LOS ANGELES — In the sport of boxing, there are thousands of sideshows and two real issues: Will Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao ever fight each other, and will the Klitschko brothers ever do the same?
The answers, in order, are: probably not, and never.
If you are a boxing fan, you hate both conclusions. If you are a human being, you will come to understand the Klitschkos’ stance. Younger brother Wladimir articulated it nicely once again over lunch the other day.
“Don King once offered us $100 million to fight,” he said. “My reaction was, how much is your mother worth?”
Wladimir said when he and Vitali used to merely spar, it got bloody and dangerous.
“The last time we sparred, and that was years ago,” he said, “I broke my leg. After that, we said no more.”
Recently, that stance became even more important.
The Klitschkos’ mother, Nadia, became a widow July 13. Her husband, Wladimir Rodionovich, died of cancer after a long battle. He was 64, a former colonel in the Russian Air Force and one of the men put in charge of the cleanup of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl in 1986. His youngest son said that his cancer was directly attributable to his work at Chernobyl, and that, even at only 64, he was among the last of his military friends to die.
“I was 10 when Chernobyl happened,” said Wladimir, whose family was in Kiev, Ukraine, 100 miles away. “Our father told us the Russians were hiding the truth, that something very bad had happened.”
So the vow of Wladimir and Vitali to never fight each other took on additional importance July 13.
The timing of the senior Klitschko’s death in Kiev also turned out to be especially significant to Wladimir, who had won his 14th fight in a row 11 days before, in a noisy and controversial matchup against England’s David Haye in an outdoor soccer stadium in Hamburg, Germany.
Wladimir said that, at the services, the priest said his father had had nothing to confess at the end, but only said that he had been able to see his dream come true, when he watched his son beat Haye on TV. Wladimir’s victory that night meant that he and Vitali now own all the heavyweight boxing titles. Wladimir is champion of the WBA, IBF, IBO, WBO and Ring Magazine sanctioning bodies. Vitali is the WBC champion.
“My father was my biggest fan,” Wladimir said. “I heard it from the priest. I really didn’t know that before.”
