ALL CHANGE
Just when the WBSS was going so well, a kickboxer steps in for Braehmer and will take on Smith. Elliot Worsell explains...
Previewing Smith’s WBSS semi-final against a mystery late substitute
THIS is boxing. You never know what to expect. Yet, equally, you’re never really surprised. For the World Boxing Super Series, it was all going so well. The cruiserweights were outdoing each other on a weekly basis, ‘Fight of the Year’ after ‘Fight of the Year’, the supermiddleweights were cornering the allbritish grudge match market, and the tournament format, as a whole, was bringing clarity to a painfully convoluted sport.
But then you remember: this is boxing. Even when it’s going right, it can just as quickly go wrong.
First we had George Groves stifling Chris Eubank Jnr for 12 rounds only to be sullied by a dislocated shoulder in the very last minute, an injury which threatens his place in the final, and then, just days before Callum Smith was set to face Juergen Braehmer in the other super-middleweight semi-final, Braehmer, struck down by a virus, pulled out.
It was a hammer blow for Smith. He was keen to use Saturday’s (February 24) fight in Nuremberg as a showcase and use the result, the slaying of a former world light-heavyweight champion, to beat the drum ahead of a spot in the final against Groves on June 2. But now this momentum, as a result of Groves’ injury and Braehmer’s illness, has been slowed if not lost altogether.
Still, best to keep calm and carry on. That seems to be the message from the promoters and, such is the nature of the tournament, there is certainly the capacity to do this and avoid panicking. Smith, for instance, won’t have to suffer the inconvenience of going to Germany and returning home without a fight and a payday. Instead, he will now box Nieky Holzken, 13-0 (10), a super-middleweight whose scheduled appearance on Saturday’s show (in a fight against Dmitri Chudinov) was no coincidence.
In actual fact, the 34-yearold from Holland was the designated backup all along, just as Zach Parker was last weekend (when boxing on the undercard of Groves vs. Eubank Jnr), and this foresight has helped salvage a semi-final and kept alive the hope of Smith meeting Groves this summer.
If this sounds like a foregone conclusion, it’s because it should be. Holzken, in boxing terms, is every bit as inexperienced as his record suggests. He began his professional career in 2013 yet has fought only journeymen, all of whom he was expected to beat, and his standout win, if it can be called that, is a second round dismissal of Viktor Polyakov, a Ukrainian who’d lost only twice and never been stopped, in what looked like a school gym. (Ominously, Holzken’s ill-fated bout with Chudinov represented his first test, and a significant one at that.) He is still learning to box. Still finding his feet. Still unaware of his ceiling.
Delve a little deeper, however, and you’ll discover Holzken’s boxing career is just one of many feathers to the Dutchman’s bow and that as a professional kickboxer he has competed 105 times and once held the Glory welterweight (170lbs) title.
Granted, kicks, knees and elbows won’t do him much good inside the boxing ring, but what Holzken’s combat history does indicate is composure in a fighting environment, as well as toughness. Rare, after all, is the kickboxer who transitions to boxing and falls apart or is found wanting in the durability department. Say what you want about their technique and bad habits, but the kickboxer-cum-boxer is traditionally resilient, game and shows no aversion to punches coming back at them.
A recent example of this was Cedrick Peynaud, the unheralded Frenchman who gave Conor Benn all he could handle back in December. Peynaud, on the face of it, possessed a modest 5-4-3 boxing record, one that screamed inexperience and a knockout defeat. Yet those statistics didn’t tell anything like the whole story. Unbeknown to many, Peynaud was a former European kickboxing champion who’d fought nearly a hundred times in that discipline and therefore boasted a seasoning and robustness Benn lacked. It showed in the fight.
That’s not to say Holzken will have similar success against Smith. Nor is it to say kickboxing is the ideal foundation for aspiring boxers (with inherent ➤
grittiness comes an upright stance, general stiffness and a chin carried too high). But it should definitely serve as a wake-up call for anyone who reckons certain skills and attributes aren’t transferable and that Boxrec.com is the be all and end all.
Safer to say it works up to a certain level, this crisscrossing. Conor Mcgregor realised that. He’d probably get away with boxing journeymen, but failed miserably in a boxing match against Floyd Mayweather, arguably the finest boxer of the modern era, last summer. And Michael “Venum” Page, a kickboxer and mixed martial artist, is another who finds himself having a ‘go’ at boxing, juggling it with MMA, though has refreshingly set his sights a little lower than the cocksure Irishman in the mink coat.
Rest assured, Holzken, the boxer, is levels above both. He appears serious, for starters, and has also shown a desire to stick with it rather than just play dress-up. The fact he was about to fight Chudinov, for example, having slowly built his way to 13-0, is a positive sign and says a lot about his ambition. Clearly, he wants to be tested.
Yet the concept of a world-class kickboxer becoming a mediocre boxer is nothing new and, moreover, one of the things that makes Holzken such an exciting kickboxer, albeit one who has lost his last three fights, is the ability to use other parts of his anatomy to mix it up and be creative. He loses that freedom, of course, in the boxing ring.
For Liverpool’s Smith, meanwhile, the prospect of Holzken, an orthodox boxer, standing in front of him and attempting to use toughness to set up combinations is much more appealing than the previous image he had in mind: Juergen Braehmer, a southpaw, shifting around the ring, trying to ‘old man’ him.
Holzken, unlike Braehmer, won’t have to be found or sussed out. He will be in Smith’s firing line, he will let his hands go, and he will search for openings of his own. It’s what he does as a kickboxer and, on the evidence available, it’s what he does as a boxer, too. He fights tall and straight, but isn’t as tall and straight as Smith, and throws a surprising amount of body shots, the kind Smith might have been throwing before he turned professional in 2012 and started smoothing his rough edges.
Ultimately, everything Holzken does, Smith does better and has been doing better for longer. While Holzken has been racking up wins on the kickboxing circuit, becoming “The Natural”, Smith has been quietly going about his business in the boxing ring, moving his record to 23-0 (17), and has long been talked about as a world title hope. He’s yet to compete among the elite, but has beaten good men, the likes of Erik Skoglund, Rocky Fielding, Christopher Rebrasse and Nikola Sjekloca, all of whom would be favoured to teach Holzken a lesson, and now seems more than ready to cross that bridge. He seems destined to challenge Groves.
Nieky Holzken will be described as a banana skin, for it’s the only way of selling the replacement fight as a worthwhile, meaningful semi-final. But if Callum Smith is as good as advertised, and can remain focused amid the confusion, there’s little the Dutchman with better kicks than punches can do to prevent a stoppage before the halfway mark.
This is boxing, after all.