The news Keith Thurman will not be boxing the surging Tim Tszyu for the Australian’s WBO belt and the vacant WBC Junior Middleweight title this weekend due to a bicep injury caused barely a ripple of surprise to those who have followed the Florida man’s catalogue of sabbaticals in recent years. It is cruel luck perhaps, but nevertheless an entirely predictable development for a 35-year-old fighter once of incredible gift, seeking to push his body through the rigours of training camp for only the second time in two years and the third in five.
Thurman’s career, if this marks the end of his significance, is increasingly defined by what he has been unable to do as that which once came naturally to him.
Evidence of declension, from the vitality of his twenties to the dwindling returns of his thirties, was writ large on his face long before he withdrew from the Tszyu fight. There was age in his eyes. The luster of youth lost from his skin.
The elongated Sebastian Fundora, also from Florida, and aged 26, steps forward in Thurman’s stead.
A fighter with victories over Shawn Porter and Danny Garcia is no more guaranteed a fairy tale ending than an anonymous club fighter or a future Hall of Famer, but the inactivity of his latter years leaves a sense of the unfulfilled even for a fighter who was, arguably, and if only briefly, the preeminent Welterweight. It is hard to contemplate headline opponents and promoters wishing to risk investing in a semi-retired boxer with three fights since 2017 in light of his latest withdrawal. And if those illustrious opponents don’t extend an invitation, is Thurman willing to box for smaller purses on a reduced stage?
To put Thurman’s inactivity into context, and with acknowledgment of the inappropriateness of the benchmark, should Mike Tyson box Jake Paul as planned, all 58 years of him, Iron Mike will have ‘boxed’ more rounds, if the mathematicians indulge his competitive exhibition with Roy Jones Jnr., than Keith Thurman has managed since losing to a 40-year old Manny Pacquiao in the summer of 2019. Almost five years ago.
It isn’t revelatory to point to Thurman’s lack of competitive action. His career merely another variant on a boxer’s infinite entanglement with regret, remuneration and the reach for the zenith of a prime the height and location of which is impossibly illusory without the clarity of retrospect.
How much regret Thurman will feel at the unharvested fruit that fell from the branches of his prime years is difficult to measure. He remained infuriatingly inactive through injury and choice, watching and narrating as contemporaries; Porter, Brook and Garcia fought and eventually made way for Spence, Crawford and now their own successors. The counterargument, that he will not endure the damage accrued boxing those dangerous opponents, is an inconvenient one for those outside the ropes enthralled by the sport and thirsty for the answers competition provides. Perhaps, he was content enough. Maybe the Thurman model of an ambivalent, undefined, creeping retirement is the way to escape the physical legacy boxing leaves on participants especially those pursuant of one more purse, one more fight, one more slug on the dopamine pipe.
Boxing is a young man’s sport. Heroes of bygone years got more done in their twenties. And while scientific wisdom may stretch the peak of a man’s powers, and cheating even further still, the enigmatic quality of Thurman’s autumn years will afford him a type of insulation from the diminishing returns of his late thirties.
All I ever wanted to was be like Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, Roberto Duran, Tommy Hearns, Marvin Hagler and Sugar Ray Leonard. Back in the day American people knew who they were and I want them to know Keith ‘One Time’ Thurman.
Keith Thurman talking to BlackSportsOnline.com in February 2015.
Thurman’s heroes all boxed on too long. Marvellous Marvin perhaps the only one among the exalted list who knew he could no longer be that which he once was and electing not to pretend otherwise, either to himself or those who paid to watch him. It is often more courageous to succumb to that truth than box on in its defiance however heroic the effort to resist the thrust of more youthful opponents and the inevitability of time may appear on fight night.
Boxers pay the price for that more familiar type of courage long after the last ticket is sold.
BOXINGWRITER.CO.UK 
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