By Mitch Abramson
Photo © Pete Frutkoff/FightWireImages.com
What motivates Pawel Wolak? He is a college graduate; has work-related managerial experience and hopes to one day work in law enforcement.
And yet he fights as if he has nothing else to fall back on, as if this is it: Boxing or bust.
If I don’t make it here, it’s like, hello to delivering pizzas.
Wolak, a 21-1 junior middleweight who will face Chad Greenleaf at the Huntington Hilton in Long Island on Friday, has an aggressive style that borders on recklessness.
While most fighters are discerning about how many punches they throw so as not to tire out, Wolak tosses everything but the kitchen sink.
While most fighters try to maintain a certain distance to their opponents, Wolak practically runs at them.
If they go left, so does Wolak. If they come forward, he goes forward.
Wolak’s strategy is simple: he suffocates you, wears you down and tries to break you physically and mentally.
It’s a crowd-pleasing style that has endeared him to fans, and made him one of the more intriguing young fighters in the sport.
“I feel safer on the inside,” he said after a training session at Gleason’s Gym in Brooklyn. “I noticed that when I pulled back and tried to box on the outside that I got hit a lot more, so I stay on the inside where I feel comfortable, where I feel better. Being on the inside, I can kind of feel where my opponent is going and what he’s going to do. It just feels right.”
So there was Wolak, 26, hurling bombs at Chris Algieri, a 3-0 pro from Long Island last Friday during his final all-out sparring session before his return-fight on Friday.
Algieri (who will face Clarence Smith on the same card on Friday) and Wolak were going at it as if they were settling a personal grudge.
Wolak was dishing it out, but he was also absorbing quite a few punches. Still, it was obvious that Wolak was trying to add some new wrinkles to his repertoire, dipping and punching off angles and moving his head and not just wading into punches, as he had against Smith.
The mandate following his first career loss to Ishe Smith on Aug. 1 at the Aviator Arena in Brooklyn was that he would have to become more resourceful.
Against Smith, Wolak revealed himself to be a mostly one dimensional fighter. He applied pressure, but didn’t always throw punches, and Smith won rounds by simply slipping and countering and punching when Wolak wasn’t and what was supposed to be a springboard into the national consciousness with his first win against a world class fighter turned into a referendum on Wolak’s boxing style.
Could he operate on a championship level using that smothering, all-or-nothing approach?
Wolak believes he can, and with the help of new trainer Don Saxby, who took over for Patrick Ford, the two are working on making the necessary adjustments to becoming a force in the division. First, he has to get past Greenleaf, who has lost four of his last five fights.
“I feel good coming into this fight,” said Wolak, who was born in Debica, Poland but now lives in New Jersey. “The loss put things into perspective. It was a wake-up call and it shows that I’m still evolving as a fighter and that I still have to work on things. I’ve picked up some tricks since then. Physically, I feel strong. It’s just about being smarter and coming in behind the jab.”
Ah, the jab. It’s a simple punch, defined by wikipedia as: “One of the four main punches used in boxing…many consider the jab to be the most important punch in boxing.”
It certainly seemed important to Saxby, who leaned against the ropes and implored Wolak to use the jab over and over in the sparring session with Algieri.
“We’re trying to teach Pawel angles,” Saxby said. “We don’t want to change his style. We want him to remain aggressive. We just want him to start using a nice stiff jab, then step around and drop four or five bombs on the guy. He can’t just stand in front of the guy anymore. He has to slip, use angles, get crafty in there.”
Saxby, along with Delen “Blimp” Parsley, who is assisting with training duties, wants to get Wolak back to the point where he was throwing 300 punches a round in sparring, which Saxby said he did earlier in his career.
“His punch-output has gone down,” said Saxby, who was the head trainer early on in Wolak’s career but stepped aside in favor of Ford. “We have to go back to what he used to do, when he used to use the jab more. We don’t want him to square up. He gets hit a lot because of his aggressive style. We need him to slide his feet and to start sitting down on his punches because he does have power, and we have to get him to stop waiting and to punch.”
Saxby, 45, who had ten fights as a professional and also trains Ali Oubaali, a 22-3 junior welterweight, believes that Smith was tired after the third round and that Wolak might have worn him down if he had been busier.
It’s because of his constant pressure that many of his fans thought he won the fight, though Saxby was frank with his fighter when it was over, telling him that it had been close but that Smith had gotten the edge.
Wolak appreciated the honesty and took the criticism to heart with an eye on getting better.
So back to the question of what motivates Wolak, who had around 50 fights in the amateurs and made the finals of the New York Golden Gloves twice in 2001-2002.
His career arc is undoubtedly unlike that of most top boxers. Wolak graduated from Berkeley College in midtown Manhattan in 2004 with a degree in business. He turned professional in July of that year, stopping John Santiago in the second round. At the same time he was boxing, he was working full-time as a supervisor for his uncle, a jewelry manufacturer. Wolak has not signed with a promoter, though he has fought for Bob Duffy, Friday’s promoter, eight times.
He is educated, thoughtful, and has designs on one day working in law enforcement. So why box?
“I want to beat everybody, I want to be a champion,” he said. “I have a lot of people that are investing in me and supporting me and I don’t want to let them down.”
He never intended on leading the life of a prizefighter, but he didn’t want to work in an office, either. As the wins piled up, the more confident he grew in his ability to fight.
“It was a snowball effect,” he said. “I started winning, and everything started rolling in the right direction. After each couple of wins my goals grew and grew and now my goal is to be a world champion.”
One of the more crucial members of Wolak’s team is Farrel Brenner, his strength and conditioning coach, who is responsible for making sure Wolak can maintain his punishing and exhaustive pace. Brenner, who is with Wolak in all stages of his training, took the loss against Smith particularly hard.
“I’m in this to win it just like Pawel,” said Brenner. “I want to win a championship, too. After that loss, I couldn’t work for a week. I had to get over it. It was my first loss, too, and it was tough. At the same time, I thought the loss was good in a way because it exposed some of his weaknesses, and showed what we have to work on, and I think it will make him better in the future.”
Wolak also has an attentive manager in Ivan Edwards, who fought as a light heavyweight in the 90’s, going 1-4 amidst complaints made by him that his career was mismanaged. Edwards is making sure that Wolak doesn’t run into the same problems. He wants a rematch with Smith, and believes that if Wolak faces the right type of opposition and is guided correctly, that he can be a world champion.
“This game is about timing,” Edwards said. “In this business, you don’t have to be great to be a champion. It’s a matter of getting the right matches and it’s a matter of getting the right fight at the right time. I think Pawel has what it takes to be a champion. He’s relentless. He’s always in great shape, and he wants the respect of being a great fighter. He’s not going to stop working until he gets to that point.”
Mitch Abramson covers boxing for the New York Daily News. Any advice or comments can be directed to mitchaaaa@aol.com .