Mchunu bids to make his lifelong dream reality

● When he was a young amateur fighter in sleepy Pietermaritzburg, Thabiso Mchunu had a vision that he would win a World Boxing Council (WBC) title one day.

Having already cleared several hurdles along the way, the 33-year-old father of two bids to transform his long-term goal into reality on Saturday night (next Sunday morning SA time) when he takes on Ilunga Makabu of the Democratic Republic of the Congo for the green belt of the cruiserweight division.

The battleground is in faraway Warren, Ohio, a municipality much smaller than even Maritzburg. Mchunu doesn’t care that it’s the backyard of his opponent’s promoter, Don King.

“I had a vision I would fight for and win a WBC belt since I was an amateur,” Mchunu told the Sunday Times from his training camp in Mexico City.

It wasn’t a Damascene moment, but rather a goal he set for himself while being groomed by his trainer-father Alex, who held the professional KwaZulu-Natal heavyweight title in the 1990s.

“All the great champions — most of them have been WBC champions and ja, my dad has been telling us since we were kids that the WBC is the biggest belt in boxing.”

All the world sanctioning bodies are vrot to varying degrees, but through the stench the WBC title still carries plenty of prestige.

For South Africans it’s been the most elusive crown with a strike rate of only 16%. Sugar Boy Malinga, who won the super-middleweight title twice, and Dingaan Thobela are the only successes in 19 shots over the years.

The graveyard of failures include some of SA’s finest fighters, from Pierre Fourie and Phillip Ndou to Corrie Sanders and Mzonke Fana.

The International Boxing Federation has been the kindest to SA’s pugilists with a 39% conversion rate — 25 wins from 64 shots. The World Boxing Association is on 29% with nine wins from 31 shots and the World Boxing Organisation is 27% with six from 22.

Mchunu has chosen the toughest path, but he is confident he will defy the statistics and reverse a 2015 defeat by Makabu to ascend what is potentially the hottest stage in world boxing right now. “I’m going to be the WBC world champion.”

Pound-for-pound king Canelo Alvarez said last year he wanted to step up to cruiserweight to take on Makabu, and if a fight against the Mexican remains part of the prize next weekend, that will catapult the status of this bout to beyond anything a South African boxer has experienced before.

A bout against Canelo would offer much, including a purse the size of a pension plan.

That is what’s at stake for the crafty, quiet-spoken Mchunu, who has had to endure lengthy periods of inactivity; one fight in 2009, one in 2013 and just one in 2015 seem sparse for a man whose defensive skills have been compared in some quarters to Floyd Mayweather’s.

He and his father agreed he needed to leave home more than 10 years ago and move to Johannesburg to improve his chances of getting fights and opportunities.

It’s still been tough, with SA losing its status as a host of big fights. The last major fight here was the world heavyweight contest between Lennox Lewis and Hasim Rahman in 2001. That no SA promoters tried to stage this showdown shows how far the sport has fallen here.

Mchunu’s first attempt to fight for this title, in an eliminator against Makabu, ended when he was stopped in the 11th round of a fight he had controlled before running out of gas. The fact that he has gritted it out for seven years to finally get there is testament to his commitment.

Makabu is no less committed and if the rematch is as entertaining as the first contest, fans are in for a treat.

Mchunu and trainer-manager Sean Smith said camp had gone well in Mexico, where they have enjoyed the hospitality of the WBC.

A former strawweight champion, Isaac Bustos, drove them around and they were taken to lunch by WBC president Mauricio Sulaiman.

He told them how he used to come home from school to find fistic stars like Muhammad Ali and Roberto Duran visiting his father Jose, the WBC president from the 1970s until his death in 2014.

Local fans will have to find a streaming service to watch.