Steve Cunningham last fought in March in Reading, Pennsylvania, winning a unanimous six-round decision. The fight, held in an arena that regularly hosts minor league hockey, wasn’t televised. Tickets started at $20.
The former sailor’s next outing will be a bit higher in profile.
Cunningham (29-8-1) will face unbeaten Andrew ”The Beast” Tabiti (14-0) for the vacant USBA cruiserweight title as part of Saturday night’s Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor undercard, kicking off the pay-per-view portion of one of the most-hyped boxing matches in history.
Tabiti’s trained by Mayweather’s father and fights under the Mayweather Promotions banner. He’s about a 3-to-1 favorite, depending on the oddsmaker.
“Really, the pressure’s on him to perform, so he’s going to run into something. Big time,” Cunningham told Military Times last week. “He’s excited, he’s going to want to make a big show. He‘s going to get a show.”
The 41-year-old Cunningham left his Philadelphia home to serve four years in the Navy (1994-98), mostly on aircraft carriers. He said he passed the test to move up as an aviation boatswain's mate (fuels) but didn’t advance, and ”by the time I got to take the test for E-4 again, I was processing out to chase the dream.”
He wanted to be a pro boxer. He’d never boxed before joining the Navy boxing team, he said, but he developed a love not just for fighting, but for learning the science behind it. Stationed at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, he was a short trip from the team’s training center at Little Creek.
But after a supportive department head transferred and a new one came in with new priorities — ”The new officer, he wasn’t trying to hear none of that” — Cunningham figured his time in uniform was up.
He won the national Golden Gloves crown at 178 pounds in 1998, the year he left service and just two years after Mayweather won his third and final Golden Gloves title (his first at 125 pounds). Then came the hard part.
“Getting out, that was scary,” Cunningham said. ”You’ve got Navy guys trying to discourage you, [saying,] ‘There’s nothing for you to do out there.’ For four years, I was getting two checks a month basically for just being there. I was doing my job, but you know, you’re just there. You do what you do. It’s habit.”
He picked up jobs at the Atlanta airport, cleaning planes and working security. He settled in with a company that put food on jets, working nights so he’d have his days free to train. His time in the Navy keeps a place in his career thanks in part to his nickname, ”USS.”
”I wanted a catchy name like ‘Iron’ Mike Tyson or [Evander] ‘Real Deal’ Holyfield,” Cunningham recalled. Nothing felt right, but en route to a bout in Poland he and his team “took on the moniker ‘USS.’ We were like, ‘We’re like a ship. We’re a ship-of-war, traveling, fighting.’
“And ‘USS,’ that one stuck. We just rolled with it.”
Cunningham debuted as a pro in 2000 and didn’t lose a fight until 2006. He won his first cruiserweight (200-pound) world title in 2007, lost it in 2008, then won it back in 2010. He moved up to heavyweight in 2012 and was outweighed by 20, 40, sometimes more than 70 pounds in his fights.
He knocked down Tyson Fury in Madison Square Garden in 2013 before the 250-pound Brit recovered and knocked him out. Two years later, Fury would beat Wladimir Klitschko to claim a share of the heavyweight title.
Most of the headlines made by Cunningham in his career came in 2014, for his willingness to trade blows with larger foes at least in part to pay the medical bills that came with a heart transplant needed by his daughter Kennedy, then 9 years old. The successful surgery took place in December of that year.
“The boxing community really showed their love,” Cunningham said. “We had the fund for my daughter, and they supported it. We made like $30,000 in the fund in like 60 days.
“And then there was money on the side. I would talk to fighters who didn’t want to be named. One fighter gave $10,000. He was just like, ‘Don’t name me.’ … Fighters, promoters, everybody helped out. That touched me forever. We go to these events, my daughter’s coming to Vegas. I know a lot of people want to come out and see her, meet her. She’s doing awesome.”
In May, Cunningham got the call from promoter Al Haymon with news of a fight on the Mayweather-McGregor card. He trained in Philadelphia and, family in tow, left for Vegas earlier this week to join the hype- and money-generating madness.
He’s even got an idea for what should happen next.
“What I would like to see is — now this is the ultimate, and I know Floyd’s not going to do it — I would like to see this Floyd-McGregor, it’ll be great, and then we do a Floyd-McGregor [in the] octagon,” Cunningham said.
”Then, we flip a coin and do a third one. Or we play some basketball, or something.”
