Boxing: Terminated by the Tuaman

By PHIL TAYLOR

Martin Pugh is the man in the middle, the shadow in the threesome which makes up David Tua enterprises. He also appears to be the catalyst in the break-up.

Kevin Barry, a man with an Olympic boxing silver medal to his name who has been by Tua's side during his 11-year journey in professional boxing, says he loves Tua like a brother but he is standing fast beside Pugh, the business fixer and dealmaker for Tuaman - the brand of the boxer from Mangere who rose from a dishwasher to fight for the heavyweight championship of the world.

Tua is less enamoured of Pugh. He has sacked his managers and wants answers about the handling of the money - about $10 million in purses alone - which has flowed in during his professional career, most of it in the four years since Pugh joined.

Tua has hired an accountant to go through the books. He and his new people - family members, good friend Inga Tuigamala, lawyer Luke Kemp - met Barry on Wednesday and were to meet again today.

"He's more angry at Martin Pugh," Barry said after the first meeting. "It's a financial issue and Martin is the financial manager, so I think out of right he becomes the dark guy."

Pugh suggests suspicion always falls on the guy in the background. "I'm the shadow," he says, "the lone wolf, the covert operation [sic]. That's what I do. When things need to be done, I take care of it."

The spotlight has turned on the shadow man. Here he is in his battered-looking offices near Barry's gym in Victoria St.

At first he declines to be interviewed. No one will print what he has to say, he complains. Then, the man who built and sold a chain of nightclubs by age 24, was bankrupt at 26, who claims to have grossed an average of $5 million a year for the Tua team since joining, and who now, at 39, predicts he's about to make it big with "penis products", relents and talks wide-eyed and almost non-stop for more than an hour.

The impression is of a man in a hurry, who enjoys the thrill of taking life's highway at speed.

He and Barry are alike, he says. "We both go for it and we don't pull punches. We are go-getters. We make decisions and we make them fast. Okay."

No photos, though. He has his reasons but would explain only on condition they not be printed. They could, however, be classed as relating to his personal safety.

For the record, he looks markedly different from the short-haired man in the existing pictures. His hair, parted in the middle, hangs near his shoulders and, in casual clothes, munching on a sports bar, toting a gym bag with documents poking out of a side pocket, Pugh looks as though he'd be more at home on a surfboard than in a boardroom.

On his desk is a framed photograph of himself with Tua. Both are beaming. On the wall in pride of place above his desk is a sole framed certificate which Pugh periodically refers to. It bears the insignia of the old supermarket company Four Square. Pugh worked for Four Square in his late teens and says he was the youngest to receive the certificate.

There are no MBAs, no university commerce degrees; he's learned his business smarts through experience.

"People might laugh but that's how you got your management diploma back then."

The supermarket business gave him his nous, he says. Supermarkets operate on tiny margins. "You need to be switched on to keep things profitable. If you can understand how a supermarket is managed, you can run America on that knowledge."

He is the man who has been running the Tuaman organisation. He bridles at being called the financial manager and says he is co-manager, at the least business manager. The Tuaman business card he hands me describes him as "president".

Since his introduction to Barry, through fitness classes his partner attended at Barry's gym, he's overhauled the way not only the company is structured but also the financial lives of the manager and the fighter. All the shares of the companies associated with Tua and Barry - Tuaman Inc Ltd, Tua Inc Ltd, Team Barry Ltd - are held in Pugh's name. He's sole director of the later two and co-director, with Tua, of Tuaman.

His name is on the title of Barry's Green Bay home in West Auckland, with those of Barry and his wife, former Olympic gymnast Tanya Moss. The website www.tuaman.com is registered to Pugh and a company he's associated with, unrelated to the boxing businesses. Nothing sinister about this, says Pugh. He holds a proportion of the shares in trust for the others and does so to protect their interests.

What say, he explains, God forbid, Tua killed someone in the ring or a girl came out of the woodwork and cried rape. American lawyers would come looking.

"They look to the company and they see Martin Pugh there. Who can they not get to? David Tua."

Should they wish to try to hold Pugh accountable, they may find the only personal assets he lays claim to is, as he tells me, his business skills.

These may include an ability to tuck assets away. A search of business and property records does not show the assets the average person has in their names, such as a house. He has no need for one, he says, because he spends so much time travelling.

When he joined the Tua team in 1999 Pugh was living in a multistorey Birkenhead house. When the Herald's boxing writer called that year to interview Pugh, Asian people were busy on the bottom floor assembling computers. The property is owned by a company whose shares appear to be held by a nominee. The same person controls another company which owns the shares of MP Trust Fund Ltd, a company of which Pugh is sole director.



Pugh lives in a North Shore home bought in 1997 for $1.67 million. The names of his partner and another person are listed on ownership records.

Protecting his interests is something he may have learned early in business. What about his business track record?

"Opened a very successful chain of nightclubs and sold them. Candyos. Sold them to a property company for xyz dollars and they went under a couple of years later. Upper Hutt, Lower Hutt, Wellington, Auckland, Tauranga, Hamilton. It was very successful for me."

Made a lot of money from that? "I made a reasonable living."

If I write about his bankruptcy he asks it be noted that, "When asked if he owed anybody any money, Mr Pugh said 'No'. Pugh leans towards the tape recorder and, sotto voce, says: "I beg somebody to say that I have owed or owe them any money."

What Chase Corporation might think were it around today is anyone's guess. It prompted Pugh's voluntary bankruptcy. When the company Pugh sold the clubs to went broke, Chase moved to call in the personal guarantees Pugh had signed for leases on the premises the clubs occupied.

"These rents were million-dollar figures and they come knocking on the door."

When they threatened to bankrupt him, Pugh says, he saved them the bother and did it himself. Though he'd done well from selling the clubs he had no assets when Chase called a couple of years later.

His bankruptcy - he was discharged in 1993 - is not his favourite topic. "Go light on the bankruptcy and all that and when the real story comes out, I'll exclusive you up," he says.

He's not the sort to waste energy on negatives. He'd rather talk about the future and the success he sees just around the corner. "I'm working with a biotech company where we develop penis products."

They'd just about "cracked" a way of delivering Viagra within five minutes, he says, saving "waiting around for an hour and a half to get an erection". They'd also developed a cream - an alternative to pills - "you rub it on and wind it up!"

He's about to talk turkey, he says, with Viagra owner Pfizer. Riches await. "What I've just developed here is a billion-dollar industry product."

He's yet to form a company for this product but likes the name "Hard On". Pugh enjoys another laugh. People have lost their humour, he reckons.

"It's just gone crazy. Anybody who knows me knows I've got a great sense of humour. And while this [the Tua break-up] is disturbing and completely nuts to me, there is still a humorous side to it."

He reminisces, the three of them having fun, "bullshitting each other" on plane trips. "Camaraderie that people would die to have and that's the saddest thing of all."

He's not the only one with a sense of humour. Someone has listed Pugh's occupation on credit check website Baycorp as "escort" and his employer as Candyos. "They do this shit just to personally **** me off," he says.

Nightclubs. Penis products. Pro boxing. And Robyn Reynolds, the Hamilton woman who parlayed a few nights in the sack with popstar Robbie Williams into a good earner. She turned up in Las Vegas for Tua's title fight against Lennox Lewis.

"The package was stacked and popping out," is how one who saw her at the post-fight party described her.

Rumour spread that Pugh was her manager. Not so, he says. They met that day at the Mandalay Bay Hotel where the fight was held. He helped her with media organisations which had been slow payers.

"That's all I did, a bit of pro bono work. I heard some of those comments about girls in lycra tops and big breasts, right. But if you started banning big breasts and lycra tops in Vegas, there'd be nobody there. Okay. And there'd be no customers."

Pugh made a minor fashion statement of his own in the United States. An American trainer, referring to Pugh, said he didn't trust any man who "wears rings on his toes".

Pugh, who this day wears shoes and a ring in each ear, is keen to respond: "This is something I'd like you to print," he says. "Write, when asked about wearing rings on his toes, Mr Pugh said, 'I had to start wearing my partner's wedding ring on my toe because when I was dealing with Don King I couldn't leave them on my fingers'. Okay, yeah. Brackets on the end: said in a joking, humorous manner. And on the record, I don't think Don would steal the rings off my fingers. Print it up, it's good reading."

Clearly Pugh is not your typical businessman but, as he points out, boxing is an atypical industry. Had he known what was involved he would have negotiated a bigger percentage. Just what his cut is, though, he won't say.

Tense business. "I'm the one dealing with the bangers up in America."

"I have a plan," he confides, "of how to escape out of a room, out of any situation, when I'm sitting there with Mike Tyson's people, with Rahman's people, who all have guns ... I take my life into my hands when I look these guys in the eye, let alone start yelling at them, calling them 'ya thieving mothers'. I have a knack ... where to this date ... I haven't been smashed in the face for dealing with them like that. Okay."

Don King, the impresario of professional boxing, has apparently grumbled that Pugh is a hard man to deal with. High praise from the king, Pugh reckons.

"On the other hand, it's been the most enjoyable, fun business I've been involved in. It's very similar to a hobby, a fun sport with the ability to make large dollars. And the thought of making large dollars, I mean, that's just the trip for me."

And isn't that the issue here, how those dollars are split up, been invested? Would he say that in guiding the Tua business he's worked hard but not got rich?

"No, I've got no comment. What people do with their own money and how they invest it is their own business." Pugh does say Tua had never done better before he joined. He defends advising Tua to buy a 60ha slice of coastal land at Pakiri, north of Auckland, rather than put it somewhere where it would return a dividend.

"We have 150 acres there ... That property in 10 years' time could be worth $200 million."

Yet Pugh is unsure of his status in Tua's eyes. The boxer has spoken of bitterness. "David and I are friends. I don't know whether I should say 'were'."

During the interview Pugh hints at a full story waiting to be told, but also says the issues Tua has have not been spelled out to him.

It may be money. If Tua beats Rahman in December, a fight with one of boxing's superstars, Roy Jones jnr, could be next. Pugh talks of it as a done deal and says $30 million stands to be made. Tua needs to concentrate on winning the Rahman fight to reach the pot of gold.

"Trouble is, they are more worried about what percentage Kevin and I will get."

It may be, as has been suggested, the boxer has decided Pugh's style is not his style. Shaking off the shadow won't be easy and may not be amicable.

Pugh: "I'm not walking away from work I've done for the last four years. I don't like to use the words 'hold him to the contract'. No. I have a contract and I think it should be respected."

Tua can break the trustee relationship if he wishes but "he can't fire me", says Pugh. "I don't work for David Tua. I work for myself."

Looking down the track? "We are a team, we will work together. That's it. Nothing else."

It's a prospect which seems unlikely.

Soon after the interview, Barry arrived and spent six hours with Pugh. On radio that morning he'd been upbeat that things could be resolved. As he emerged at 5.30pm Barry had this to say to our photographer:

"It's over. It'll never be how it was. The Tuaman has ****** it."

Tua Companies

Tuaman Inc Ltd

Incorporated June 1999.

Management company.

Martin Pugh and David Tua, directors.

All shares are in the name of Martin Pugh.


Pugh says he holds the shares in trust and the company is split 25/25/50 between him, Barry and Tua respectively.


Tua, ASB Bank and a sports nutrition company have charges registered against Tuaman Inc.

Tua Inc Ltd
Incorporated February this year.


All shares in name of Martin Pugh, who is sole director.

Team Barry Ltd

Incorporated October 1999.


All shares in name of Martin Pugh, who is sole director.