KID GLOVES
HOW THIS BOY GREW UP TO FIGHT JOSHUA
THE clues apparently lie in the games of Jenga that have filled time in a Wembley hotel. To listen to Anthony Joshua’s next challenger, those big hands and that big frame are really quite misleading.
‘We have played it a lot, me and my brother,’ Kubrat Pulev tells Sportsmail. ‘ People say Jenga is good for small hands and I do not have small hands. I have these big fingers, but I am a technical talent at Jenga.
‘I play that game and I am a surgeon. I do not lose at Jenga. Like boxing, I am technical.’
It is told in jest, but one can only wonder whether this tough Bulgarian will prove so adept at prodding a different sort of tower on Saturday night.
Most sensible estimations would have the 39-year-old as a long shot against Joshua, even in light of how Andy Ruiz dismantled that myth of invincibility 18 months ago. But if Joshua’s only defeat reaffirmed anything, it is that heavyweight boxing is a bad place to find guarantees, so it is interesting to consider the credentials of a fighter who has journeyed to London with a sense of destiny.
As Pulev tells it, his late father had this planned years ago, long before his death in 2007.
‘You need to understand my father,’ Pulev says. ‘He was the Bulgarian heavyweight champion. And he was a boxing maniac. He loved boxing. A crazy love. He wanted boxing champions for children but his first child was a daughter. He then had two more daughters before he got a boy.’ There were five children by the time Venko Pulev was done, with Kubrat and his younger brother, Tervel, brought into lives that had already been mapped out. Even their names were borrowed from Bulgarian warriors of the past.
What Pulev describes of his upbringing is done so with affection, but by his own reckoning it was ‘not a real childhood’, which was exacerbated substantially by the unexpected death of his mother when he was 10.
‘My first words with my father, it was about boxing,’ he says. ‘I have a picture at home of me in gloves — they are up to my armpit. I think I was one year old. At four, another picture, the same.
‘I remember saying, “Father, me and my brother, we want to go and play with other children outside”. But it was, “Nah, nah, nah, I want to show you something”, and then we are hitting his hands in the basement. That was my life.
‘My father talked always about boxing, about how me and my brother would be fighters. He said, “You will be big champions and everyone will say this is Kubrat, this is Tervel”, and we were small children when he said these things. I thought maybe my father is crazy, does he believe this?
‘We were just little children, absolutely normal family, not so much money, the same as everybody in a small country. He would say, “You will have money, respect, people will know you”. When me and Tervel talk now, it is amazing how much has become fact.’
Perhaps within all that is an explanation for a personality that can be light but often gives way to intensity. ‘Losing our mother made us all stronger characters, hardened us mentally,’ Pulev says. ‘We grew up without being spoiled. As fighters, Tervel and me are people who realise the value of every second God gives us.’
While Tervel, 37, would win heavyweight bronze at London 2012 (where Joshua took superheavyweight gold) and has since won the European title as an unbeaten cruiserweight, the bigger brother is preparing for his second crack at the world crown. His only loss in 29 fights was in his previous challenge to Wladimir Klitschko six years ago.
He was meant to fight Joshua in 2017 before pulling out with a pectoral injury, but his enduring status as the IBF mandatory challenger has brought this chance. In those intervening three years, Joshua’s defeat by Ruiz has altered the perceptions of many, including Pulev.
‘With all due respect to Anthony Joshua, I don’t think he’s that good, nor do I think he’s invincible,’ Pulev says.
His suspicion is that the IBF, WBA, WBO and IBO champion may also have focused too much attention on a looming blockbuster with Tyson Fury, who Pulev believes is the best in the division. ‘The impression is that they are actually more excited about a possible match against Fury,’ he says. ‘That is fine for me.’
The challenge will be in exploring and exploiting the theory.
‘I have been born for this,’ Pulev says. ‘My father died when he was 80, before I had this chance. But he will be watching and I will make him proud.’