It has taken Robbie Peden nearly a decade to get to the top in the super-featherweight division, and now he is there he is not going to just drift off without a battle.
Since turning professional in 1996, the Australian has struggled with a problem that is a typical one in boxing. He has always been a fighter with talent, but, by his own admission he has not been a big enough name to get the big fights.
“Other boxers have probably seen me as high risk, low reward,” he admitted.
However, all that has now changed.
In February he picked up the vacant IBF belt after shutting up American Nate Campbell with an eighth-round TKO in front of a partisan Melbourne crowd, and now he has been rewarded with a crack at a real big-name fighter, WBC champion Marco Antonio Barrera, in a unification fight on September 17.
“I really appreciate the opportunity he [Barrera] has given me. I always want to fight the best but a lot of them have avoided me,” Peden said.
“I’ve struggled for a while in that respect, but he didn’t have to take this fight. My outlook was always to win a world title.
“Quite a lot of people get shots at titles earlier than they should, and they go into fights knowing that they don’t have a chance of winning. But I’ve had to wait for my chance.
“I think that’s been good for me because I don’t want to be a small fish in the ocean, I want to be a big fish in the ocean.
“And now that I’ve got the IBF belt, it obviously makes me a more attractive opponent for fighters.
“I know I can compete with the big fighters, and I’ve proven that to myself when I have sparred with them.”
Peden has been a long-time sparring partner for Barrera, and in February 2002 the Mexican suffered a broken rib in a session with Peden in California. The injury caused Barrera to postpone his second fight with Erik Morales for three months.
However Barrera bounced back from the injury to win the bout with a unanimous points decision, and a third meeting with Morales last November gave the ‘Baby Faced Assassin’ the WBC super-featherweight belt.
He comfortably defended his title with a second-round knockout against Mzonke Fana in April, but meeting Peden in the ring promises to be a much harder test.
The 31-year-old from Brisbane, the first Aboriginal world champion since lightweight and bantamweight king Lionel Rose in the 1960s and 70s, knows Barrera’s style like few others.
“I know him well and I know how he fights, but he knows me too so it can be detrimental,” said Peden.
“We’ve sparred many, many times before, and I’m telling you, if you could have sold tickets for those sparring sessions, we would have brought in plenty of dollars!
“He was a champion at 22, so he’s got a good record, although I don’t think he went into the Manny Pacquiao fight looking as sharp as usual.”
The TKO 11th round loss against Pacquiao in November 2003 was Barrera’s last defeat, and only the fourth of a near 16-year career which has seen him win 60 fights.
Peden has lined up David Santos – defeated by Carlos Alberto Hernandez in a clash for the IBF super-featherweight title in 2003 – as a sparring partner, but when it comes to the Barrera fight, he does not plan to alter his strategy when he steps into the ring.
“I usually fight my own fight, so I’ll let him adapt to me,” he said.
Self-belief has helped to hold ‘the Bomber’ together over a difficult few years, as Peden has had anything but an easy ride since he moved to live in America after competing in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.
“I’ve had a lot of setbacks in my career, but I like to see them as tests,” Peden added.
“In the past I’ve had lots of injury problems, and some promotional and managerial problems, but everything is going really smoothly now.”
Then there was the horrific night in July 1999 when Peden awoke to find an intruder in his home, who battered him unconscious with a club.
“Yeah that was nasty. The guy got caught and was sent to prison, but it’s something I try not to think about,” said Peden.
“It took a while to recover and it probably set me back six months. It wasn’t just the physical injuries, there were mental injuries. It took me a while to be able to sleep properly again.”
For a young, unbeaten fighter, it could have thrown Peden’s career into disarray. Since the attack though, he has only lost twice in 14 fights, on his way to the showdown with Barrera.
However although he has only just reached the top table in the super-featherweights, he admits that he is considering whether to move up a weight to 135lbs.
“It depends what happens in this fight, but there are still other fighters at this weight who I would like to fight,” he said.
“It’s always been a pretty good division, and now there are seven or eight good fighters. If we could all fight each other I think a lot of people would want to watch.”
