By Thomas Gerbasi
Wladimir Klitschko has never been one for the rearview mirror.
“I’m not done yet, you know that, right?” he asks with a chuckle while in New York City to promote an April 29 fight with Anthony Joshua that really doesn’t need any more promotion considering that over 84,000 tickets have been sold for the Wembley Stadium event.
The topic was the 40-year-old’s legacy, one already set after 64 wins and 23 successful heavyweight title defenses over two reigns. If the Ukrainian walked away from the sport today, he would get a call from the International Boxing Hall of Fame in five years. But he’s not walking away. Not now. Not before he faces the unbeaten Joshua in the biggest heavyweight title fight in years.
For Klitschko, winning that fight and becoming a world champion for a third time has become an obsession. That’s his term for it, it’s the hashtag he’s using on Twitter, and in the lead-up to the fight, he’s described that obsession as a five-part process. Tuesday, he reduced it to two.
“It’s very simple,” he said. “Instead of five steps, there are now two steps. The first step, I put a goal in my life to become three-time world champion, and the second step, I’m obsessed with the first step. So obsession means I breathe it, I live with it, and this is my chance. I have only one shot and it has to be one kill. One shot, one kill, one opportunity – nothing else.”
It’s as focused and intense as Klitschko has been for a fight in a long time. Sure, there was the desire to even the score with the man who beat him in his last fight, Tyson Fury, but after moving on after two postponements, his eyes are firmly on Joshua, the 2012 Olympic gold medalist who has taken the pro boxing world by storm and reminds Klitschko a little of himself in more than a few ways.
“I totally see mirroring of myself in AJ,” he said. “I’ve been there, done that and, as a little older person, you can understand the circle of life and that the person going after you is going to have the same experience as you have. These experiences you can’t buy in a shop; you need to gain it through your life, and that’s what I see in Anthony. And he is, in a certain way, a copy of me sizewise and skillwise, just with a different look. He definitely reminds me of me, and in a certain way I can totally read him.”
Klitschko will need that experience edge against the 27-year-old, who has been fearless in an 18-fight career in which he’s already won the IBF heavyweight title and successfully defended it twice. He’s younger and presumably faster and stronger, and after Klitschko’s lackluster loss to Fury, all the signs are there for a changing of the guard. But the old guard isn’t ready to yield just yet, and he admits that looking back, he found the year-plus away refreshing.
“It was the first time in my 26-year career that I had a one year break where I didn’t fight,” he said. “It doesn’t mean I didn’t train, but I didn’t fight. If I look back now, I think it was good. I had time to recuperate my body and my mind and my motivation, because I’ve been in this like a hamster in a hamster wheel since I was 14, non-stop – training, fighting, training, fighting - for 26 years. That’s a lot of time. So yes, if I look back, I definitely enjoyed that break.”
The break is over, and that’s news to the ears of Klitschko, who is pleased that fans have embraced the matchup without the aid of bad blood and trash talk, whether real or manufactured. So yeah, boxing’s not dead, is it?
“Boxing never was dead and is never gonna be dead,” he said. “It’s one of the most exciting sports and it’s a big part of society in general. It’s amazing, boxing started in England and now we broke all the records with the ticket sale. I’ve been fighting in 30, 40, 50, 60-thousand seat stadiums, but never 90-thousand. So it’s going to be new for me as well. I’m also fighting the biggest challenge I have because Anthony’s an extremely athletic guy, ambitious, an Olympic champion and world champion. And most amazingly for the sport of boxing, we don’t talk s**t. There’s no bad talk, no throwing tables or bottles, no f-words to sell the fight. It’s just two Olympic champions facing each other, respecting each other, shaking hands and saying, ‘See you in the ring,’ and wishing each other good luck. And that’s how we polish the sport of boxing and make it better.”
Wladimir Klitschko has been making the sport better for a lot of years, both in the ring as a dominant champion and outside of it as a gentlemanly ambassador. That’s quite a legacy. Is he ready to talk about it yet?
“No, my answer is going to be the same,” he laughs. “I’m still doing it and I’m still in this hamster wheel. Eventually it’s going to happen and I’m going to step out of this and have a different look, so then I can look back at what I’ve accomplished and what I was missing. But right now, I’m not ready to talk about it.”