Eight weeks away from his professional boxing debut, former UFC fighter Tyson Pedro is about to enter what he describes as “a monk’s life” in Penrith.
He will move out of the family home, settle into a spartan, rented room and start the serious business of transforming body and mind for his greatest challenge yet: facing Australian heavyweight champion Kris Terzievski on June 12.
Tyson Pedro (yellow gloves) with Ibrahim Lane Saipaia at Bro Fit in Penrith ahead of his debut fight. Credit: Dean Sewell
Pedro has already done 20 rounds of hard sparring this week, and on Friday he will face a young, fast opponent, Ibrahim Sapeia, for three supposedly light rounds to finish. Next door to the gym, a business allows people to pay money to take baseball and cricket bats to computers, televisions and plates for stress relief. Pedro is learning how to use his boxing gloves to dismantle opponents.
There is no small talk in the gym; the only sound is the thick sparring gloves on skin and the grimace of a hard shot landing. The session is meant to be focused on movement, but both men exchange hard shots as Pedro recalibrates his distance control that is hard-wired to the dimensions of a UFC octagon and opponents who are ready to kick and grapple with him.
Pedro and Sapeia end the spar, warm down and start swapping notes on what they saw in each other, where the other can improve, and what they felt they could exploit. Slowly, as Pedro warms down, slugging on a huge metal four-litre water bottle filled with stickers of previous training camps around the world, the fighter becomes noticeably lighter. The heaviness of another tough week of training is off his shoulders, but the reality of life as a fighter is still in his mind.
“It sucks every day in there hurting,” Pedro says. “Sometimes you’ll wake up, I’ll look in the mirror and I’ll be like, I don’t even know how I’m going to get to training.
“It’s all part of it. I love the whole idea of it and the person that it makes me and everything, but it’s shit. Any time kids tell me they want to be a fighter, I tell them don’t do it.
“It must be a love-hate thing because, like I said, I love the process; the process is beautiful, and how you become a better version of yourself, and I think I love the idea that you transform every time you have a fight camp, like I become a whole new person every time, and I love that.
“You just change; you’ll go through a whole metamorphosis, whether you become hardened or you might go through signs that change your perspective on something in camp, and I come home and I’m a noticeably different person in some aspect or another.”