Jason Cunningham and Zolani Tete at the Crossroads This Weekend

It is probable that one must go all the way back to the mighty Dick Tiger to find a fighter who courted the British public with the determination Zolani Tete has exhibited during the last decade.  Between the final days of 2015 and the final days – the disastrous final days – of 2019, he fought on this country’s soil on six occasions, dashing not the hopes of native sons but rather turning away Filipinos, Mexicans, Argentines and even a fellow South African. Slowly, surely, Tete was earning British trust, pounding out impressively one-sided decisions over the once dominant Omar Narvaez and Arthur Villanueva, dusting others with impressive punching power and a pleasing, aggressive style.

When Tete met John Riel Casimero in Birmingham, it was a fight he was favoured to win, despite their being ranked neck-and-neck by the TBRB. Tete, who had been scheduled to face Nonito Donaire for the right to meet Naoya Inoue earlier in 2019, had been forced to withdraw from that match with a shoulder injury. Donaire went on to lose to Inoue in the TSS Fight of the Year and Boxing News was far from alone in looking ahead to Tete’s seemingly inevitable showdown with Inoue in a preview of the Casimero fight. Tete was “granite tough” and Inoue’s “closest 118lb rival…he might also turn out to be his worst nightmare.”

BN was far from alone in taking the bait, but it’s certainly possible to see strains of the defence of a British pugilist in the legendary London publication’s enthusiasm.

Casimero, with what seems retrospectively to be a certain inevitability, stepped in to wreck both these plans and Tete himself. The Filipino, who had been active while Tete recovered from injury, fought low-handed and in small, clever increments, popping Tete out in three with short sharp shots in what looked an awful lot like an exposure. Tete’s technical acumen seemed brittle and tired in the face of Casimero’s quickness.  Silence followed.

While Tete was recovering from an injured shoulder, Yorkshireman Jason Cunningham was in a rehabilitation of his own, overcoming the most hurtful sporting injury of them all: a series of hidings in the boxing ring. He picked up the commonwealth featherweight title in 2017 by way of split decision over Ben Jones in a close fight in which Jones was the aggressor. Cunningham lost the title by way of a brutal stoppage sixth months later to Reece Bellotti in a fight where he was clearly the quality operator but was mowed down by a bigger man throwing bigger punches. He betrayed a certain fragility in finding himself on the canvas in five before the fight was waved off in the sixth. When he lost a British featherweight elimination match to Jordan Gill in 2018 and then dropped a harrowing decision to Michael Conlan that December, Cunningham teetered on the most desperate of ledges and in the eyes of some had already slipped. Still in his twenties and with a paper record of 24-6 he was now little more than a journeyman.

So, while Tete nursed apparent tendonitis, Cunningham nursed a broken career, turning out at the Doncaster Dome for a series of short fights at a series of random weights coming in just over bantamweight one minute, over the lightweight limit the next. Then he got a call from Gamal Yafai’s people.

Gamal, younger brother of former world champion Kal, was on his own comeback trail after losing out to the excellent Gavin McDonnell. For Cunningham it looked like something of a last chance at the big time and the odds were not in his favour.

“This has been probably the quickest camp I’ve had,” he told Boxing Social. “I’ve had three weeks’ notice…but this time I’ve had to renew my medicals, sort out kit and everything else, so I’ve been flat out for this.”

He was flat out in the ring, too, using his southpaw range and footwork to out-punch and out-work the younger Gamal for a clear twelve-round decision. It was the best fight he had been involved in, one of the best domestic matches of 2021 and it was, in his own words, his best performance. He had dropped the favourite three times on the way to restoring twelve-round status and much more importantly, respect. It brought with it the EBU European Super Bantam Title and a fight with Brad Foster where the British, Commonwealth and European titles would all be at stake.

Once more, Cunningham defeated a favoured house fighter in a raucous, dirty fight I saw 114-113 to Cunningham, victorious by the single point referee Foster had deducted for a range of fouls from heeling to low blows to headbutts. Better was to follow – in April of 2022, Cunningham defeated Frenchman Terry Le Couviour via sixth round stoppage on body shots. Cunningham has always had a nice line in body attack, often opening up the midriff with feints off the jab, but in these two fights it matured to a weapon of real substance. These punches had dragged Cunningham from the bottom of the pile to the top of the domestic heap.

And then the ostensibly world-class Tete hovered into view.

While Cunningham had been motoring, Tete had found himself in the doldrums. COVID-19 controls in South Africa made travelling nearly impossible and there were even rumours of a car crash.  Finally, just before Christmas 2021, in a tiny ring in the Booysens Boxing Club in Johannesburg, Tete returned against 14-4-1 Tanzanian Iddi Kayumba. Tete blew him out in fifty-five seconds.

What all this means is that Tete has boxed just under a minute in the best part of three years.   When he steps back into a British ring this weekend on the undercard of the Joe Joyce-Christian Hammer match in the Wembley Arena, he will be fighting a tough, primed fighter who has boxed the thirty toughest and the thirty best rounds of his career in the past fourteen months, while Tete cooled his heels and blasted out a sparring partner. That this fight is being ignored in favour of a stay-busy contest being fought by a heavyweight contender is strange and Sweet Science readers should not count themselves among the number: Tete-Cunningham is the real main event in London on Saturday.

What will occur?

Tete, at thirty-four, two years older than Cunningham, is no longer ancient for the weight – but he is old to be stepping out of the garage. Cunningham, who is running on high quality experience now, is as good a manifestation of himself as is likely ever to be seen and Tete, it must be presumed, will be at or around his worst. Tete is still likely to hit as hard as anyone Cunningham has boxed, featherweights included, but does he still have the technical apparatus and speed to get those punches to where they need to be?

It is impossible to know, but therein lies the rub. Essentially this fight stacks a very good domestic fighter who is big at the weight against the remains of a world-class one. The question in these circumstances is always the same: how much does the world-class fighter have left? If it’s a lot, he will win (see Vitali Klitschko versus Samuel Peter); if it’s a little, he will lose (see Ricky Hatton versus Vyacheslav Senchenko). Then, of course, there is a sweet spot somewhere in between where the fight hangs in the balance. More, because the traditional strengths of Tete – power and technical competence on attack – line up so dramatically with Cunningham’s – grit, toughs, quick-footed, awkward persistence – we could be in line for a dual sweet spot.

But whether we see a sweet spot war, or Cunningham grinding out a decision, or even if Tete just marches in and bangs Cunningham out like he did Kayumba or Siboniso Gonya or the dozen others he’s dispatched in the first round, we will have seen something special.

Like so much of Jason Cunningham’s career this fight is dipping under the radar. Do not miss it.

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