Boxing: Cameron vows to return

Shane Cameron says the loss to David Tua was not the end of his career. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Shane Cameron is okay.

He will fight again, but not for at least three months as he serves a mandatory stand-down and has some titanium removed from his twice-broken right hand. He has no complaints, no regrets, save perhaps, being denied the chance to showcase any of his own boxing skills during his obliteration at the blurring hands of David Tua in Hamilton on Saturday night.

Yesterday Cameron performed the last act of a piece of sporting theatre that gripped the nation, fronting a press conference at his Boxing Alley gym at the foot of Parnell.

His right eye was bloodshot and both were blackened, but that appeared to be the extent of the damage.

"The war wounds are all right, they go away," Cameron said. "But I'm still hurting now from the loss. It will stay with me forever. The important thing is how I come back from it.

"I'd been training full-on for this fight. I didn't leave nothing in the gym. But this is a cut-throat sport. It can be all over with one punch and that's pretty much what happened to me."

Well, kind-of. The fight may have been as good as over when Tua connected with an overhand right late in the first round, but Cameron took plenty more punishment before it was finally stopped after a vicious flurry of Tua blows at the start of the second round.

The outcry over the referee Bruce McTavish's failure to stop the fight after a second knock down in the first round and the decision of Cameron's corner to send their man back out was because New Zealanders were unaccustomed to the level of violence in big boxing bouts, Cameron's manager Ken Reinsfield said.

"He was lucid. He wanted to go out. This is the fight business. This is what people do. It's why they are paid the money. It looks brutal and a lot of New Zealanders aren't used to seeing that and it is difficult for them to handle. But I've seen more brutal fights."

Cameron's hospital visit had been purely precautionary and he had been discharged after half an hour," Reinsfield said.

Cameron at least has the consolation of his $500,000 purse, the biggest by far of his career.

How much of that would actually find its way into his pocket, however, was unclear.

"It's not retirement money," he said. "Taking this fight, the money was win or lose. It happened to be the loss but it's certainly not the end of my career. I'm only 31. We're all right man. In the next 12 months I want to get back up there in the rankings."