VALUEV NO CARNERA

by Ron Borges

Nikolai Valuev knew what they thought he was in those years before he found Wilfried Sauerland. Valuev believed he was a boxer, although he did not have even a rudimentary idea of what that meant except to fight on command when a bell sounded, but the men who made their money off his sweat and the blood that would trickle from his nose on the nights he plied his trade thought of him differently.

He was not a prize fighter to them. He was a circus act. A giant in shorts and leather mittens, 7 feet tall but moving with little athletic grace. They called him a boxer but they sold him like he was a freak show, as if he belonged beside the tattooed lady and the fortune teller, working the outermost ring of boxing's three-ring circus.

They sold him in tiny Russian arenas in St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk, and then around the world. They took his act to places such as Parramatta, Australia; Yokohama, Japan; Prague; Minsk; and even to Seoul.

"Step right up. Come and see the giant fight. Come one, come all. Watch Shrek box." They labeled him "The Beast from the East." He was packaged as cruelly as Primo Carnera once was, the sad-faced giant from Sequals, Italy who briefly held the heavyweight championship in the 1930s without glory or honor. But Valuev thought more of himself than the early people around him did. Somehow he kept winning in those days, beating nobodies with a pawing left jab, a powerful straight right when he could land it with full extension, and a massive body that so intimidated some of those early opponents, such as Alexei Osokin and Evgueni Odolski and George Linberger, that they fell over more from fright than from anything Valuev might do to them.

"Because of his size he was promoted as a sideshow act but I saw in him something different," Sauerland once said, when asked about why one of Germany's most powerful boxing promoters decided to waste time and money on someone as untutored as Valuev when he first signed him three years ago. "I believed with effort and better training he could become world champion."

Once Carnera had managed to win the same title, defeating Jack Sharkey in circumstances many at the time felt were, to be kind, mischievous. Sharkey always denied he'd taken a dive when he pitched face first to the canvas in the sixth round of their June 29, 1933 fight. Many years later he would insist, "Carnera knocked me out with as hard a punch as I ever took'' and even Carnera's slippery manager, Walter Freidman, argued the truth of that, claiming that blow was as legitimate as any his 6-5 3/4, 250-pound fighter ever landed.

Freidman was the front man for a racketeer named Bill Duffy and a contract killer named Owney Madden, who really directed Carnera's career, stole most of his money and, along with his first manager, Leon See, set up a string of shady victories to build him up as a circus strong man turned fighter who was ready and able to terrify the heavyweight division.

In fact, he was neither, which is the major difference between him and Valuev, who has improved with each fight and now holds the World Boxing Association version of the title with the intention of expanding on that portfolio if given the opportunity. That, however, was never the case for poor Primo.

"Yeah a lot of Primo's fights were what you might call mischievous but his title fight with Sharkey was on the level,'' Freidman once admitted. "When he connected properly with that right of his, it was curtains for whoever was on the receiving end.''

That turned out to be Sharkey but Carnera's time as a champion was short lived and so was his money. Carnera was paid the princely sum of $10,000 for the Sharkey fight but later it was revealed he only netted $200, the rest going to the unsavory characters around him.

Soon he would be embraced by Italy's fascist dictator Benito Mussolini and paraded around the country like livestock until, less than a year after winning the title, he lost it to Max Baer in as ghoulish a display of limited skills as one could imagine. That night at the Long Island Bowl, Carnera went down 11 times, falling once without even being hit after spraining his ankle. That led popular writer of the day Paul Gallico to later pen a lengthy profile of Carnera entitled, "Pity the Poor Giant.''

By 1935 Carnera was both the laughingstock of boxing and a broke and bitter man. What little money he'd made had been pilfered by the people around him and the tales of his involvement in fixed fights unbeknownst to him began to leak out in all directions, bringing him further ridicule. As Gallico wrote of Carnera, "He was a helpless lamb among wolves who used him until there was nothing more left to use...Never at any time could he fight a lick.''

Gallico called Carnera a "glandular freak' who was "horrible (to look at) until he commenced to fight, when he became merely pitiful.''

When Valuev first arrived on the scene he was seen in much the same fashion. He had never been a circus strongman, as Carnera was when he was first discovered in France by a former heavyweight fighter named Paul Journee in 1928 and soon after began fighting "cooperative'' opponents all over Europe without ever realizing he A) couldn't fight and B) had a chin made of porcelain. Those sad facts didn't come to his attention until Baer kept knocking him to the floor. It was a lesson re-emphasized in a sadly emphatic way by Joe Louis in 1935, who knocked him out in three rounds and left his face so battered the entire left side was a sea of white bandages when he emerged from his dressing room.

At one time Valuev was expected to be little more than another Carnera, albeit without the fixed fights. His size is freakish, even by today's towering heavyweight standards, and he suffers a pituitary gland malady that has caused his forehead to thicken and leave him a somewhat frightening looking man to view the first time you meet him.

But after winning 12 straight times since signing with Sauerland, Valuev comes into the ring on Oct. 7 to defend the WBA title from the challenge of Monte Barrett with elemental skill and an unblemished record of 44-0 with 32 knockouts. Promoter Don King has spent several weeks dragging the Russian around the country like a circus bear, announcing at each stop "The Giant is coming! The Giant is coming!''

Yet there is a difference between Carnera's story and Valuev's.

Carnera could never fight. Valuev appears to be learning, improving with each of his last three fights. This does not mean he will ever stand among the pantheon of great heavyweights like Louis, Dempsey or Ali but what it does point out is that the similarity in the two stories stops at the measuring tape and their troubled baptism in the sport.

Certainly Valuev won the title by virtue of a controversial decision, outpointing Ruiz in the opinion of the three judges at ringside and few others. Their's was an opinion not shared by many in sold-out Max Schmelling Halle and came only months after winning the right to face Ruiz by virtue of an equally disputed majority decision that October against the former American Olympian Larry Donald.

Donald is an aging but still slick boxer who made Valuev look bad at times. He made him look like the ungainly amateur he sometimes is when the opponent is uncooperative and moves a bit too quickly or a bit too often for the 7-foot, 324 1/2-pound Valuev's liking. But he didn't make him look like the kind of totally inept fighter Carnera appeared to be against Baer and Louis and because of that he was given an unlikely chance to live a dream he did not share with the people who first pushed him into smoky arenas at the age of 20, a former discus thrower convinced his fortune would be made with his fists even if his own promoters doubted it.

"I saw I had a better future in this sport," the monosyllabic Valuev said after the question of how he first got into the sport was translated from English to German to Russian and then back in the same tortured direction before the answer was delivered. Valuev's refusal to master German has irritated many of the country's highly nationalistic fight fans, yet he remains stoic about that and seemingly everything else.

In that he shares a resemblance to the monosyllabic Carnera but that is where the resemblance seems to end for he would tower over the Ambling Alp, as Carnera was once dubbed by Damon Runyon. Valuev stands over six inches taller than Carnera, would outweigh him by more than 60 pounds and by comparison is a far more skilled fighter, though still rough around the edges himself even on his best nights.

"I was making nothing in Russia to fight,'' Valuev admits. "Then I found Wilfried Sauerland. What I liked about him was he treated me seriously. Like a real boxer."

Ever since Valuev has tried to at least act like one, beating European champion, Paolo Vidoz, in nine rounds in a fight that first gave him and Sauerland hope that he was more than what some thought of him. More, even, than Carnera ever thought of being.

He so beat up an American journeyman named Gerald Nobles that Nobles got himself disqualified in four rounds for low blows. Valuev then went on to beat up a guy named Attila Levin and blew out American Clifford Etienne, a man who came to Bayreuth, Germany, with a formidable nickname, "The Black Rhino," but with none of the rhino's traits of speed and aggression. This Rhino, by all accounts, did well for two rounds then looked for a soft place to fall. He found it in Round 3 and that led Valuev into the improbable position of fighting the slick but often reluctant Donald for the mandatory position in the WBA ratings. It was a fight Sauerland acknowledges he didn't want, fearing Donald's athleticism would expose Valuev's weaknesses while leaving him few chances to exhibit a straight right hand that can do a lot of damage if it lands firmly on target.

Sauerland's fears were confirmed but it took Donald six rounds to figure that out. When he did he came on strong but he'd given away so many rounds he'd opened the door for the giant from St. Petersburg and when he walked through it he landed in the ring with Ruiz and accomplished something less people may have expected of him than they did of Carnera 73 years earlier. He won the heavyweight title with a jab that left Ruiz's face bruised and his nose bloody.

Although it's difficult to imagine at the moment with all four portions of the heavyweight title now held by either products of the former Soviet Union boxing machine or other Eastern European satellites of what was once the USSR, no Russian had ever won that title and only one, Alexander Zolkin, had even fought for it before Valuev opened the door for guys like reigning WBC champion Oleg Maskaev and WBO titleholder Sergei Liakhovich.

For all their success since, it is Nikolai Valuev who made history that night in Berlin last December. Regardless of how long he holds that title or what he does with it, unlike poor Primo it is a history that will not need to be re-written years from now when new evidence emerges about how it was achieved. While Primo Carnera seems clearly to have had a little help from his friends on his way to becoming an unlikely heavyweight champion, Nikolai Valuev had none of that.

He was never a circus act after all, even though he has been packaged and marketed like one both in his early days and even now as Don King parades him from coast-to-coast hollering "See the Giant! See the Giant!''

Come Oct. 7 American fight fans will see the giant for real on HBO. They won't see Ali or Louis in there when they do but they also won't see a sad stand-in for Primo Carnera, either. They'll see a giant of a man who because of his stature is difficult to hit and harder to hurt, a man with a jab, a straight right hand and a chance in these down days in the heavyweight division to give Goliaths everywhere something to cheer for.

That, in itself, is a lot more than Primo Carnera ever did.