Four days before he takes his place in Oleksandr Usyk’s corner in his bout with Dereck Chisora, Russ Anber recalls the time he served as lead trainer for the gifted Ukrainian against the dangerous Michael Hunter, and also discusses the heavyweight’s similarities with friend and countryman Vasiliy Lomachenko.
Oleksandr Usyk seems to like to have me as the chief second in his corner, the guy who comes into the ring in between rounds. For all his fights since he fought Michael Hunter, that’s how things have been. I don’t yet know if that will be what happens next weekend when he fights Dereck Chisora and I won’t be offended if it changes, of course. After all, I’m there to do whatever is best for Usyk and the team to enable him to get the win.
For the Hunter fight, I was also Usyk’s lead trainer. His manager Egis Klimas called me up before the fight and said: ‘We need a trainer for the Michael Hunter fight. Would you do it?’ I replied: ‘Wow, of course, what an honour.’
If there is anybody I would love to train it’s Usyk. He’s a great athlete, a great guy and so receptive to ideas and suggestions. So I jumped at the opportunity. We trained in California at Egis’ gym. Lomachenko was also training there to prepare for his fight against Jason Sosa on the same card. Loma would train upstairs and Usyk downstairs.
The whole experience was one of the highlights of my career. I really loved training Usyk. He listened and we practiced things together. I think he really liked training with me and I certainly liked it and enjoyed it.
Training a guy who is already a world champion like Usyk is completely different to taking a guy who is aged 11 or 13 – like I did with David Lemieux and Otis Grant – and moulding them, developing them from scratch.
My approach when training Usyk – who was already an Olympic champion and world champion, of course – was to firstly watch how he did things, how he shadow boxed and so on. I’d known of and watched him since his amateur days, I covered his Olympic journey on TV while doing colour-commentary for the CBC and TSN, but watching how somebody trains is very different from watching how they fight.
After studying him, I started making suggestions about small adjustments He could make. With someone like Usyk it is a case of fine tuning. When you have a boxer who’s really gifted – just like when you’re coaching a team of superstars in baseball or hockey or whatever – it’s those little subtleties that can make all the difference in the world. It’s like polishing a diamond – if you don’t polish it perfectly it may only be worth 75,000 rather than 100,000 dollars.
I think there were a few things I brought to Usyk for that fight and his other fights that have helped make a difference. It’s a game of inches at the end of the day and there’s a fine line between a knockout shot and a shot which barely hits the other guy. Those inches matter. I really think I see things that others miss. I don’t know why that is, but its that type of analytic eye and mind which drove me to coaching in the first place. In my heart of hearts, I knew I could see things that others completely missed.
I often get asked about what similarities I see between Lomachenko and Usyk and other members of what we might term the recent ‘Ukrainian school’ of boxing like Oleksandr Gvozdyk.
Stylistically and technically Loma and Usyk are very similar. There are certainly many more similarities between them than there are between them and any other Ukrainian fighters. Gvozdyk, for example, is a little more conventional, maybe partly because he’s right handed. He is certainly more ‘textbook’ as it were than Loma or Usyk, more north American or western in his style you might say.
The biggest similarity between Loma and Usyk is the pace that they set and the pressure they put their opponents under. And for a man the size of Usyk to do things in the ring in terms of pressure and activity which are comparable to what a featherweight or lightweight such as Lomachenko does is pretty impressive let’s face it.
Russ Anber was talking to Luke G. Williams.
Main image: HBO Boxing.