The biggest attraction in boxing
IN recent years the ring entrance has become an ever more vital part of boxing’s absurdist pageantry.
With hopes of giving themselves a psychological edge, fighters have arrived in the ring aboard motorcycles and makeshift thrones.
To show he was, as he said, “all business,” Winky Wright recently stepped onto the canvas wearing a three-piece suit. To underscore his agility, Prince Naseem Hamed did a flip over the turnbuckle.
But for a spectacle of sheer menace, nothing can match the pre-fight procession of Nikolay Valuev. If history is any indication, when the 33-year-old Russian heavyweight fights Monte Barrett tonight at the Allstate Arena near Chicago, he will leave the locker room in a robe that can’t quite cover the thick hair that carpets his chest, back and shoulders. He’ll walk methodically, his eyes wide open, as if he’s forgotten how to blink. When he reaches the ring, he’ll lift a leg and simply step over the top rope.
“I can see fear in the other corner when I do that,” Valuev, speaking through his omnipresent interpreter, says with a laugh that originates deep in his belly. “You can do that when you’re my size.”
Here’s what else you can do when you’re seven feet tall and weigh 325 pounds: Even though armed with only rudimentary boxing skills, you can become the heavyweight champion of the world.
In what is either a sad commentary on the state of the division or an encouraging commentary on the global appeal of boxing, there is no American atop the heavyweight ranks. The four current belt holders all hail from former Soviet states.
While the IBF’s Wladimir Klitschko (Ukraine), the WBO’s Sergei Liakhovich (Belarus) and the WBC’s Oleg Maskaev (Kazakhstan) are each good, if unremarkable, fighters, it’s hard to know whether Valuev, the WBA champ, achieved his status simply by dint of his size.
“I’d be champ too,” Jamaica’s Owen Beck said after getting KO’d by Valuev, “if every guy I fought came up to my ribcage.”
When Valuev meets Barrett, he’ll be aiming for his 45th straight win against zero defeats. But Valuev is sufficiently self-aware to know his real battle isn’t against Barrett but rather against perception.
“I will show that I am not just a big guy who happens to fight,” he says. “I am a fighter who happens to be big.”
It’s hard to exaggerate Valuev’s size. Built to nearly the exact specs of Shaquille O’Neal, he often stands a full foot taller than his opponents.
His fists are the size of melons. His head, one foe said, is “the size of a Volkswagen.”
Nicknamed “the Beast from the East,” Valuev has been likened to every giant from Gargantua to Shrek.
Valuev’s story begins in the guts of cold war Russia. His father worked in a Leningrad factory repairing radios. His mother worked for the military. Nikolay grew up with few material trappings, but didn’t know better.
“You shared toys, shared clothes, shared everything,” says Valuev, who was born in 1973. “Everyone had the same, because that was the system.”
By age 16 Nikolay was 6ft 8in and weighed north of 250 pounds. Since his parents were of unremarkable size, the consensus was that Nikolay was blessed — or cursed — with a hyperactive pituitary gland.
He has a different theory.
One of his great-great-grandfathers was a colossus who was said to have descended from Tatars, the Mongolian tribe that once invaded Russia.
By his late teens Valuev had reached seven feet. He was no natural athlete, but because of his size he played on a team that won the Russian junior basketball championship, and he set his sights on making the Olympics in the discus and the hammer throw.
He was 19 when he stumbled into boxing. The wife of one of his coaches at the Institute for Sport in St Petersburg saw this behemoth with the size (and the agility) of the Winter Palace and suggested he lace up a pair of gloves. “I had never punched anyone in my life,” Valuev recalls.
Still, boxing fed something in him, and he spent hours in the gym trying to improve his footwork and fitness. He sparred, figuring out how to angle his punches at shorter men. “From the beginning [boxing] was a way to prove something to myself,” he says, “that I am a real man.”
By 1993, when he was 20, Valuev was fighting professionally, larding his record against inept unknowns. But he was marketed as a freak instead of a credible athlete.
His fate changed in 2003 when he crossed paths with a German promoter, Wilfried Sauerland, who believed that Valuev could become a bona fide fighter. Working by then with a well-regarded trainer, Manuel Gabrielian, Valuev upped the calibre of his opposition. At times he seemed to be doing a slow pantomime of a boxer, throwing sluggish punches while pawing at his opponent in the manner of a playful bear. At times he was devastating: Fighting Paolo Vidoz of Italy in October 2004, Valuev threw a right hand that not only ended the bout but also broke his opponent’s jaw in two places.
At other times Valuev’s mere presence has won him the fight. In 2005 Clifford Etienne was set to fight Valuev.
Then he got to the weigh-in. “Nobody told me I was takin’ on Bigfoot!” Etienne yelled before returning to his hotel room and packing his bags.
Ultimately he showed up for the fight but lasted only three rounds.
Valuev’s shining moment came last December, when he challenged John Ruiz in Berlin for the WBA belt. Valuev groped and lumbered and occasionally punched his way to a controversial majority decision.
“Boxing is the only sport where you can get robbed without a gun,” groused Ruiz, nearly a foot shorter and 100 pounds lighter than Valuev.
As the first Russian heavyweight champ, Valuev was feted like a hero when he returned to St Petersburg. These days he can’t even go hunting in the Russian hinterlands without being approached by fans. Which is fine by him.
“I never fought to be popular, but if people want to meet me or shake my hand,” he says with a shrug, “how can I not [respect] that?”
Inevitably Don King has angled for a piece of the action. Mr Only-in-America held options on Valuev after the Ruiz fight. So it was that a limo rolled up to the VIP entrance at last month’s US Open tennis championships in New York City, and out popped King and then Valuev.
In full impresario mode, King brayed, “He’s the Jolly Red Giant! Come see the Eighth Wonder of the World. From Russia with Glove!” The bankers and the brokers on their way to their suites looked on bemusedly.
Here Valuev was, again reduced to a sideshow. He played along, posing with players and shaking hands, but couldn’t conceal his resentment, smiling wanly and muttering in Russian.
By this point it had become clear: Valuev may prevail against Barrett, a 35-year-old journeyman, or he may be exposed as an oversized pretender.
But either way, the tallest heavyweight champ in history will leave the ring with his head high.
Copyright Sports Illustrated, Time Inc 2006. All rights reserved.
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