Remembering David Tua.

It's around 14 hours since Tua lost a unanimous points decision to American Monte Barrett. Even before the fight, years before in fact, David had more than his share of detractors, too short, one dimensional, overweight and so it went on. For most people if you'd heard of David Tua you owned part of him, he was public property for dissection. Everything he did was analysed, and it seemed, most times, to label David with terms less than his achievements. Perhaps it has been the public need to tear apart those that succeed, particularly those that achieve not through academic brilliance, diligent study but instead by raw ferocious talent. The opportunity to look at the gladiator in the pit and see nothing of his humanity but rather marvel or detract from his brutal instinct - in the way of surviving in physical mediocrity, cowardice even at never having stepped into the ring, or over a line where most others might not dare. It could be true to say that Tua represented all that many want to be while at the same time all that many don't want to be. A superb athlete on one hand, a boy from struggle street on the other - a kind of blend that characterises those that rise against the odds, but it seems we could never always recognise that in David because we were too often dissecting his personal life, his boxing style, his manner, to allow us to see the real man.

And of course David Tua is a real man, one with all the hopes, joys and disappointments of any other man. He is also a dreamer, one not afraid to share his dreams and hopes and for 20 years he has provided an often blank sheet for many to comment on, to pull away from him his hopes and aspirations, mostly it would seem - because he dared verbalise them with a naive courage too frightening for most to realise. Now at 38 he is still larger than life among us, not from him we hear of his financial nightmares, nor the sense that the legal storm to once he eagerly swum into might have been an opponent greater than he could ever imagine from a black and white simplicity of village, church life or even fisticuffs.

He was strangely quiet before this fight. For me there was a sense of foreboding in the city, a resignation of sorts of David's commitment for this fight as though something had happened in the last few weeks that was playing on his mind. Of course it appears the commentators weren't aware of it, and how often are they aware of anything other than their own opinions. They couldn't see that David wasn't distracted by the fight ahead - absorbed in what he needed to do and that only came slowly midway through the bout. Before then, he hadn't shown a fighter's arrogance or aggression, he was moving back at times and shovelling out a half jab and when hit no beast stirred in him. 4 rights to the Barrett's kidneys in the 9th showed me that David was coming back, once again he began to find that zone that might have disappeared from him weeks before the fight. Suddenly, he was again single minded, the boy fighting a man and not prepared to lose, bereft of pain and any thought other than to dispense with Barrett.

No need to contest the decision because it's in the books now, but I saw a fighter emerge where earlier there hadn't been one, I saw power in two hands and adrenalin that made David jump with concentration. I saw a fighter dictating to the end against another who was drained. I heard the comments about it being last chance corral for David, read the headlines that screamed out nonsense as to what the result of the fight mean to David, reminded again how it seems we think we own the man. Well, we don't. Never have and never will. He's given a generation here in NZ and fans worldwide a chance to take a journey with him and he's never belittled another man along the way, he's proven what family and church is to him and he's gone where few would dare, to the very edge of fear and defeat and smiled. So David will decide as always what he will do, and this one grateful commentator applauds him for that.