Profile by Steven Downes
Tough old game: Sunny Edwards after losing his world title in America earlier this month
Tomorrow is Sunny Edwards’ birthday.
It will be the first he has celebrated for three years when he has not been a world champion. Yet he has won greater acclaim from his first, bloody defeat than any fame he earned when he was winning every bout as the world’s best flyweight boxer.
Edwards has never got the recognition for his achievements that he deserved, certainly not in London, and never in his home town of Croydon. For which this website, and its Editor, is also responsible.
I’d like to say it was because we didn’t want to tempt fate, as from afar we tracked his pro career, fight-by-fight, victory-after-victory, through to his winning the super-flyweight European title in 2017 and then claiming the flyweight world belt in 2021.
I’ve known Edwards since he was 11, when he and his brother, Charlie, were already famous because their dad had built a boxing ring in the back garden of their home off Beddington Lane. Charlie Edwards lived the dream, winning ABA amateur titles first before turning professional and becoming a world champion himself.
Brother Sunny trod a slightly different path, even going to university – at Sheffield, to be closer to where British boxing’s Olympic team was based. But when his dream of boxing at the Olympics was thwarted by the arcane selection system and national team quotas, he opted to make his living from the sweet science.
Boxing brothers: Sunny, left, and Charlie Edwards. Both have been world champions
But the public, even sports fans, disregard proper boxers like Sunny Edwards, and the sports media barely bothers with the lighter weights, even when we have a world champion in their midst, preferring instead the pomp and little circumstance of the heavyweights and the brawlers. Edwards’s career’s subterranean profile, outside boxing’s tight circle, has not been helped by none of his contests being seen by a free-to-air TV audience.
Sunny Edwards is the epitome of the boxer, someone who sets out to avoid being hit. That is what the “noble art” is supposed to be all about.
Until the start of this month, he had a pro record of 20-0 and a reputation among boxing aficiandos of someone who could dance his way through a full 12 rounds with their opponent barely laying a glove on them.
Edwards had also a well-deserved reputation for getting into fierce wars of words on social media, sometimes brash, goading and taunting his critics, of which there were many. He’s been described as having “a trollish persona online”. Of which, more later.
He’d quickly earned a reputation as a spiky ringside analyst whenever one of the broadcasters handed him a mic. A true student of his trade (he once accompanied me to a sports journalists’ lunch to hear from another British champion, George Groves; Sunny was 14 at the time), Edwards’ wit is as fast as his hands, his comments always packing a punch.
Hard blows: Edwards takes another punch from Rodriguez in their title fight. The Brit said he could not see out of his right eye from the 2nd round
It is because of his deep affection for the sport, his respect for the champions that have gone before him, that Edwards determined to put everything on the line and, instead of opting for safer contests, he traipsed to Arizona for a world title unification contest with the highly rated American WBO flyweight champion, Jesse “Bam” Rodriguez.
Norman Mailer, the American writer, once said of boxing that in no other sport can you be more humiliated. The Rodriguez fight brought about a form of humiliation for Edwards, it brought his first defeat, the loss of his world champion status, and even a retirement – literally, throwing in the towel – in the ninth of the scheduled 12 rounds.
Edwards took a blow to the right side of his head in the second round. There were reports that it fractured his eye socket. For much of the rest of the fight, he could not focus, could not judge the distance to his opponent, ws unable to throw counter-punches or, as important, avoid the in-coming blows.
“My tricks that usually get me out of the way of shots, he was getting on to them,” Edwards told BBC Radio. “I just couldn’t see. From the second round, my eye was completely blurry and from about Round 6 I got cut. It was getting hard in there.”
Two weeks later, and Edwards can see more clearly now. As specialist magazine Boxing Scene reported just before Christmas, Edwards “has never received more support in his career than in the aftermath of his first career loss”.
And Edwards told Boxing News: “I’ve probably had more positive comments losing in a good fight than I have from winning all my boring fights.
“It meant something being part of an event that people genuinely cared about. Either side, they really wanted me to win or they really wanted Bam to win or they really wanted to find out how the fight went.
“Every other time I’ve boxed, there’s been something happening in boxing that night bigger and I felt like that week, especially that fight night, I feel like it kind of took over the boxing world. And rightfully so. When two young fighters put up their ‘O’s and their world titles, everything is up for stake, it should be celebrated as it was.
“I’ve now become the big nights of boxing and I’ll do everything I can do be there again and again and again.”
Edwards, who is managed by Eddie Hearn and the Matchroom organisation, reckons that his value as a attraction for future fight shows has risen. Tired of being on boxing’s “undercard”, a warm-up act for the heavier weights, Edwards said that Hearn thinks “more people want to see me fight than ever and ever before”.
He said: “I’m looking forward to the future. I still feel like there’s years and years and years ahead of me, achievements and accolades.
“I just want the fights that people actually care about happening because for pretty much 19 of my fights, 20 of my fights maybe, it was the Sunny Edwards show and people didn’t really care because they were expecting me to win.”
It was a champion from history, Jack Dempsey, who once said, “A champion is someone who gets up when they can’t.”
Many happy returns, Sunny Edwards.
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