He respects everything the former unified welterweight champion accomplished, but Tszyu is perplexed by Spence’s “arrogance” as they fast approach their 12-round middleweight match Sunday at Afterpay Arena in Tszyu’s hometown of Sydney, Australia. Spence is, after all, about to end a three-year layoff and needs to disprove doubts about what he has left following the brutal beating he absorbed in his last fight.

The 36-year-old southpaw wasn’t interested in taking a tune-up to shed some ring rust. From Tszyu’s perspective, that encapsulates Spence’s approach to what Tszyu assures will be another difficult, physical fight for the DeSoto, Texas native.

“He thinks I’m a walk in the park,” Tszyu told The Ring. “He thinks it’s all gonna be easy. And that’s why he’s demanding all these things and he wasn’t doing all the media obligations. There’s a lotta different things. There’s a certain bit of arrogance [from] him. But he feels like he’s earned it, you know? And that’s how it is, you know? Money can change a lotta people.”

Spence’s skeptics wonder whether he has happily traveled halfway around the world for a payday and skipped an easier bout because he knows this will be the last fight of his career. Such intense cynicism motivated him even more to demonstrate Crawford didn’t beat all of the championship-caliber boxing out of him in July 2023, when his rival sent Spence to the canvas three times and stopped him in the ninth round of a long-awaited, shockingly one-sided 147-pound title unification fight at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.

Still, Spence didn’t inspire confidence when his team requested two weeks before their fight for the contract weight to be raised two pounds – from a catch weight of 158 to the middleweight limit of 160.

Tszyu (27-3, 18 KOs) agreed to the weight switch because he didn’t want Spence (28-1, 22 KOs) to use depleting himself physically before their fight as an excuse for what the former WBO junior middleweight champ promised will be a dominant performance from him. Spence’s “strange” request only reinforced Tszyu’s suspicion that Spence sees him as a shell of the fighter he was before former IBF 154-pound champ Bakhram Murtazaliev (23-1, 17 KOs) and WBC champ Sebastian Fundora (24-1-1, 16 KOs) defeated him by technical knockout in two of his past five fights.

“I don’t know, man,” Tszyu said. “I don’t know if he’s taking it seriously. I hope he has. I hope he really has, because I have.”

The odds on this main event between Spence (-136) and Tszyu (-102) are essentially even, according to FanDuel.

The 31-year-old Tszyu has won two fights, however, since he didn’t answer the bell to start the eighth round of his rematch with Fundora a year ago at MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.

He beat Anthony Velazquez (18-1-1, 15 KOs) and Denis Nurja (20-1, 9 KOs) by unanimous decision in a pair of 10-rounders. Those two fights took place over a 3½-month span from mid-December until early April.

The comparatively inactive Spence has boxed just twice since his unanimous points victory over Danny Garcia in December 2020.

Spence-Tszyu will headline a show DAZN will offer to subscribers to its Ultimate plan for no additional charge. It costs $49.99 per month in the United States and £24.99 in the United Kingdom.

The Spence-Tszyu card can also be bought on pay-per-view through DAZN and Amazon’s Prime Video for $79.99 and £24.99.