Wladimir-Haye: Good vs. Bad or Bad Guy vs. Bad Guy?

By Terence Dooley

Bernd Boente’s claim that “We had [British] people shaking Wladimir’s hand and telling him to knock Haye out because they do not like him” has led to a bit of fight week soul searching amongst British boxing fans looking forward to this Saturday’s Wladimir Klitschko versus David Haye WBO, IBF, IBO and WBA heavyweight unification bonanza at the Imtech Arena, Hamburg.  Boente’s communiqué the latest in a long line of claim and counter claim ahead of the biggest heavyweight contest since Lennox Lewis met Mike Tyson in 2002.

Bernd’s declaration, however, provokes thoughts of the Bard, “The middleman doth protest too much”, and there seems little basis for Boente’s statement.  Consider, Britain is a small wind and rain swept island.  Our co-tenants are the Welsh and Scottish, we hate them and they hate us, and our neighbours are the Irish, we stereotype them, they hold us in contempt.  We read The Sun, The Daily Mail and Heat magazine, jingoistic rags not worth the paper they used to be written on.

The French live across the street, they are our gateway into Europe, our attitude to the Europeans is “Why should they be allowed to speak their language in their own country when we go over for our hols?” leading to the typical British reaction of yelling, “Do you serve fry ups and English breakfast tea”, at them in a bid to communicate our needs – hardly a people who are going to be turned off by a bit of outlandish pre-fight smack talk.

Why would the average British fan suddenly round on Haye?  Because he’s trash talked?  Yeah, they put up with the initial call outs, the decapitation t-shirts, the aborted 2009 meeting, an anodyne outing against John Ruiz and the Audley Harrison PPV stink bomb only to turn on Haye simply because he has had a pop at German food produce during fight week.  Get real.  Those who were behind Haye at the start – although now holding a newfound fondness for Wlad – will support him come fight night.

David Haye has consistently done one thing during the Klitschko saga – he has been Mr. David Haye.  As one person said to me, “He makes it hard to like him but he’s his own man and you have to respect that”.  Talking helped him get this fight by virtue of raising his profile and then putting him into a position to take Nikolay Valuev’s WBA belt in 2009. 

A few weeks ago the Londoner lowered his profile, canned the talk and what he got in return was forum threads alleging that his bottle had gone.  Now he is issuing more sound bites than a dying government and we are somehow led to believe that people will take a firm stance over his talk.  Pure nonsense.

Moreover, the idea that Wlad is ‘the good guy’ and Haye ‘the bad guy’, whilst fitting into our need to lazily compartmentalise our fighting idols, does not hold.  Wlad has played his own games with Haye. 

The Hamburg presser to officially announce the fight saw the 6’ 6½’’ Ukrainian adopt an approach that could be viewed as condescending, his offer to translate German into English for his guest coupled with questions as to whether Haye was Tweeting during the conference could be read as a subtle dig, “I hearken back to an age when people studied, read and learned languages, you epitomise a generation of people who can only express themselves in 250 characters or less.”

Indeed, the 35-year-old’s attempt to tell Haye where to stand during a photo session, to lead the presser and his insistence that Haye ‘shake the magic hand’ could have been put into play to force Haye into doing what he is told to do, placing the younger man in a subservient position that he would find hard to shake on the night.

En route to this contest Wlad signed on to fight Derek Chisora only to postpone and then ditch the engagement on medical advice, giving him the time and opportunity to make the Haye date – leaving Chisora with two aborted training camps and a handful of wasted months. 

No one is alleging that Wlad dropped the fight on purpose, but his decision to press on with Haye left at least one unhappy person in its wake and could be read as a sign that Wlad, like many fighters, is ruthless when it comes to getting what he wants.

Plus there is the small matter of what happens if Haye wins this one.  Vitali has been a constant presence during fight week; the older brother wanted to take care of David himself but has settled for a September 10th date with Tomasz Adamek at the Stadio Miejski in Poland. 

Should Haye win it is possible that Vitali may decide to nix the Adamek date due to the fact that the stadium is currently experiencing problems, there are fears that it may not be fit for purpose on time.  He may even pick up a niggling injury, producing a doctor’s note to push the contest back, recovering just in time to arrange and then honour an October date with Haye in order to avenge his brother.

Should this be the case questions such as ‘Why not just postpone the Adamek fight’ would be knocked aside by the Vitali-Haye hype train and fans would quickly lose sympathy for Adamek’s position.  Far fetched?  Not really, the brothers, like their British rival, are operators, selfish, successful athletes who will stop at nothing to get what they want and are at the top of their game due to this outlook. 

There is a lot to admire on both sides.  Neither Haye nor any fighter bearing the Klitschko name can be truly painted as hero or villain, there is a lot of grey when looking at the personalities involved in this fistic ménage à trois.

The fight itself bears out the idea that these guys are not doing this purely for the love of the sport.  It is a huge marquee event, putting boxing at the forefront of the popular imagination yet the undercard is terrible, a poor advertisement for boxing, a sign that the organisers know this will sell and did not feel the need for a tasty hors d'oeuvre.  Money has spun into this one, the majority of it will funnel into the pockets of the fighters and promoters rather than being lavished on an impressive bill.

Claims that the fight will bring a lasting equilibrium to the division are also fantastical.  As mentioned, only a Haye win would lead to the possibility of full unification via Vitali’s WBC belt.  A brace of ‘Hayemaker’ wins, Wlad and Vitali, would crown a consensus boss who would then retire and fragment the titles.  The Klitschkos will Hoover them up and then refuse to fight one another, quite rightly so, leaving the division in the state of inertia it found itself in prior to 2011.  A win for Wlad would result in more of the same, the two brothers bashing up fat Americans in front of capacity crowds.

So this is not the mission of mercy it is portrayed to be, it is a holding fight, a chance for a bit of wiggle room in a division that seems to be permanently moribund.  As for who is the good guy and who is the bad guy, Boente’s belief that Haye has gone too far even for his British fans aside, neither man has snuggled easily into a fixed role despite attempts to force these broad strokes on them.

Boxing is a contradictory sport in a hypocritical society.  Only in boxing could Mike Tyson find the impetus to reinvent himself as a cuddly mystic to the extent that the Hollywood stars of The Hangover II turned down a cameo from Mel Gibson due to his alleged assaults on his former mistress whilst embracing Mike, convicted of rape in 1992, although I still maintain that ‘Iron’ Mike was railroaded into jail on that occasion.

Fans have the same myopic, black and white perspective, a viewpoint which is not justified by the characters in the sport and which often goes into overdrive ahead of big fights.  In a business full of politicking, back biting and sudden shifts, the tendency for either/or thinking leads us into a corner when things get a bit skewiff. 

Once the speculating is done on this one and the first bell rings the talk, disrespect and spite will be thrown to one side and they will sort out their differences, each emerging with a fresh perspective on the other after the event. 

It will not be Good versus Bad, Germany against England or anything of that ilk, just a straight shootout between two men who mix charm, loquaciousness and malevolence in equal measure and have done an inspired job in selling us a fight that has no real long-term benefit for the sport.  Who knows, David may even say a few nice things about Wlad and shake that magic hand once all is said and done.

Coda:

Sod it, Wlad must be the bad guy, the man comes right out of a James Bond movie and talks a bit like Ivan Drago.  As for Boente’s claim.  The people who shook Wlad’s hand and told him to KO Haye probably waited until he had left the room before running over to David and imploring him to decapitate Wlad before asking for a photo.  This is boxing, baby.

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