The most important fight of Sunny Edwards’ life was supposed to be when he won his flyweight world title. Last April, the self-proclaimed “little scruff from Croydon” was a clear underdog against Moruti Mthalane, the veteran champion used to grinding his opponents into submission with a ceaseless stalking pressure. Edwards’ performance that night was a masterclass, calming the storm with impervious skill and movement, and as he held his IBF belt aloft in the centre of the ring afterwards, all those outlandish dreams he’d set as a child had been realised.
It might yet be the bout that defines Edwards, who defends his title for a second time this weekend, but what’s most important isn’t always decided by a material trophy. Sometimes, it’s the pivot that has made it all possible, the sliding doors moment that irrevocably changes a career, putting in on a path to legend or leaving it as a trail of what-ifs. For Edwards, that moment came in 2015. A few months earlier, shortly after turning 18 years old, he packed his bags and uprooted to Sheffield to train at the Steel City Gym ahead of his first senior national championships.
But on that February morning, Edwards’ sister called out of the blue. His mother, Terry, was suffering from breast cancer and had fallen badly ill. “She said ‘I don’t think mum’s going to make it through the night’ and my world just shattered,” he says. “I went down to London and spent two-and-a-half weeks by my mum’s hospital bed, eating McDonalds every day because it was the only thing still open at 3am, waiting to say goodbye to her.”
Then Edwards’ trainer, Grant Smith, called to say that the weigh-ins for the ABA finals had been moved forwards by two weeks. “He was going to pull me out but told Grant I’d be back in Sheffield tomorrow. When I jumped on the scales I was 57.8kg, I’d never been that heavy in my life. I hadn’t trained and my head was all over the place. I spent nine days killing myself to get that weight off. I could barely stand up at the first weigh-in. I didn’t speak about my mum or say it was in honour or memory of her, she didn’t even like boxing, it was more for me and my own sanity.”
When the ABA finals arrived, Edwards defeated future Olympic gold medallist Galal Yafai en route to winning his first senior national title. It propelled him to a place on the Team GB squad, allowed him to become recognised internationally, and ensured he was sought after by promoters when turning professional. It changed the course of Edwards’ career, even if he avoids seeing it in an overly sentimental light.
“Everyone has their own trauma,” he says. “I don’t like showing emotion. I’m very much from an old school mentality that nobody cares about your struggles so you just have to get on with it. I think the mental resilience, what I had to put myself through just to get in the ring, people can’t fathom it, but I’ve always been quite numb. Boxing makes me feel alive, it makes me feel something when most parts of life don’t really. Once I was in the gym everything was outside of it, that’s how it’s always been, it’s been my sort of safe space.”
There are few characters quite so proudly brash as Edwards within British boxing either. His personality has outgrown his small stature, standing at just 5’3”, and he speaks in a faster, freer rhythm than the clinical measure to his punches. His incessant cheekiness, quick-witted but occasionally crude, has often been misconstrued for outright arrogance, but Edwards insists he has always cared little for external opinions. “I made the conscious decision to be as close to myself as possible in the media, whether people like me or not, my fights will get me there,” he says.
His talent though, despite so often being questioned as an amateur, has become inarguable. Edwards is undefeated in 17 fights now, with each playing out to a familiar pattern as his opponents struggle to subdue his speed off the back foot. He is not necessarily a powerful puncher, with just four knockouts on his record, but he possesses enough spite in his fists to demand caution. “I’m not going to disrespect Grant and our journey [by searching for knockouts],” he says. “I’m here to win not to entertain. We want to win the next 30 fights. Don’t be an exciting loser, be a born winner.”
That supreme technique is a credit to Smith, one of the best trainers Britain has to offer, but it started with Edwards’ father. Affectionately known as ‘Mad Larry’, owing to the mischevious antics of his youth, he sold his second-hand tyre shop in Sutton after seeing Edwards and his older brother Charlie’s talent and would take them straight from school to Repton Boxing Club in Bethnal Green in the evenings. But it was Charlie, two years Sunny’s senior, who has been the real guiding light. A prolific amateur himself, they would spar each other without mercy for much of their childhood, with Charlie the first to enter the pro ranks, eventually becoming a world champion in 2018.
“We grew up in the same household, the same sport, and still to this day we get compared to one another,” Sunny says. “I’ve always wanted him to do his absolute best, but I just want to be better than him. I think that’s healthy competition and he had a lot of early success when I was falling short and now I’ve closed that gap.”
In the run-up to his fight against Mthalane, Edwards used a falling out he’d had with his brother as fuel. “After we had a disgreement in our personal lives, that whole camp I was thinking: you were a world champion, now look what I do. If you can do it, so can I.”
The pair are “like chalk and cheese” but back on speaking terms now and Edwards stresses that he owes a lot of his success to Charlie. “As I’m getting older, I’ve put less steps wrong because I’ve learnt from him so I owe a lot,” he says. “I followed him like a fly on the wall, like a little flea sucking and absorbing all the knowledge I could. I’ve never minded being in his shadow because he’s opened doors for me that I didn’t even know would be there.”
Edwards also pays thanks to his adviser, Daniel Kinahan, for helping to steer his career after seeing Charlie thrust into a difficult fight too early and suffer a brutal loss against John Riel Casemiro. Kinahan is allegedly the head of an organised crime cartel, but Edwards describes him as a “friend for life”.
“I’ve known him since I was 17, I have a personal relationship with him and I take people at face value,” he says. “I’ve got friends and family from all walks of life. I’m human, I’m not perfect, and I don’t try to be a moral compass for anyone. He’s given me a chance to provide for my family and made sure I’ve been looked after properly.”
Ireland has no extradition agreement with the UAE, where Kinahan now resides, and Edwards’ defence of his title against Muhammad Waseem will be held in Dubai on Saturday. He doesn’t mind fighting away from home and shares the same concerns as many fighters over the judges’ scoring in Britain, as well as admitting that he still carries a chip on his shoulder from being “written off a hundred times” as an amateur with England.
“When I left Team GB, one of the coaches who hadn’t been selecting me said to Grant ‘why are you taking him on? You won’t do anything with him’,” he says. “I got laughed at, but all the other fighters have been beaten and now I’m a world champion.”
It is the status that defines Edwards and feels like “vindication”, but no more than he ever expected. Because what has been most important, the difference between him and then, he says, just like the trips up and down from Sheffield to see his mum, has always been a willingness “to run towards the hardest things”.
