by David P. Greisman

Steve Cunningham was held to a draw in his fight with Antonio Tarver, the former light heavyweight champion who is now 46 years old and does not aesthetically resemble a finely conditioned athlete.

Cunningham not only feels as if he won the fight, but that it is Tarver who should take shame with the result.

“I’ve looked at the fight. There’s always woulda coulda shouldas. That’s hindsight. From my part of the performance I feel good. From his part, I feel he should be embarrassed or disgraced,” Cunningham told krikya360.com a few days after the Tarver bout. “He literally looked like a clever journeyman. That’s what he looked like to us. He looked like a guy who didn’t want to engage, who didn’t come to engage. He came to throw a few punches around, make it look like he was doing something.”

Cunningham-Tarver was preceded on the Spike TV “Premier Boxing Champions” broadcast by a thrilling cruiserweight fight in which Krzysztof Glowacki came from behind to knock out and dethrone titleholder Marco Huck. That, combined with the pace of the action in Cunningham-Tarver, meant the main event was seen as far from from entertaining. Cunningham acknowledges that but points to his opponent as the problem.

“How can you dance when you don’t have a partner?” he said. “This guy is literally trying to steal rounds. He’s like a journeyman trying to survive until the next check. That’s basically what he is. When they rendered the decision, which was a draw, I was disgusted.  I was like, ‘That is bull.’ But they celebrated. Who celebrates a draw? A guy who came in knowing that he was going to lose, knowing ‘I need to bullshit my way to the 12th, bullshit these judges a couple punches and sway them.’ … And after the fight he’s running away screaming, ‘Oh you never buzzed me, you never touched me,’ just delusional things. What is wrong with you?”

Cunningham did feel as if he could’ve done more, though he also felt what he did do was enough to win.

“I saw things, spots where I could’ve turned it up when he was on the ropes. I tried to turn it up and then I backed off and gave him space. I could’ve stayed in there, went to work, went to work, went to work and got countered,” he said. “Sometimes plans change in the fight for whatever reason, and one of the reasons was that’s all he was waiting for was for me to come in there and work so he could launch a big left hand. Tarver has made his career on that big left hand. Power is the last thing to go in a fighter.

“He cracked me the second round and it was a good left hand. We don’t want to get caught with that on the tip of the chin. It was a good shot, but I immediately responded back to let him know it was a good shot but it wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t good enough to keep me from staying on your butt. When you have a guy just literally trying to land just one punch, he’s not active, how does he get rounds?”

Cunningham decried the scoring as “bogus” and also took aim at the Spike TV commentary, which he said was biased in Tarver’s favor, affecting the way the television audience viewed the action and the decision.

“It was pro-Tarver, 100 percent. They never really mentioned that I was a two-time world champion. It was just that I’m the younger guy,” he said. “There was no pro-Steve Cunningham anything. Tarver could fart in the ring, and it was, ‘Oh, look at that fart.’ With Tarver being their work buddy [on the network’s boxing broadcasts] and their friend, they chose not to be as neutral.”

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