Remember Kostya Tszyu? Of course ya do. Kostya Tszuyu! The great man!
Two-time light-welterweight boxing champion of the wooooorld. Made very thin long pony-tails look tough and cool.
Kostya Tszyu: Champion.
And very bad at cricket. And I know this because one day, on a stinking hot February afternoon in 2001, I took Kostya down the nets for a hit. And towelled him up like a big-suckin’ chamois.
Earlier I’d interviewed the man at his gym in Rockdale in Sydney’s south, inland from Botany Bay.
And there we’d talked Russia and beating up people, and suchforth, and it was quite interesting.
For he is an interesting man, Kostya. Grew up boxing, effectively. Age 8 and 9, running the streets shirtless in Serov, an industrial Baltic bog-hole. By age 15 he’d had hundreds of amateur fights. Went to the Olympics. A hard, hard man. He was a warrior, Kostya.
Anyway, in his gym in Rockdale there was a squash court. So it was decided, in the ways of men, that we’d go down and have a hit.
And he verily smashed me. He was a bit fit, Kostya, being the light-welterweight champion of the world. And he wasn’t bad at squash. He sort of patrolled the court like he did the ring – head still, eyes focused, swatting at the little black ball with hard little jabs. Thwack!
And so I ran around after it like a giant fat fool, and he flogged me, would’ve been 15-2 15-2, or something, I was too rooted to remember.
And it cost me $20 (another thing in the ways of men).
And so, in knockabout Aussie style, I challenged Kostya double-or-nothin’. And he was all over it.
But I said, No, Kostya Tszyu. Not squash. Cricket. And took him outside into the nets.
And there in the baking sun on a concrete slab surrounded by chain-link fence, we had a bet about who could dismiss each other the most in one six-ball over.
I’m not sure Kostya completely understood the rules – or the point – of what we were doing.
But affable fellow that he is, he nodded, called “heads” in his cool Russian Bond villain accent, and elected to bowl.
And so I stood there, padded up in all the kit that I’d borrowed from my mates who played for North Sydney Bears – gloves, box, thigh guard – thumping my Gray-Nicolls twin scoop on the crease, preparing to face the light-welterweight boxing champion of the wooooorrrrld.
“Bring it, Tszyu,” I muttered. “What you got…”.
Now, given they’d never heard of cricket in Serov, the industrial town at the base of the Ural Mountains in Russia where Kostya grew up, it was not very much.
Kostya’s idea of ‘bowling’ was, effectively, what Shane Warne did. He’d actually met Warney a couple of times, been in the Australian dressing room.
Hence ‘bowling’, in Kostya’s mind, was leg-spin, a notoriously difficult discipline for a cricket savant like Steve Smith, say, much less a 31-year-old Russian émigré fresh out of the former Soviet Union.
And so, with a run-up the length of Warney’s, and an action through the crease that was very much not, Kostya flung out a delivery that went 45 degrees from whence it sprang and whacked into the chain-link fence.
He smiled. I smiled.
He fetched the ball and came in again … and missed the pitch, again. His third and fourth did too, and I was pretty confident of keeping the 20 clams.
And then, on ball five, he landed one … right in the slot.
And I smashed it straight back over his head, way down the ground, six anywhere in Australia, much less the concrete confines of the Rockdale nets.
“Fetch that, Kostya Tszyu,” I said (quietly). “Fetch that.”
Gloriously, he did, wandering off to pick up the ball which had come to rest some 80 metres away. And yes – I may have told the story a time or two, of smashing the undisputed light welterweight boxing champion of the woooorrrrld for six back over his head.
When Kostya reached the ball, an interesting sort of “cultural” thing happened. Instead of charging back in and screaming like a banshee, swinging his arm in crazy windmills like Aussie kids have done since time immemorial, Kostya just strolled casually back in.
Then he took his mark, and, wordlessly, started in again, tossing up another slow legspinner-of-sorts, which landed on the pitch, again – and in the slot, again – and I, of course, smashed it straight back over his head. Six more.
Cop that, Tszyu. Your bat.
And so Kostya did his best to work out how to put the gloves and box and all the sundry stuff on, and in pads that looked too big and a thigh guard that continually slipped down his leg, he waddled into the net.
Then he faced up. Tapped the bat. And smiled.
And I tore in at him like Dennis Lillee.
And unleashed the heat.
The ball scorched (well, maybe not scorched) though the hot air, kissed the concrete strip and darted away outside off-stump.
Kostya stood and delivered, and flayed at it, but could only get a big fat healthy outside edge which thudded into the back fence.
I ran down the wicket, finger in the air. You beauty! Shed’s that way, buddy!
To which Kostya replied: “What? I am out?”
I explained the rules of net cricket, whereby any edges that hit that back portion of the net are automatically caught in “slips”.
He smiled and shrugged, another mystifying “cricket thing”.
And I kept my 20 bucks.
Later, as the sun went down, the journo produced an esky full of traditional Australian refreshments, but couldn’t convince Kostya to partake given he was training to unify the belts in the world light welterweight division and knock out Zab Judah.
So we sat under a tree and talked boxing and Australia and cricket, and the champion offered this about our country’s national game:
“Cricket, I never know when one game finish and another one start,” he mused. “It is on all the time, the television. White clothes, yellow clothes. All the time.
“But I like it very much. Like in boxing, there is much skill and courage.
“It is man against man.”
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