 fights, 32 by K.O. he's never been cut, hurt or knocked down. His plan against Lewis is to exhaust the champion. "I'm going to force the pace inside and outside," says Tua. "And you'll be looking for me. It's not hard to find. I'll be right in front of you." The 27-year-old Tua intends to make it a brawl and his big bomb capability makes him dangerous, even if he's behind on the scorecards late in the fight.
Few feel he can outbox Lewis, and Tua is hoping the champion is also underestimating him as a one-dimensional fighter. "[I'm] going to be throwing my left hook," Tua said. "That is not all." Like that right overhand being the key? "Yeah man, I like...it's coming together, It's coming together at the right time," he says. "It's coming around. After three years of waiting in line, it's Tua's time. But when he thinks back to the early days, this is a moment he couldn't even dream happening to him. Did he ever think he would be sitting in Las Vegas with the world watching, fighting for the heavyweight championship of the world? "Never thought man, never thought," he said laughing. As for a prediction? The Tua camp figures, why monkey around?
Those smiles from training camp are forgotten now. But not the preparation that Tua says was the most demanding of his career. After all, in this game you often have to take pain to inflict it. And Tua will be happy to cross that threshold for the chance to walk away a champion.
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