From Russia With Glove

It is late September, and cruiserweight Sergei Kobozev is 6,000 miles from home, sitting at a table in an Italian restaurant near Catskill, N.Y. The hour is late, about 1:30 a.m. The Russian's face is hard as he stares into a shot glass on the table in front of him. It is much the same look he gives his ring opponents as he bores in on them. Who knows what he sees in the shot glass? His wife, Irina, and six-year-old son, Alexander, who live in the central Russian city of Kostroma? The title he came to America to win?

After a moment Kobozev points to a place high on an empty glass, dumps two full shots of vodka into it and mutters something in Russian. Perhaps, "Where I come from, that's a real shot."

Kobozev is asked about Carl Wilson, the fighter he dispatched in two easy rounds earlier that night in Catskill while a woman in the crowd yelled at Sergei, "Go, Boris!" Under heavy pressure from the fists banging at his body, Wilson, a journeyman fighter, tried a somewhat novel approach to boxing: He threw only three punches in the first round. Now, in the restaurant, Kobozev chuckles and says, "Mishok" ("He was a bag").

Everyone at the table laughs, glasses are raised, a toast is proposed. "To Sergei, who has once again made us proud," says Kobozev's co-manager Rory Cutaia. "We look forward to you carrying a belt."

"Na zdoroviye!" The drinks are downed. A Phil Collins song plays on the jukebox. Kobozev glances at his Uncle Sam watch. Slava Trunov, who is his other manager, lights his trillionth cigarette of the night and begins to reminisce, speaking in heavily accented English: "It was exactly 11 years ago to the day I left Russia with $90 in my pocket...."

Kobozev looks on. He is the thread, the tie that binds these people together on this night. Sitting on one side of Kobozev is Trunov's wife, Anna. On his other side sits the Trunovs' 20-year-old son, Gary, a student at Kingsborough Community College, Kobozev's translator and the caretaker at the fighter's current residence in Brooklyn. At the next table is Teddy Atlas, a former trainer for Mike Tyson, hired by Cutaia to show Kobozev the ropes of American boxing.

Kobozev, 28, is 5-0 since returning to America in June of this year. (His first visit to the U.S., in 1991, was cut short after four months when he suffered a gash above his eye.) Kobozev, who was 6-0 as a professional fighter in Russia, learned to box at the age of 12, went on to become a member of the Russian Central Army team from 1985 to '90 and had been expected to compete in the 1988 Olympic Games before a knee injury sidelined him. He also has a four-year chemistry degree from the Kostroma High Military Command for Chemical Defense, which he earned in 1984. "If there was ever chemical, nuclear or biological fallout, I would get sent into different zones to test for contamination," he says.

In the last three years, since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a number of Russian fighters have begun to make names for themselves. Yuri Arbachakov, who now lives in Tokyo, won the WBC flyweight title there last June. In this country the brothers Artemiev—Sergei (18-1-1) and Alex (6-1-1)—are lightweights slugging it out from Gallagher's Gym in Queens, N.Y., which is one of the places where Kobozev trains. There, too, is cruiserweight Yuri Vaulin (13-2), who rocked Tommy Morrison in a fight in Atlantic City in April of last year before falling in five rounds. And heavyweight Alex Zolkine, who fights out of Columbus, Ohio, has quietly achieved a 13-0 record.

On a freezing day in January 1990, Cutaia, who was in Russia to find fighters, boarded a plane for the three-hour trip from Moscow to the city of Barnaul, on the Siberian plains. "First, I'm flying to Siberia in the middle of the winter," says Cutaia of the memorable flight. "Second, the plane looks like it's something from the 1940s, and third, it was incredible to me that on an airline, people didn't have scats and were standing in the aisles."

That night Cutaia watched Kobozev—by then a pro—knock out his opponent in the second round, and he decided that Kobozev would be the first of several fighters he would bring to the U.S. Cutaia formed a partnership with Trunov, who is in the import-export business. To date, the partnership has spent more than $100,000 developing four Russian fighters: Kobozev; heavyweight Igor Bistritzky, a recent arrival to the U.S.; and two middleweights who have since returned to Russia.