Of Soviets and athletes

By Bart Barry–

SAN ANTONIO – If you’re reading this column, it is highly probable you watched on HBO Russian Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev’s Saturday reduction of Jean Pascal from a ferocious spectacle of athleticism to a man stumbling across the canvas like an enthusiastic toddler determined to crawl no longer. There’s also a fair chance you watched Thursday’s HBO Latino undercard, one that featured Ukrainian Vyacheslav Shabranskyy violently dismantling Fabiano Pena, in this city’s Freeman Coliseum.

The matches had a symmetry that was unmissable: The fighter initially taught by men raised in the Soviet system threw with better precision and more proper conviction every punch in the boxing lexicon than the more-athletic man across from him. Both Pascal and Pena were undone methodically – right cross to the head, left hook to the body, right uppercut to the head, right hook to the body, left hook to the head, left jab to the head, left jab to the body, right cross to the head – with attacks that predicted their targets’ movements in a way the targets could not hope to predict their attackers’, and both Pascal and Pena reacted the same way: launching blind haymakers that did little but intensify the luridity of the beatings they were to receive.

Shabranskyy caused Pena to quit on his stool after five rounds. Kovalev made decent men ask how Pascal was allowed from his stool for the eighth.

There is a stiff-leggedness to the attack of fighters taught by men raised in the Soviet system, and it makes them temporarily vulnerable when attacking more-athletic prizefighters. It is why former-Soviet fighters pulverize opponents, grinding their wills like pepper across the ring’s blue leaf, rather than blitzing them and bringing unconsciousness in a lone punch.

For all the hyperbole that attends Kazakh Gennady Golovkin’s knockout ratio – one part quality of opposition for every two parts quality of punching – Golovkin is nothing like Mike Tyson was. Golovkin’s knockouts are pulverizations, not detonations. Sergey Kovalev’s knockouts come the same way, and if the day ever comes Golovkin confronts an opponent even half as good as a 49-year-old Bernard Hopkins, one like Andre Ward, expect no knockout victories for GGG.

The Soviet system, though created for amateur events, relies on deriving power nearly as much from the motion of another man’s body as the torque from one’s own punches. What is now noted with increased frequency is that Kovalev punches on-time more than hard; he runs you into punches and sets his knuckles on you at the very moment they will devastate most. Almost nothing like this is taught in American boxing.

The American style is one that hopes to reduce an opponent to a heavybag, somehow, on which combinations may be exhibited. It is a style with fewer dimensions than the Soviet system’s, in part because it is a style that relies more heavily on athleticism. What makes Americans like Bernard Hopkins or Floyd Mayweather or Andre Ward great as they are is not their athleticism but a transitional capacity, defense to offense, that is a product of diverting themselves for thousands of hours across from men they were able to solve and create upon, and that they had creative impulses, much more than a product of great teaching (the reason their teachers never manage to build, from scratch, similar successes – at least with nothing like the frequency of, say, Mexican Nacho Beristain).

There is an excellent ESPN documentary, “30 for 30: Of Miracles and Men,” recently released to Netflix and treating the Soviet hockey team that lost to Team USA in 1980, and the extraordinary approach to hockey the Soviets created in an incredibly short time. Just as the Soviet boxing approach relied on an opponent’s improvement of one’s punches, the Soviet hockey system fixated on the activities of the four men who did not have the puck, not the one who did. The Soviets took hockey, most selfless of North American professional sports, and without even knowing quite how North Americans played the game, created a transcendent form of selflessness – with an obvious assist from communism – in which every man on the ice felt as much euphoria at the scoring of a goal as the man from whose stick the puck was shot.

Such a holistic approach is not possible in a contract system that pays every player according to his individual contributions – it’s why your eyes roll when an athlete sets a career mark for points or home runs or touchdowns and then risibly tells the camera getting a win in game 9 of the nearly endless season was more important to him – because, to borrow from Vince Lombardi, if individual achievement isn’t everything in professional sports, why keep stats? With players signed to non-negotiable 25-year contracts in a system that would banish a sports agent to the gulag, the Soviets were able to create a system in which the team organism provided not just sustenance to its components but also identity.

This system, of course, suffocated its participants, too, and appears more romantic to a Western individual today, probably, than any survivor of the Soviet system in Eastern Europe – but it remains nevertheless instructive as an alternate approach to a somewhat calcified system. Certainly the NHL game, once a forum that emphasized the imposition of one’s will, with slapshots and physicality, more than finesse, with crisp passing and offensive intricacy, looks considerably more Soviet in 2015, a quarter-century after the Soviet Union’s collapse, than it did in 1975.

It is worth pondering, then, if the recent success of former-Soviet fighters – and its brazen promotion by HBO – will not help American boxing improve from its current emphasis on conditioning and athleticism to a more-holistic emphasis on melding enough with one’s opponent to make him a co-conspirator in his own demise – in a way better captured by the verb to swirl than to disrupt.

Bart Barry can be reached via Twitter @bartbarry