Before the excitement, there is the mundanity. Before everyone is watching you, no one cares. These are the stark truths that apply to TIM TSZYU on this cool, windy November afternoon in a quiet pocket of the southern Sydney suburb of Rockdale, home to the grandly named Tszyu Boxing Academy, really the upstairs of a Police Citizens Youth Club. I was meant to meet the fighter here around lunch, but he's running late and all I can do for a while is watch the occasional comings and goings — middle-aged guys fronting up for a hit of squash; younger dudes to shoot hoops. There's no sense that a great athlete on the verge of a momentous feat is about to grace the place with his presence.
At last, Tszyu pulls up in his AMG-Mercedes with his striking partner, Alexandra Constantine, and his placid French bulldog, Pablo, and the trio heads straight upstairs to the austere gym that feels frozen in time. There's a ring, of course, racks of dumbbells in one Corner, a beaten-up sofa that Vinnies would reject, and a matted section where you stretch, jump rope, work the speed bag. But I can't peel my eyes off the wall to the right, which is covered in posters from the heyday of Tim's father, Kostya, the great Russian-born light-welterweight who held multiple worldtitles in thegecond half of thel990s and early 2000s. While the resemblance between Kostya in his twenties and Tim now is well known, it
