Lighting Sergey Kovalev’s Path to All-Time Greatness

It is a dream lineup; and though dreams don’t always come true, if the schedule manager Egis Klimas envisions for Sergey Kovalev the remainder of this calendar year pans out and Kovalev continues to win in dominating fashion, the balloting for the 2016 “Fighter of the Year” will be much more of a foregone conclusion than the U.S. presidential election figures to be.

A few days prior to Kovalev’s epic -- and intentionally prolonged -- beatdown of former WBC light heavyweight champion Jean Pascal in their rematch on Saturday, Klimas said he wanted his Russian destroyer, who holds the IBF, WBA and WBO titles, to follow up with a full-unification matchup with WBC/lineal champ Adonis Stevenson. He then desires a clear-the-decks showdown with former super middleweight champion Andre Ward, who has moved up to the now-loaded 175-pound weight class and, by the way, hasn’t lost a boxing match since he was 12 years old.

If Kovalev (29-0-1, 26 KOs) were to sweep past Stevenson (27-1, 22 KOs) and Ward (28-0, 16 KOs) before year’s end now that he’s forever put Pascal (30-4-1, 17 KOs) in his rearview mirror?

“We’d be talking not just ‘Fighter of the Year’ but the pound-for-pound No. 1 guy,” Klimas said, a projection that seemed a bit more likely after Kovalev tortured the unfortunate Pascal until the Haitian-born Canadian citizen’s new trainer, Freddie Roach, mercifully ran up the white flag after the seventh round. “But [we] need to bring that to reality and we’re ready for it. We want to go.”

The biggest possible snag to Kovalev being afforded the opportunity to cash in on that trifecta is Stevenson, who is a Showtime fighter. Kovalev is under contract to HBO, which televised his almost casual disassembly of Pascal at the Bell Centre in Montreal.

“Adonis Stevenson would have to cross a political dividing line in order to fight Sergey Kovalev, as long as Kovalev has the contract he currently has with this network,” HBO play-by-play announcer Jim Lampley said during the postmortems on Kovalev-Pascal 2. “Stevenson within the past few weeks seems to have made clear that he’s still not ready to cross that line and therefore not really willing to sign a contract to fight Sergey Kovalev.”

Then again, maybe that dividing line isn’t as high, wide and insurmountable as has long been surmised. When asked who he would like to fight next, Kovalev, in his heavily accented English, said, “I want to unify all four titles. I would like to fight Adonis `Chickenson.’” Almost on cue, Stevenson, who was sitting at ringside, stormed into the ring and made a staged attempt at trying to get at Kovalev while screaming, “I am the champ! I am the real champ!”

“It was all show,” color analyst Bernard Hopkins said, and that very well might have been the case. After winning for the 12th time in his last 13 bouts by knockout or stoppage -- the lone exception was Kovalev’s 12-round unanimous decision over a then-49-year-old Hopkins on Nov. 8, 2014, which mostly shows just how superb Hopkins has been in his professional dotage -- Kovalev likely has frightened off several highly ranked contenders who value their health more than a decent payday and a shot at his titles. Still, Klimas believes, or at least wants to believe, that a solution can be found to the Stevenson conundrum.

“I think Stevenson would like to fight Sergey,” Klimas said. “He is not scared, but the politics in boxing today … this one wants this, the other one wants that. That is where the problem is. HBO is holding a date in June for us at Madison Square Garden or the MGM in Vegas, but we have a short time to close the deal. If it’s not going to happen, if we don’t see a signed contract from Stevenson, then we have to move forward, and our next fight likely will be in Russia.”

If the negotiations for a Kovalev-Stevenson unification bout fall through, if indeed there are any, the opponent for Kovalev’s second leg of his three-part 2016 journey to superstardom likely would be fellow Russian Artur Beterbiev (9-0, 9 KOs). His relatively thin pro resume notwithstanding, Beterbiev is ranked in the top 10 of all four major sanctioning bodies and as high as No. 2 by both the IBF and WBO. A Pascal-Beterbiev-Ward sweep also would make Kovalev the likely favorite to be selected as the “Fighter of the Year” -- a distinction denied Kovalev in 2014, when he finished a close second in the Boxing Writers Association of America balloting behind Terence Crawford.

However, Kovalev is shattering certain barriers in any case. The Ring magazine, which almost always has recognized the lineal champion in any weight class as the “real” champ, now lists the light heavyweight title as vacant but has installed Kovalev at No. 1, with Stevenson at No. 2. It is one more step toward the unquestioned acceptance of what most people already believe: The 32-year-old Kovalev is the main man at light heavyweight and positioning himself to possibly enter the conversation of the finest 175-pound fighters of all-time. A few more years of his scorched-earth domination of the division and you’ll start hearing conversations of how he might fare, prime-on-prime, against such all-timers as Ezzard Charles, Archie Moore, Michael Spinks and Bob Foster.

It has been a remarkable journey, not only for Kovalev but for Klimas, whose efforts to bring Kovalev to the attention of America promoters -- he is now the star of Kathy Duva’s Main Events roster -- met with initial resistance. Even as Kovalev was demonstrating that he was really, really good, audiences in the United States and some points beyond were a bit slow to take notice.

“Don’t forget, he has been willing to go on the road and give everything away,” KIimas said. “We went to England (actually, Cardiff, Wales) to fight for WBO title for $100,000 [in a fourth-round dethronement of Nathan Cleverly]. He would have title fights for $250,000 or $400,000, not crazy, crazy money. When we fought Hopkins, we took [the short end of the] 65-35 split, but Sergey didn’t care that time about the money. He cared about winning and showing what he could do. Who else is like that? Floyd Mayweather [is] making $300 million. You think $100,000 is big money to him? He probably pays that much to have somebody wash his car.”

Kovalev is not prepared to begin making the sort of outrageous financial demands his heightening profile might prompt. The trick is to get the right guys into the ring first, even if you give up something at the bargaining table, because if you win, the big bucks will necessarily begin to flow like water over Niagara Falls thereafter.

“We make all the offers,” Klimas said. “We don’t say, ‘Sergey has three belts, Stevenson has one, so why don’t we split the 100 percent into 75 percent for us and 25 percent for him?’ We say, ‘No problem, we do 50-50. Is that a fair enough deal?’”

It depends on how much highly ranked guys at light heavyweight are willing accept to absorb the sort of pummeling Pascal endured, and indications are that not everyone is eager to explore the limits of their tolerance for pain.

“In 2010, the light heavyweight division was almost dead,” Klimas said. “You had Chad Dawson [and] Tavoris Cloud. Hopkins wasn’t that interested then in making the big bouts. Then we came with Sergey and tried to get his foot in the door with the promoters. We kept being told, ‘Well, that weight class is not interesting.’ It is interesting now. I truly believe Sergey took a huge step [toward revitalizing] the division. Because of him, that weight class began climbing up.

“Right now, I don’t want to speculate on who may be avoiding him, but things have gotten to the point where these guys have to know that by fighting Sergey Kovalev they can make money and get a lot of attention,” he added. “Even if they lose, it’s not a big deal because they lost to a good fighter, the best fighter.”

Try telling that to Pascal, who was more competitive in his first fight with Pascal, an eighth-round TKO loss on March 14. Pascal had daringly and perhaps foolishly waved a red cape in the face of the Russian bull in the weeks leading up to the rematch, accusing him of being a racist, as well as a poor draw who has to travel to his opponents’ backyards to avoid the embarrassment of fighting before mostly empty seats. It was, in retrospect, a most unwise decision.

“There is only one star in this fight, and it isn’t Sergey Kovalev,” said Pascal, who had fired his longtime trainer, Marc Ramsey, and brought in seven-time BWAA “Trainer of the Year” Roach to aid his bid to demonstrate that Kovalev isn’t as big and bad as advertised. “When he fought in Vegas on July 25 [and scored a third-round knockout over Nadjib Mohammedi], it became obvious that Kovalev sells like sand in the desert. He didn’t even sell a thousand tickets, so we all know the reason he’s coming back to Montreal is because I’m the only way he can make money. He likes to say that he goes to other people’s hometowns to ruin them in front of their fans, but that’s a lie. He likes to go to other people’s backyards because he has no hometown of his own.”

Kovalev was all too eager to respond.

“Pascal is a trash-talker,” he said. “I don’t care what he says because it’s just trash from his mouth. He will pay for this in the ring, believe me. It is now a more personal fight.”

It was a threat but also a promise. When Pascal showed up for the weigh-in with a beard that was only a few days’ growth short of cast membership on “Duck Dynasty,” Harold Lederman, HBO’s unofficial judge, advised Duva that the challenger’s whiskers were so thick as to be against the rules and would need to be trimmed to an acceptable length. Duva passed that along to the commission, which made Pascal trim his beard. If Pascal thought the extra chin cushioning would afford him some protection against Kovalev’s big shots, he was mistaken. In fact, he might have hurt his own cause; Hopkins opined that the beard merely provided Kovalev with a more obvious target.

What followed was a case study in measured brutality, as Kovalev would batter Pascal to a point where it seemed likely referee Michael Griffin would have to jump in. Then the “Krusher” would back off, in no apparent rush to close the deal. Lampley compared his reticence to Muhammad Ali’s prolonged mistreatment of Floyd Patterson because Patterson had continued to refer to Ali as “Cassius Clay.” Had Kovalev really intended to toy with Pascal as a cat might with a doomed mouse?

“Yes,” he said. “I would fight more rounds and make him more pain. Punish him more.”

No wonder Stevenson seemingly was looking for someone to hold him back as he made his halfhearted attempt to get in Kovalev’s face; and if that fight ever does take place, it might be wise for Stevenson to keep any insults directed toward Kovalev to a minimum.

Bernard Fernandez, a five-term president of the Boxing Writers Association of America, received the Nat Fleischer Award from the BWAA in April 1999 for lifetime achievement and was inducted into the Pennsylvania Boxing Hall of Fame in 2005, as well as the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame in 2013. The New Orleans-born sports writer has worked in the industry since 1969 and pens a weekly column on the Sweet Science for Sherdog.com.