Sunny Edwards has described the sense of “relief” that followed his announcing his retirement after being stopped by Galal Yafai.
The referee Lee Every intervened to rescue Edwards before the conclusion of the sixth of six one-sided rounds at Resorts World Arena in Birmingham, England in November, therefore confirming the biggest victory of Yafai’s nine-fight career and the second defeat for Edwards, who then retired at 28 years old.
At his peak Edwards was regarded as the world’s leading flyweight, but having previously lost only once, to Jesse “Bam” Rodriguez, he showed signs of decline throughout against his leading domestic rival, who he insists he had planned to retire after fighting, “win, lose or draw”.
Edwards was criticised, post-fight, for telling his new trainer Chris Williams at the end of the second round that he didn’t “want to be in there”. He by then had already been hurt in the first.
He regardless intends on remaining in boxing as a commentator, manager and potentially trainer if he never fights again, and revealed the extent to which he is looking forward to the benefits of not living a fighter’s life.
“The sad thing is, once I’d done it, I genuinely felt relieved,” he told BoxingScene. “And it’s the first time I’ve got out of the boxing ring and one of my first thoughts aren’t, ‘Who am I fighting next? When am I fighting? What’s next?’.
“That just showed me, probably more than I accepted to myself, it felt like a relief, you know what I mean? And it should have felt more heartbreaking, and it just wasn’t.
“I’m still very much going to be deeply linked and rooted in boxing. I’m not going anywhere. If anything I’d be popping up doing more other stuff [like commentary and management] but I think part of it is my body. If I’m honest, my body’s really taken the enjoyment and belief out of myself, because it’s slowly broken down.
“I got to go to my son’s nativity play. The things that I’ve been really missing out on – being in camp for fighting… Being in America to fight [in June, Mexico’s Adrian] Curiel, I happened to miss one of the things that I’ve been most excited about ever since I’ve thought about having a child of my own – having to watch sports day through a FaceTime… That was a big part of a lot of my mindset changing. I sit here and I convince everyone that I do it all for my kids, but then my kids are looking at the end of the race, and the other kids have got their dads there, and their dad’s watching through a phone. It just got to the point where I weren’t 100 per cent sure if the juice was worth the squeeze. All of the stuff I’m missing out on – for what?”
Before the fight with the 32-year-old Yafai, who is expected to challenge the WBC champion Kenshiro Teraji in 2025, it had been suggested that Edwards might not be the same fighter as a consequence of the damaging defeat by Rodriguez in December 2023 in which he suffered a medial orbital fracture, and he revealed that “eye issues” persist.
“If I sat here and bored you with every single injury; every single fight I should have pulled out for and for what, I’d probably be 7-0, 8-0 now,” he said. “I’ve had one hand for fights; no hands for fights. I’ve rolled ankles just weeks before. I’ve done so many things; I’ve chipped collarbones. I can’t lift my right arm; my rotator cuffs are fucked. My knee goes. My elbow I can’t straighten out without hyperextending it – I probably need surgery on that as well. I’ve even got eye issues that I buried my head in the sand about so I could still fight.
“It’s just a lot, and it got to a period of time – I’m enjoying the other stuff and I’m also quite successful in other places. I’m starting to think at times that I was missing out on more that I could be doing outside of the ring, and I think it just altered and tweaked my mindset. That same ego and spite I had – the desire of wanting to be the best in the world; wanting to be the number one – disliking my opponents just because we’re fighting. That kind of faded as I got older. Maybe having kids changed my mindset outside of boxing, and that ego did really help me a lot more than I knew at the time.”
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