Kovalev In Good Place, But Others Would Marvel at Thawing of Cold War

Published

11 years ago

July 31, 2014

It probably isn’t in any of the history lessons taught in the classrooms of Chelyabinsk, Russia, which is the hometown of WBO light heavyweight champion Sergey Kovalev, or even in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where he now resides. Like many American citizens who were born in these United States and never have lived anywhere else, and nationals from other countries who came here in search of a better life, he complains, half-jokingly, about the amount of taxes he has to pay as part of the price for the privilege of being here. But they say you can’t really know where you’re going unless you understand where you came from, and the 31-year-old Kovalev would do well to consider some of his predecessors from the old Soviet Union who arrived on these shores nearly a quarter-century ago hoping to find something that was unavailable to them in Russia and 11 additional republics that then comprised the USSR.

Kovalev (24-0-1, 22 KOs) is a professional world champion and an increasingly well-compensated one at that, and he’ll bank a nice paycheck for Saturday night’s HBO-televised defense against Australia’s Blake Caparello (19-0-1, 6 KOs) at the Revel Resort in Atlantic City, N.J. Should Kovalev, who recently received his green card as a permanent U.S. resident, win as expected, the hard-punching “Krusher from Russia” can expect to have an increasingly higher profile in the U.S. and internationally, not to mention financial compensation that once would been considered unimaginable in Chelyabinsk. A victory over Caparello – and he’s a solid favorite to do so, and probably inside the distance – could vault Kovalev into a unification showdown with 49-year-old legend Bernard Hopkins, the IBF/WBA champ who has called him out publicly.

“I would like to fight any champion in my division,” said Kovalev, a short list that also includes WBC titlist Adonis Stevenson. “If it is Hopkins, it is Hopkins. If it is different guy, it will be different guy.”

Most of the questions directed to Kovalev during a media session last week in New York City were about Hopkins, whom he might or might not fight, and Caparello. But none – and I blame myself for this oversight – referenced Viktor Egorov, Yuri Vaulin and Sergei Artemiev, who helped clear the path that allowed Kovalev to arrive at the position he now enjoys. Nor, for that matter, did anyone bring up Ivan Drago, the fictional Soviet heavyweight who threw down with Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa in 1985’s “Rocky IV,” or then-President Ronald Reagan’s notable depiction of the Soviet Union as the “Evil Empire.”

The current nasty business in Ukraine notwithstanding, maybe we really have come a long way, baby. Americans appreciate boxers, regardless of their country of origin, if they are sufficiently entertaining, and the higher the likelihood of someone delivering a spectacular knockout, the more willing U.S. fans are willing to accept them. It is a well of goodwill from which Kovalev draws, as is the case with Gennady Golovkin, the popular WBO/IBO middleweight ruler from Kazakhstan who defended those titles on a third-round stoppage of Australia’s Daniel Geale last weekend in Madison Square Garden.

So where does Kovalev like it better, Russia or Florida?

“In the future, I don’t know,” he said, smiling, of where he might spend his post-boxing life. “Right now, I like being in America. I like Russia, too. Wherever it will be better for my family, I will stay there.”

The world has changed, obviously, since children in the USSR were instructed that all Americans were selfish capitalists and kids in the U.S. were told all Russians and those in their satellite states were commie stooges bent on global domination. There is such a thing as Russian billionaires – one of them, Mikhail Prokhorov, owns the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets – and U.S. companies are thriving in the more open marketplace of Eastern Bloc countries. There is residual spying back and forth, of course, but people who were once on either side of the old philosophical divide no longer fret so much about some politician’s finger twitching on a nuclear launch button.

But ‘twas not always so. Americans of a certain age still remember the Cuban missile crisis, Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev banging his shoe on a desk at the United Nations and loudly telling everyone in the U.S. that “We will bury you!” It was easy then to tell the good guys from the bad guys, or so we thought, and every athletic confrontation involving individuals or teams representing the world’s two great superpowers wasn’t merely a sporting event. It was a referendum on the validity of Our Way of Life vs. Theirs.

Into this maelstrom of intrigue and mistrust came Egorov, Vaulin and Artemiev, who might be described as pioneers who wanted some of the same things that Kovalev and Golovkin now have, without having to shoulder the heavy burden of being seen as symbols of an omnipresent Red Peril. Do you recall maybe the most poignant line in the HBO-produced documentary, “Klitschko,” which shone a spotlight on Ukrainian brothers Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko, heavyweight champions who held the division in a vise-like grip? Vitali, reminiscing about his first trip to the U.S. as part of a Soviet youth kickboxing team, spoke with wonder of the seemingly endless options to be found in an American supermarket.

“There were so many kinds of cheeses!” said the now-retired Vitali, or words to that effect. In Ukraine, he continued, “We have one kind of cheese. We call it … cheese.”

Repressive and totalitarian societies offer few if any choices for so many things Americans have long taken for granted, not the least of which are freedom of movement and of commerce. In the environment in which Egorov, Vaulin and Artemiev were raised, you took what you were given or allowed to have. A lot of us in this country are familiar with tales of repressed peoples behind the Iron Curtain standing in long lines to receive items as basic as a roll of toilet paper, and Russian kids all but selling their souls to procure black-market jeans or rock ’n’ roll albums featuring American and British musicians.

Then the Berlin Wall was torn down, East and West Germany reunited, the cash-strapped Russkies all but throwing up their hands in surrender when The Gipper floated the notion of the U.S. developing a futuristic “Star Wars” missile defense system. The arms race basically was called off because we were too far ahead and too well-financed to be caught by the panting Soviet bear.

Now? Well, a lot of Americans fret, and rightfully so, about our $17.6 trillion debt, our sieve-like southern border, the polarization of our political process and any number of other issues of paramount national importance. But to others – including boxers from Eastern Bloc nations we once were so wary of – this is still the land of opportunity, and the place where dreams are made.

Even though the Soviet Union officially was dissolved on Dec. 26, 1991, remember the climate that still existed when a pair of Russians, Egorov, a middleweight, and Artemiev, a lightweight, and a Latvian, Vaulin, a heavyweight, were brought to this country in 1990 by New York-based entrepreneur Lou Falcigno, to test the choppy waters of professional boxing.

What they found, perhaps not unexpectedly, were audiences more prepared to cast them as stereotypical villains than as hopeful but wary voyagers making their way toward an impending new reality. Such was the case Oct. 2, 1990, on a chilly night in Philadelphia, when the three Soviets appeared on the same card at one of America’s most iconic boxing clubs, the Blue Horizon. A capacity crowd of 1,500-plus, second-largest ever to jam into the old building to that point, came in no small part to vent its collective anger at the trio. And why not? It had been only five years since the lines of demarcation had been so starkly drawn in 1985’s “Rocky IV,” which pitted fictional Philly heavyweight Rocky Balboa against the seemingly invincible and remorseless Russian destroyer, Ivan Drago, who had beaten Apollo Creed to death in the ring with his gloved fists.

Vaulin and Artemiev won their bouts, the former on a split decision and the latter on a fifth-round stoppage, but Egorov was a TKO victim in the fourth round, an outcome that met with shouted approval from the vast majority of spectators.

Tommy Gallagher, the New York guy who trained all three Soviets, said Vaulin, in particular, was shaken by the hostile reception he received in Philly and other U.S. venues in which he sought to ply his trade. “He wants so much to be liked that when he heard that `USA! USA!’ stuff, he feels like a villain,” Gallagher said. “He has to be able to learn how to deal with that b.s., to block it out of his mind.”

With so much elapsed time from which to assess the impact of the players in Falcigno’s bold experiment, it is clear that Artemiev enjoyed the most success of the three men who fought in Philadelphia that night. He is also the most tragic figure, but the maybe the most inspiring one, standing as proof that maybe human beings are not so different after all.

Artemiev, a husband and father of an infant son, was paid $10,000 for his March 21, 1993, bout at the Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, N.J., against Carl Griffith, with the vacant USBA 135-pound title on the line. Had he won – and he was favored to do so – the likelihood is that Artemiev would have moved on to a matchup with WBC lightweight champion Miguel Angel Gonzalez three months later. But Artemiev was stopped in the 10^th round, absorbing so much punishment that he was rushed to a local hospital where he underwent a 4½-hour operation to alleviate the pressure of a brain bleed. He never fought again.

But the story, in its own way, has an upbeat ending. Artemiev, who was described by Gallagher as a person of “so much character” and “a real pleasure to work with,” never went back to St. Petersburg, Russia. He continues to live in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, N.Y., where his positive outlook remains a shining beacon of hope to everyone, regardless of nationality or political ideology.

“I’m alive and I have a son,” Artemiev told writer Robert Mladinich in 2006. “I used to cry about my damage, and that I not fight again. Sometimes I get angry. I’m not rich. But I’m alive, thinking and hoping, and I believe in God. As long as I have life, I have something to live for.”

Kovalev, by comparison, has had it easy. He is not accustomed to being booed in the U.S.; the Cold War thawed years ago, and he is the sort of turn-out-the-lights puncher for whom American fight fans have an affinity, regardless of where they come from, maybe because there are so few home-grown blasters to command their affection. It will be interesting to see how the audience is divided if and when the “Krusher” meets up with “The Alien,” Hopkins, who is 100 percent made in the USA but hasn’t scored a knockout in 10 years.

Until then, Kovalev has the peace of mind knowing that he can purchase all the designer jeans he wants and can load up his fridge with any cheese that suits his taste. Some would call that progress.

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Bernard Fernandez

Avila Perspective, Chap. 326: San Diego Smoke

Published

40 minutes ago

May 9, 2025

David A. Avila

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Years ago, I worked at a newsstand in the Beverly Hills area. It was a 24-hour a day version and the people that dropped by were very colorful and unique.

One elderly woman Eva, who bordered on homeless but pridefully wore lipstick, would stop by the newsstand weekly to purchase a pack of menthol cigarettes. On one occasion, she asked if I had ever been to San Diego?

I answered “yes, many times.”

She countered “you need to watch out for San Diego Smoke.”

This Saturday, Top Rank brings its brand of prizefighting to San Diego or what could be called San Diego Smoke. Leading the fight card is Mexico’s Emanuel Navarrete (39-2-1, 32 KOs) defending the WBO super feather title against undefeated Filipino Charly Suarez (18-0, 10 KOs) at Pechanga Arena. ESPN will televise.

This is Navarrete’s fourth defense of the super feather title.

The last time Navarrete stepped in the boxing ring he needed six rounds to dismantle the very capable Oscar Valdez in their rematch. One thing about Mexico City’s Navarrete is he always brings “the smoke.”

Also, on the same card is Fontana, California’s Raymond Muratalla (22-0, 17 KOs) vying for the interim IBF lightweight title against Russia’s Zaur Abdullaev (20-1, 12 KOs) on the co-main event.

Abdullaev has only fought once before in the USA and was handily defeated by Devin Haney back in 2019. But that was six years ago and since then he has knocked off various contenders.

Muratalla is a slick fighting lightweight who trains at the Robert Garcia Boxing Academy now in Moreno Valley, Calif. It’s a virtual boot camp with many of the top fighters on the West Coast available to spar on a daily basis. If you need someone bigger or smaller, stronger or faster someone can match those needs.

When you have that kind of preparation available, it’s tough to beat. Still, you have to fight the fight. You never know what can happen inside the prize ring.

Another fighter to watch is Perla Bazaldua, 19, a young and very talented female fighter out of the Los Angeles area. She is trained by Manny Robles who is building a small army of top female fighters.

Bazaldua (1-0, 1 KO) meets Mona Ward (0-1) in a super flyweight match on the preliminary portion of the Top Rank card. Top Rank does not sign many female fighters so you know that they believe in her talent.

Others on the San Diego fight card include Giovani Santillan, Andres Cortes, Albert Gonzalez, Sebastian Gonzalez and others.

They all will bring a lot of smoke to San Diego.

Probox TV

A strong card led by Erickson “The Hammer” Lubin (26-2, 18 KOs) facing Ardreal Holmes Jr. (17-0, 6 KOs) in a super welterweight clash between southpaws takes place on Saturday at Silver Spurs Arena in Kissimmee, Florida. PROBOX TV will stream the fight card.

Ardreal has rocketed up the standings and now faces veteran Lubin whose only losses came against world titlists Sebastian Fundora and Jermell Charlo. It’s a great match to decide who deserves a world title fight next.

Another juicy match pits Argentina’s Nazarena Romero (14-0-2) against Mexico’s Mayelli Flores (12-1-1) in a female super bantamweight contest.

Nottingham, England

Anthony Cacace (23-1, 8 KOs) defends the IBO super featherweight title against Leigh Wood (28-3, 17 KOs) in Wood’s hometown on Saturday at Nottingham Arena in Nottingham, England. DAZN will stream the Queensberry Promotions card.

Ireland’s Cacace seems to have the odds against him. But he is no stranger to dancing in the enemy’s lair or on foreign territory. He formerly defeated Josh Warrington in London and Joe Cordina in Riyadh in IBO title defenses.

Lampley at Wild Card

Boxing telecaster Jim Lampley will be signing his new book It Happened! at the Wild Card Boxing gym in Hollywood, Calif. on Saturday, May 10, beginning at 2 p.m. Lampley has been a large part of many of the greatest boxing events in the past 40 years. He and Freddie Roach will be at the signing.

Fights to Watch (All times Pacific Time)

Sat. DAZN 11 a.m. Anthony Cacace (23-1) vs Leigh Wood (28-3).

Sat. PROBOX.tv 3 p.m. Erickson Lubin (26-2) vs Ardreal Holmes Jr. (17-0).

Sat. ESPN 7 p.m. Emanuel Navarrete (39-2-1) vs Charly Suarez (18-0); Raymond Muratalla (22-0) vs Zaur Abdullaev (20-1).

Photo credit: Mikey Williams / Top Rank

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“Breadman” Edwards: An Unlikely Boxing Coach with a Panoramic View of the Sport

Published

20 hours ago

May 8, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Stephen-Breadman-Edwards-An-Unlikely-Boxing-Coach-with-a-Panoramic-View-of-the-Sport

Stephen “Breadman” Edwards’ first fighter won a world title. That may be some sort of record.

It’s true. Edwards had never trained a fighter, amateur or pro, before taking on professional novice Julian “J Rock” Williams. On May 11, 2019, Williams wrested the IBF 154-pound world title from Jarrett Hurd. The bout, a lusty skirmish, was in Fairfax, Virginia, near Hurd’s hometown in Maryland, and the previously undefeated Hurd had the crowd in his corner.

In boxing, Stephen Edwards wears two hats. He has a growing reputation as a boxing coach, a hat he will wear on Saturday, May 31, at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas when the two fighters that he currently trains, super middleweight Caleb Plant and middleweight Kyrone Davis, display their wares on a show that will air on Amazon Prime Video. Plant, who needs no introduction, figures to have little trouble with his foe in a match conceived as an appetizer to a showdown with Jermall Charlo. Davis, coming off his career-best win, an upset of previously undefeated Elijah Garcia, is in tough against fast-rising Cuban prospect Yoenli Hernandez, a former world amateur champion.

Edwards’ other hat is that of a journalist. His byline appears at “Boxing Scene” in a column where he answers questions from readers.

It’s an eclectic bag of questions that Breadman addresses, ranging from his thoughts on an upcoming fight to his thoughts on one of the legendary prizefighters of olden days. Boxing fans, more so than fans of any other sport, enjoy hashing over fantasy fights between great fighters of different eras. Breadman is very good at this, which isn’t to suggest that his opinions are gospel, merely that he always has something provocative to add to the discourse. Like all good historians, he recognizes that the best history is revisionist history.

“Fighters are constantly mislabled,” he says. “Everyone talks about Joe Louis’s right hand. But if you study him you see that his left hook is every bit as good as his right hand and it’s more sneaky in terms of shock value when it lands.”

Stephen “Breadman” Edwards was born and raised in Philadelphia. His father died when he was three. His maternal grandfather, a Korean War veteran, filled the void. The man was a big boxing fan and the two would watch the fights together on the family television.

Edwards’ nickname dates to his early teen years when he was one of the best basketball players in his neighborhood. The derivation is the 1975 movie “Cornbread, Earl and Me,” starring Laurence Fishburne in his big screen debut. Future NBA All-Star Jamaal Wilkes, fresh out of UCLA, plays Cornbread, a standout high school basketball player who is mistakenly murdered by the police.

Coming out of high school, Breadman had to choose between an academic scholarship at Temple or an athletic scholarship at nearby Lincoln University. He chose the former, intending to major in criminal justice, but didn’t stay in college long. What followed were a succession of jobs including a stint as a city bus driver. To stay fit, he took to working out at the James Shuler Memorial Gym where he sparred with some of the regulars, but he never boxed competitively.

Over the years, Philadelphia has harbored some great boxing coaches. Among those of recent vintage, the names George Benton, Bouie Fisher, Nazeem Richardson, and Bozy Ennis come quickly to mind. Breadman names Richardson and West Coast trainer Virgil Hunter as the men that have influenced him the most.

We are all a product of our times, so it’s no surprise that the best decade of boxing, in Breadman’s estimation, was the 1980s. This was the era of the “Four Kings” with Sugar Ray Leonard arguably standing tallest.

Breadman was a big fan of Leonard and of Leonard’s three-time rival Roberto Duran. “I once purchased a DVD that had all of Roberto Duran’s title defenses on it,” says Edwards. “This was a back before the days of YouTube.”

But Edwards’ interest in the sport goes back much deeper than the 1980s. He recently weighed in on the “Pittsburgh Windmill” Harry Greb whose legend has grown in recent years to the point that some have come to place him above Sugar Ray Robinson on the list of the greatest of all time.

“Greb was a great fighter with a terrific resume, of that there is no doubt,” says Breadman, “but there is no video of him and no one alive ever saw him fight, so where does this train of thought come from?”

Edwards notes that in Harry Greb’s heyday, he wasn’t talked about in the papers as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the sport. The boxing writers were partial to Benny Leonard who drew comparisons to the venerated Joe Gans.

Among active fighters, Breadman reserves his highest praise for Terence Crawford. “Body punching is a lost art,” he once wrote. “[Crawford] is a great body puncher who starts his knockouts with body punches, but those punches are so subtle they are not fully appreciated.”

If the opening line holds up, Crawford will enter the ring as the underdog when he opposes Canelo Alvarez in September. Crawford, who will enter the ring a few weeks shy of his 38^th birthday, is actually the older fighter, older than Canelo by almost three full years (it doesn’t seem that way since the Mexican redhead has been in the public eye so much longer), and will theoretically be rusty as 13 months will have elapsed since his most recent fight.

Breadman discounts those variables. “Terence is older,” he says, “but has less wear and tear and never looks rusty after a long layoff.” That Crawford will win he has no doubt, an opinion he tweaked after Canelo’s performance against William Scull: “Canelo’s legs are not the same. Bud may even stop him now.”

Edwards has been with Caleb Plant for Plant’s last three fights. Their first collaboration produced a Knockout of the Year candidate. With one ferocious left hook, Plant sent Anthony Dirrell to dreamland. What followed were a 12-round setback to David Benavidez and a ninth-round stoppage of Trevor McCumby.

Breadman keeps a hectic schedule. From Monday through Friday, he’s at the DLX Gym in Las Vegas coaching Caleb Plant and Kyrone Davis. On weekends, he’s back in Philadelphia, checking in on his investment properties and, of greater importance, watching his kids play sports. His 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son are standout all-around athletes.

On those long flights, he has plenty of time to turn on his laptop and stream old fights or perhaps work on his next article. That’s assuming he can stay awake.

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Arne’s Almanac: The Good, the Bad, and the (Mostly) Ugly; a Weekend Boxing Recap and More

Published

3 days ago

May 6, 2025

Arne K. Lang

Arne's-Almanac-The-Good-the-Bad-and-the-(mostly)-Ugly-A-Weeend-Boxing-Recap-and-More

Arne’s Almanac: The Good, the Bad, and the (Mostly) Ugly; a Weekend Boxing Recap and More

It’s old news now, but on back-to-back nights on the first weekend of May, there were three fights that finished in the top six snoozefests ever as measured by punch activity. That’s according to CompuBox which has been around for 40 years.

In Times Square, the boxing match between Devin Haney and Jose Carlos Ramirez had the fifth-fewest number of punches thrown, but the main event, Ryan Garcia vs. Rolly Romero, was even more of a snoozefest, landing in third place on this ignoble list.

Those standings would be revised the next night – knocked down a peg when Canelo Alvarez and William Scull combined to throw a historically low 445 punches in their match in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 152 by the victorious Canelo who at least pressed the action, unlike Scull (pictured) whose effort reminded this reporter of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” – no, not the movie starring Paul Newman, just the title.

CompuBox numbers, it says here, are best understood as approximations, but no amount of rejiggering can alter the fact that these three fights were stinkers. Making matters worse, these were pay-per-views. If one had bundled the two events, rather than buying each separately, one would have been out $90 bucks.

****

Thankfully, the Sunday card on ESPN from Las Vegas was redemptive. It was just what the sport needed at this moment – entertaining fights to expunge some of the bad odor. In the main go, Naoya Inoue showed why he trails only Shohei Ohtani as the most revered athlete in Japan.

Throughout history, the baby-faced assassin has been a boxing promoter’s dream. It’s no coincidence that down through the ages the most common nickname for a fighter – and by an overwhelming margin — is “Kid.”

And that partly explains Naoya Inoue’s charisma. The guy is 32 years old, but here in America he could pass for 17.

Joey Archer

Joey Archer, who passed away last week at age 87 in Rensselaer, New York, was one of the last links to an era of boxing identified with the nationally televised Friday Night Fights at Madison Square Garden.

Joey Archer

Archer made his debut as an MSG headliner on Feb. 4, 1961, and had 12 more fights at the iconic mid-Manhattan sock palace over the next six years. The final two were world title fights with defending middleweight champion Emile Griffith.

Archer etched his name in the history books in November of 1965 in Pittsburgh where he won a comfortable 10-round decision over Sugar Ray Robinson, sending the greatest fighter of all time into retirement. (At age 45, Robinson was then far past his peak.)

Born and raised in the Bronx, Joey Archer was a cutie; a clever counter-puncher recognized for his defense and ultimately for his granite chin. His style was embedded in his DNA and reinforced by his mentors.

Early in his career, Archer was domiciled in Houston where he was handled by veteran trainer Bill Gore who was then working with world lightweight champion Joe Brown. Gore would ride into the Hall of Fame on the coattails of his most famous fighter, “Will-o’-the Wisp” Willie Pep. If Joey Archer had any thoughts of becoming a banger, Bill Gore would have disabused him of that notion.

In all honesty, Archer’s style would have been box office poison if he had been black. It helped immensely that he was a native New Yorker of Irish stock, albeit the Irish angle didn’t have as much pull as it had several decades earlier. But that observation may not be fair to Archer who was bypassed twice for world title fights after upsetting Hurricane Carter and Dick Tiger.

When he finally caught up with Emile Griffith, the former hat maker wasn’t quite the fighter he had been a few years earlier but Griffith, a two-time Fighter of the Year by The Ring magazine and the BWAA and a future first ballot Hall of Famer, was still a hard nut to crack.

Archer went 30 rounds with Griffith, losing two relatively tight decisions and then, although not quite 30 years old, called it quits. He finished 45-4 with 8 KOs and was reportedly never knocked down, yet alone stopped, while answering the bell for 365 rounds. In retirement, he ran two popular taverns with his older brother Jimmy Archer, a former boxer who was Joey’s trainer and manager late in Joey’s career.

May he rest in peace.

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