By 11am in Phuket, most fighters have already finished their morning training. The heat has settled over Donegal Den, the new boxing gym opened by long-time Irish trainer John Hutchinson. Team Opetaia have already completed their morning run and are back in the gym for the second session of the day. Jai Opetaia is working on the heavy bag while his father and trainer, Tapu “Tap” Opetaia, calls out instructions from nearby.
Tap is approachable and relaxed away from training, but when the work starts there is a noticeable change. He watches closely and corrects what he sees.
Training at this time of day is not easy. Most fighters who have spent time in Thailand will avoid the middle of the day when they can, but for Team Opetaia the conditions seemed to be part of the preparation.
I asked strength and conditioning coach Mark Mathie whether training in the Phuket heat added anything to Jai’s work.
“For Jai, it’s all mental,” Mathie told me. “You get to a certain level in boxing where it’s all mental, and our goal is to push him.”
Tap puts an even greater number on it.
“Your mindset is 95 per cent of it,” he said. “You can have all the talent in the world, be great at everything, but if your mindset doesn’t follow what your body’s doing, it will just fall apart.
“It’s like having a nice-looking car with a bad engine in it. It won’t go anywhere. It looks good, but it won’t go anywhere.”
I asked if that was why they pushed his son so hard in camp.
“You have to break yourself and mentally be prepared for the worst,” Tap said. “If you don’t know how to swim, you’ll drown.”
For the next week, I would get a closer look at what he meant.
My route into the camp had started with a text from Hutchinson.
“Hi Wasim, Jai Opetaia is coming to Phuket for a camp.”
Hutchinson has been based on the island for more than a decade and recently opened Donegal Den. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been too surprised by his message. Thailand had recently hosted a Tyson Fury fight night in Pattaya, while Fury himself had also chosen the country for parts of his recent training camps.
Now Opetaia was heading south to Phuket.
I booked a ticket from Bangkok and made my way to the island, where I would spend a week around the team as they prepared for Noel Mikaelian on September 12.
As the week went on, the method behind the camp became clearer.
One session saw Opetaia work 12 rounds of pads with three different pad holders, four rounds with each.
Hutchinson worked with the power shield and encouraged Opetaia to sit on his punches. Mathie pushed the conditioning, while Tap slowed things down and corrected the technical details.
Each pad holder had a different role in the session, allowing the team to work on different areas as the rounds and fatigue accumulated.
Joining Jai in camp was his younger brother Elvis, who went through the sessions alongside him.
There were also small things I started to notice as the week went on.
During some of the harder periods on the heavy bag, Opetaia would start talking to himself. Sometimes he would swear, particularly when the work became difficult.
Tap had noticed the habit long before I had.
Having trained his son throughout his career, I asked him what Jai looks like when he is genuinely struggling in training.
“He’s very mentally strong,” Tap said. “He talks to himself. Any time he gets uncomfortable he’ll go, ‘Fuck you,’ and starts swearing at himself. He gets angry.”
I asked whether Jai would agree with that assessment.
Tap laughed.
“Yeah.”
The idea behind the camp was not complicated. Team Opetaia wanted difficult situations in training to become familiar.
A boxing camp gives a fighter a certain amount of control. Opponents can be studied, rounds can be counted and mistakes can be corrected. If something is not working, the team can go back into the gym and work on it again.
A fighter’s career does not always work the same way.
For years, becoming undisputed cruiserweight champion has been Opetaia’s goal. Despite continuing to win inside the ring, the route towards it has become increasingly complicated.
In March, the IBF withdrew its sanction for Opetaia’s fight with Brandon Glanton after it became clear that the newly created Zuffa Boxing cruiserweight title would also be contested. Opetaia went ahead with the fight and comfortably outpointed Glanton over 12 rounds, but was subsequently stripped of his IBF title.
The WBC situation has added another complication.
In May, the sanctioning body ordered its cruiserweight champion Noel Mikaelian to defend against David Benavidez, whose move into the division immediately changed the picture at the top. Mikaelian instead moved forward with the September 12 fight against Opetaia.
For Tap, it is another example of how much of a boxer’s career can be decided outside the ring.
“There’s a lot of politics you can’t talk about or get people involved in,” he said. “The cruiserweight division is not very popular like other divisions. So they need big names to sort of bring it out.”
Benavidez is one of those names.
“The WBC want to say, ‘Look who we’ve got as a cruiserweight,’ meanwhile we’ve been struggling to get where we’re at now,” Tap said.
“There’s so much politics in this. We have no control, so we just do our thing. Whoever they put in front of us, we will fight anybody.”
Tap believes another fighter holding the WBC title could actually make Opetaia’s pursuit of undisputed more difficult.
“If they get the WBC belt, that gives them more reason not to fight Jai,” he said. “They’ll say, ‘What have you got? Why would I fight you for a Zuffa belt? What is a Zuffa belt? No one has even heard of a Zuffa belt.’
“They’ll use this as an excuse. ‘We’ve got these, what have you got?’ And the only option we can give them is money. We have nothing else to offer them.”
The IBF situation remains another source of frustration.
“They took the IBF off us. The lawyers are taking care of that,” Tap said. “Will it come back to us? I don’t think so. There’s talks of other people fighting for the title.”
Despite that frustration, the belts have not lost their importance to the family.
I asked Tap whether everything that had happened had changed what a world title actually meant to him and his son.
“No, not really,” he said. “That’s why we started. These belts hold weight. Since he was a kid he’s been watching it. Since I was a kid I’ve been watching it.”
Fighters can become frustrated with the organisations behind the belts while still spending their careers chasing what those belts represent. For Opetaia, walking away now would mean leaving part of the job unfinished.
During one of the strength and conditioning sessions later in the week, the conversation turned to Benavidez.
Tap believed a fight between the two could potentially happen early next year.
As Jai continued training, Tap reached for his phone and pulled up a video that had been circulating of Benavidez working on a heavy bag in oversized clothes.
We watched the video and spoke about what a fight between the two might look like.
Benavidez was not the man Opetaia was preparing for in Phuket, but Team Opetaia were clearly keeping an eye on him.
“Yeah, 100 per cent, that fight will skyrocket us to the next level if it does happen,” Tap said. “I’m sure it will be for the unification and then we’ll move up to heavyweight because our plan is to go up to heavyweight. But we have unfinished business here.”
Heavyweight has been part of the plan for some time. With all the difficulties surrounding the cruiserweight titles, Tap admitted there had been a point when he wondered whether they should simply stop chasing them.
“I even said to Jai, ‘Maybe we just leave it and go,’” Tap recalled.
“He said, ‘Listen Dad, we won’t leave it like that just because of politics. Let’s finish what we started.’”
That conversation explains why Opetaia remains at cruiserweight. Moving to heavyweight would offer a new challenge, but there is still something he wants to complete first.
Benavidez could eventually provide the fight Team Opetaia have been looking for.
When I asked what he thought his son brought that Benavidez had not seen before, Tap pointed towards Jai’s skill level, power and movement.
But that is a discussion for another fight.
The man directly in front of Opetaia is Mikaelian.
For all the talk during the week about Benavidez, heavyweight and the remaining cruiserweight titles, Tap was quick to make clear that nobody in camp was looking past September 12.
“Anyone that we fight is dangerous. We don’t overlook anyone,” he said.
“We go with a plan, we tick all the boxes. Mark, the strength and conditioning coach, does his job. I do my boxing stuff.
“If anything, it’s all about respect. Respect the sport, respect the athletes. They’re going through the same struggle, trying to feed their families.
“We concentrate on what we have to do. Who’s next? Then move on.”
By the end of the week, I had watched the routine repeat itself. Running, heavy bags, pads, strength and conditioning and sparring. On some days, the team trained three times.
Through most of it, Tap was never far away.
Before I left, I asked him what he hoped he and his son would remember when all of this was eventually finished. Not the belts or the wins, but the years they had spent doing it together.
“We just love what we’re doing,” he said. “We grew up with it. It’s been in our families for generations. We were born into it. It’s been in our blood for a long time.
“It’s just a crazy journey. We keep going because this is what we were supposed to do.”
There are still things Team Opetaia cannot decide for themselves. They cannot force another champion into the ring, and whether Benavidez happens next year or Opetaia gets the opportunity to become undisputed remains to be seen.
For now, the focus is Mikaelian and September 12.
By the final days of my week in Phuket, the routine around the gym had become familiar. Opetaia was back on the heavy bag with Tap watching nearby and calling out instructions. As the session became harder, Jai started talking to himself again and continued working.
It brought me back to something Tap had told me earlier in the week.
“You have to break yourself and mentally be prepared for the worst. If you don’t know how to swim, you’ll drown.”
