Errol Spence, Tim Tszyu, and the Blueprint After Defeat

For Errol Spence Jr., time stopped on July 29, 2023.

That was the night when Terrence Crawford beat him to a bloody pulp inside T-Mobile Arena. With the ninth round coming to a close, Crawford was mercilessly hammering “The Truth” with shots that went unanswered. The referee came to an inevitable conclusion.

As Crawford’s hand was raised in victory—with a host of welterweight title belts draped on his body—it seemed like fate had hit the pause button on Spence’s career.

It’s been nearly three years. No one’s touching the play button. Yet.

Tim Tszyu Never Stopped Moving

Meanwhile, Tim Tszyu has been on repeat.

Two years ago, he had his own version of a career-altering defeat when he lost to Sebastian Fundora, who’d taken the spot of the injured Keith Thurman less than two weeks before the fight. It was a double, maybe even a triple whammy for Tszyu: Not only did he lose to an opponent he didn’t thoroughly prepare for, he also parted ways with his WBO super welterweight title by way of split decision.

It was one bitter pill after another for the Australian fighter to swallow. Yet, seven months later, he was competing in the squared circle once again. In a title fight, no less. And he lost.

The following year, Tszyu fought three times, winning two of them. Win, loss, win, followed by another win this past April. Ever since “Soul Taker” lost to Fundora in 2024, he’s taken on five more fights. In contrast, Spence hasn’t had a professional bout since that Crawford stoppage. 

So now, we can conclude that Tszyu is a better man than Spence, right?

Sorry, that’s not how this works. The sport of boxing rarely tells fighters how to win. It certainly doesn’t tell them how to lose.

When Everything Falls Apart

Put yourselves in the shoes of Spence. Now, imagine that fall from grace. It’s a doozy.

A beast on the U.S. amateur boxing scene, Spence represented his country at the 2012 London Olympics, where he reached the quarterfinals in the welterweight division. The DeSoto, Texas native went pro shortly afterwards, going undefeated for close to 10 years and unifying the IBF, WBC, and WBA titles along the way.

In the summer of 2023, The Truth was named by ESPN as the no. 4 pound-for-pound fighter in the world. Spence, in other words, had everything going for him. Then, Terrence Crawford happened.

On that pressure-packed July evening, the pound-for-pound king knocked down Spence in Round 2. Then, in the seventh round, Spence kissed the mat twice more. With his face swollen from Crawford’s onslaught—and his defensive instincts seemingly abandoning him—Spence ate his first-ever professional loss after the ninth round stoppage.

How can an elite, well-decorated fighter fall apart in one night? To his credit, Spence has admitted that the embarrassing loss to the switch-hitting Crawford was a long time coming. 

“That camp was BS,” he told Andre Ward on the “The Art of Ward” podcast last month. “I didn’t spar for six to seven weeks. It was just a lot of stuff that went wrong in that camp…I was living wrong, bro.”

For Spence, the bizarre halt in sparring during his preparations for Crawford foreshadowed a much longer standstill in his career. Three years, to be exact. While Spence had to undergo eye surgery after losing the undisputed welterweight crown, was it something else that obstructed his vision of a triumphant return? Was he struggling with the reality of a long climb back to the summit?

The Price of Moving Forward

Tszyu could have chosen to go on hiatus as well. The problem was, he couldn’t afford to take that option.

Unlike Spence at the time of the Crawford fight, Tszyu was still on the rise when he squared off against Fundora in March 2024. At the time, he was less than a year removed from shedding the “interim” tag and getting named full world champion in the WBO’s middleweight division. In order to move closer to the status of household name, Soul Taker had to keep going.

So he did. And, as he kept going, he ran into Fundora’s elbow.

In the second round of that fateful bout, the 5-foot-8 Tszyu inadvertently collided with the left elbow of Fundora, who stands 6-foot-5. As Tszyu sat down in his corner at the end of the round, blood gushed right below his hairline. For the rest of the fight, the referee asked him if he could continue. Though Tszyu’s crimson mask was becoming more and more pronounced, his answer never changed.

“Tim could’ve died,” Tszyu’s wife Alexandra told Fox Sports Australia. “He almost went into cardiac arrest.”

Yet, Tszyu kept going. In October that year, he was back in the ring against Russia’s Bakhram Murtazaliev in an IBF light middleweight title bout. Concerns over whether Tszyu was rushing his way back to competition were immediately validated, as Murtazaliev knocked him down thrice in the second round. Then, barely a minute into Round 3, Tszyu’s own brother Nikita threw in the towel after Murtazaliev floored Soul Taker for a fourth time.

Yet, Tszyu kept going. After bouncing back with a fourth-round stoppage of Joseph Spencer in April 2025, he got his rematch with Fundora. Fighting for redemption—along with the WBC light middleweight championship—Tszyu retired on his stool after seven rounds.

Yet…you know where this is going.

Now, Tszyu is days away from another potential humiliation at the hands of a former unified welterweight champion. Sometimes, you have to look at a fighter and ask, what is up with this guy?

No Blueprint After Defeat

That question, by the way, goes for both Spence and Tszyu.

Over the past three years, their legacies have been defined by their losses more than any shiny prize or spectacular knockout. If we’re putting their careers side by side and weighing these boxing narratives, can we definitively name a superior man?

That’s a healthy debate, for sure. But here’s an alternative way of looking at it: Maybe there’s no one way of doing things right in this sport.

Maybe we need an agonizingly long time before we get up from our worst losses.

Maybe we have to stay busy and keep things moving just to feel alive.

For every fighter, there’s a blueprint after defeat. But no blueprint tells you when to face the music again.

Errol Spence Jr. chose pause. Tim Tszyu, who has changed his nickname to “Phoenix,” chose repeat.

This weekend, both men press play. When they do, we’ll finally find out who the better fighter is.

Catch Errol Spence vs. Tim Tszyu live on DAZN this Sunday (Manila time). The main card is scheduled to begin at 9:00 a.m. Ringwalk for the Spence vs. Tszyu main event is projected to start at 11:30 a.m.

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