David Tua gloves up to a man mountain.

This is truly 'Tua Time.' The meeting of heavyweights, the meeting of David against his critics, and himself, in the shape of Ustinov ranked 8th in the World and a veritable giant. By all reports Ustinov will 'lean down' on David in an effort to wear him out, clinch, push and lean. For the fans the question will be if Ustinov can absorb the body punishment David will look to work on the bigger man.

There are most often signs to read from David Tua before a fight. Before losing to Lewis he spoke about his destiny and never really delivered in a fight, that a spectator might have imagined that the winning of, belonged to Tua because  he believed it was his 'destiny.' So much for that and so much for the menacing Tua who entered the ring against Shane Cameron to destroy him, and the many times overweight David who seemed to go into the ring with a bag of problems epitomised by his weight.

'This' David Tua is lean and focused. I saw him recently and he was bleeding power and aggression, the 2 greatest assets of the Tua arsenal. By all appearances he looks together and focused, determined. Age also now enters against his natural disadvantage in height, but a boxer loses his power last when speed and footwork has already declined. Tua though has always been an 'on off' fighter, this week he has mentioned his 'own' demons. I suggest that it means he's looking into himself for triumph, not looking outwardly for what he thinks should be his or what might be his 'destiny,' focused on the fact that he can only bring what is in himself, that he can control nothing except himself, focus his mind there, not on his demons and not on his destiny.

I expect, hope, to see an honest fight and effort. I expect that David will be mindful of the death in the last week of another great Samoan warrior, Pita Fatialofa only 14 years David's senior and a mentor and inspiration, that this fight may in someway be for 'fats.' Tua was the boy pitched in to fight men by his disciplinarian father, he had no way out, no escape from his father's ambition that he should, and would be a fighter. Well a fighter he is, sometimes locked in a battle with himself showing all the fragilities of nature where maturity and fear of punishment has been forced upon a child. This Saturday evening there will be no shadows of the past stepping into the ring with him, only months of training that have seen him drop over 30 kilos, the mountain is before he and his raw power, the aspirations and goodwill of 1000s around the globe will be behind him wanting to see the mountain fall.

David Tua - between the rounds.

Talk is rife that David has fallen out with his promoter Kushner. Kushner said as much and David isn't talking. For those that remember, when David slowly lurched toward a settlement with his former manager and mentor Kevin Barry a High Court Judge commented adversely on the way David engineered the business relationship to the point of a 'raid' type invasion to obtain paperwork. It was a bad scene and David stupidly put aside common sense and his career onto hold to 'engage' in the legal battle which saw millions lost.

Credit to David he reinvented himself to some degree after that with help from yes, Kushner, Tuigamala and others. Well, Inga has been struggling financially and Kushner has fronted with cash to fill the gaps as David somewhat meandered toward what was hoped to be a title fight. Now he won't talk to Cedric Kushner, and his lawyer won't talk whilst David has also closed up shop. Boxing promoters don't enjoy a great reputation but Kevin Barry in my opinion was blind-sided by David, that looks to be happening now with Kushner. I say that mostly because David isn't talking, a divided camp and silence speaks volumes louder that any talk or prevarication.

Time for David to take a hard look at himself. He's not a young man, he can't forever ride a sympathy ticket on the boxer ripped off by manager, particularly where there is so much visible between the lines - a bridge too far for credibility to extend. It could simply be that David doesn't want to pay Cedric Kushner back, has his eye on the total purse from his recent fight sponsored by SKY TV. David could be blaming others for what he has failed to do in the ring with his own fists.

Life is tough for fighters and that is why there is a fascination with them. David does humble and devout very well, but he does anger and surliness poorly. There was something wrong with the man for the majority of his last fight and for at least 2 weeks leading up to it. David might find being an assassin requires a different constitution than that of a fighter, stealth and deceit are not the ways of a fighter and not the way for someone loved by his own community and sports fans alike.

Great fighters have mental durability and toughness, the ability to get back up and cop the bad licks along the way. By his silence David does himself and his fans a great disservice, he should speak truthfully and now - he long ago chose to present himself as humble and truthful so time to front up, tell it like it is. He put himself down in a bad decision that could have been resolved around a kava bowl, brought disrespect on a man who had opened his home to him. Right now he looks like he's putting himself down again, no prayers ringside will do, no bitching about being ripped off will help. We've been this road with him before, he's learnt this lesson to not go quiet and hating while supping on paranoia. Time for Tua to front up to preserve his reputation into the future.

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.