Murad Khalidov didn’t let more than a decade outside the professional boxing ring stop him from knocking out Sergey Kuzmin in an all-Russian heavyweight clash in St. Petersburg on Monday night.
Khalidov last fought in February 2014, dipping into bare-knuckle boxing in the interim. Kuzmin was inactive, too, but had boxed as recently as July 2023. More importantly, Kuzmin had been tested by the sterner competition: though he lost to both, Kuzmin went the distance and won rounds against dangerous names like Martin Bakole and Michael Hunter.
You’d never have known any of it watching the fight.
Khalidov and Kuzmin, 37 and 38 years old respectively, fought at a blistering pace by heavyweight standards – and Khalidov consistently beat his countryman to the punch. In a violent seesaw affair, Khalidov at last broke down his opponent’s iron chin in the seventh round, sending him to the canvas with a fierce combination. The referee did not give a count, waving off the bout at the midway point of the stanza.
The first round offered a sign of things to come. Kuzmin landed thumping body shots with both hands. Khalidov fired back with an uppercut that jolted Kuzmin’s bald dome skyward. He looked the sprier, more active fighter early, but both men slammed home big enough shots that a knockout seemed inevitable regardless of victor.
Khalidov landed short, precise counters in the second round while Kuzmin looked to load up. Straight shots to Kuzmin’s breadbasket took a toll while Kuzmin’s wider haymakers landed glancingly. Already the attempted knockout punches seemed desperate.
Khalidov worked his left hook to the body in the third round, though Kuzmin responded in kind emphatically enough that Khalidov backed up and holstered his fists for a few seconds.
A sharp left from Khalidov at the end of the fourth caught Kuzmin coming in and sent him stumbling backward in surprise. He didn’t seem hurt, but pain wouldn’t be long in coming.
Khalidov rattled Kuzmin’s head with power shots of all varieties in the fifth. Kuzmin’s granite chin absorbed them all, leaving it no mystery how he went the distance with a murderous puncher like Bakole. Kuzmin launched a rally of his own later in the round and briefly looked on the verge of overwhelming a suddenly exhausted Khalidov.
But Khalidov recovered to land his cleanest shots of the fight in the sixth round, two point-blank right hands finally sufficient reason for Kuzmin to wobble in search of his legs. A smattering of blood droplets collected around Kuzmin’s right eye. During a break, he sagged back into the ropes, looking ready to go. He rallied once more late in the round but walked into a straight shot from Khalidov in the dying seconds and found himself hurt and covering up once more.
Khalidov continued the onslaught in Round 7, peppering Kuzmin with accurate power shots, every one of them hefty enough to drop a man with a lesser chin. A counter left hook hurt Kuzmin, who retreated to the ropes. Once there, Khalidov fired his closing combination, the ultimate straight right putting Kuzmin down and in a bad enough state for the referee to decide he’d seen enough.
Khalidov moves to 11-0 (6 KOs), while Kuzmin falls to 19-3 (14 KOs).
Further down the card, which featured IBA Pro fights, Vage Sarukhanyan outboxed Georgii Chelokhsaev over 10 rounds at 140lbs.
Chelokhsaev did his best Artur Beterbiev impression right down to the freakishly muscled back, relentlessly stalking Sarukhanyan to the outer reaches of the ring. Unlike Beterbiev, however, he often missed wildly, leaving himself open to counters in bunches.
Though he moved enough to draw musings from the broadcast team that he could run a marathon in under three hours, Sarukhanyan landed the cleaner shots – even when he tired late and had to stand and trade. He also avoided the worst of Chelokhsaev’s shots and took the ones that did land well enough to beg the question of why he moved so much in the first place.
Sarukhanyan moves to 22-4-2 (4 KOs) and Chelokhsaev falls to 24-3-1 (16 KOs).
In a meeting of IBA Pro debutants, Alexander Zyryanov stopped Khikmatillo Ulmasov in the fourth round. Zyryanov, 22, overwhelmed the 18-year-old Ulmasov, hurting him with a huge uppercut at the end of the third round and closing the show with a flurry 43 seconds into the fourth.
