Hyu’s First Loss Reignited The Fire He Thought He’d Lost
Hyu knows exactly what went wrong against Taiki Naito last April, and he has spent every day since making sure it never happens again.
The 23-year-old Japanese kickboxing phenom faces RISE Super Featherweight Champion Hyuma Hitachi in a flyweight kickboxing showdown at ONE SAMURAI 3 this Saturday, September 12, from Yokohama Buntai in Yokohama, Japan.
A karate black belt who transitioned to kickboxing at 19, Hyu carried a 5-1 ONE Championship record into that fight, a run built on thunderous left kicks and sharp boxing. The unanimous decision loss to Naito, coming just six weeks after beating Suablack Tor Pran49, changed the conversation entirely.
“I was simply too fixated on getting the knockout,” Hyu said. “I underestimated the possibility of Naito winning by accumulating points. In the end, it felt like the fight was over before I had even really fought.”
The defeat exposed a gap between his physical ability and the composure needed to close out a fight, and that realization has stayed with him.
“I believe it was a fight I would have been fine in if I had kept myself properly composed,” he said. “I’m frustrated with the version of myself that couldn’t stay composed through the end of the fight, and now I have a strong desire to come back and prove something.”
The immediate aftermath brought emotions he had not felt since his karate days, when losses were rare and always earned rather than self-inflicted.
“I hated the thought that Wikipedia and other places would now have ‘1 loss’ written next to my record,” he said. “For me, that loss lit an even bigger fire. It brought back that serious competitive tension I used to feel in karate.”
Learning his comeback opponent would be Hitachi, a 28-year-old RISE champion making his ONE debut, brought immediate relief rather than dread.
“My first reaction was, ‘Oh, I get to have a real fight again,'” Hyu said. “Instead, it’s Hitachi, who just became the RISE champion. I was genuinely happy to get an opponent like that for my comeback.”
Composure, not power, will decide whether this comeback succeeds.
“The biggest thing for me is to put aside everything that can be thought about after the fight and focus only on the fight itself,” he said. “If I lose this one, I’ll honestly be shocked. That’s why I absolutely do not want to lose.”
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