Resting over the ring ropes, Freddie Roach watches the sparring session go on and does not like what he sees. Zou Shiming, his fighter, is still doing all the kinds of things that won’t work in a pro fight. He throws a punch off-balance, without anchoring his feet, so he has no torque. He squirrels away from serious confrontation then tries to strike again from afar. When he does engage and commit to a punch, there’s not much behind it, and there’s nothing Roach can do about his power. Some fighters have it, and Shiming doesn’t. For two years, Roach has been trying to convert Shiming into something he isn’t. Roach says Shiming is the toughest fighter he’s ever trained.
One round. Two rounds. Shiming is getting hit, pushed and bullied around the ring as the clock ticks. Roach doesn’t say much. Too much criticism could sap Shiming’s confidence. Besides, what can he say? Shiming doesn’t speak English.
“His left hand is too low, a bit lazy,” Roach said about Shiming, arguably the most lucrative prospect in boxing, but a fighter who by traditional standards has all the wrong things going for him. He can’t punch, having scored only one real knockout in two decades of boxing. He can’t speak English, which kills his marketability in the States. Worst of all, Shiming is old to start a pro career. He turned 33 this year, entering that twilight stage when a prizefighter’s timing and reflexes diminish. If those shortcomings aren’t enough, Shiming fights as a flyweight, the 112-pound weight class that even most hardcore fans don’t follow, because the little guys rarely knock anybody out.
Any reasonable boxing promoter would think twice before signing up a fighter like Shiming. But given the sport’s dwindling prestige and popularity in the U.S. over the past few decades, Shiming offers a promoter something no other fighter can. Shiming is not only from China, he’s a national hero there, making him the potential gateway to a promising and untapped market for boxing. The mega casinos in Macau are willing to pay promoters far higher fees to stage bouts than Las Vegas venues will pay, and like the wide-eyed miners who once trekked up to Alaska with their sifting pans looking for gold, boxing promoters are racking up their air miles flying to China and looking for ways to sell boxing to the Far East.
At the center of China’s pugilistic boom, and arguably the force behind it all, is boxing’s promoter emeritus Bob Arum, who has outwitted his rivals into his eighties, and has also been expanding his promotional operations into Russia in search of a bigger market for boxing. Through his friend Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino magnate who has started a host of gambling operations in Macau, Arum was able to form new alliances with a group of Chinese associates anxious to host bouts in Macau and build a fan base. Last fall, Arum sent the biggest fighter in his stable, Manny Pacquiao, to fight in Macau, and Pacquiao will return there for his next fight in the fall. Many of Arum’s other fighters are also flying to Macau, with some now on their second and third trips. But the fighter the Chinese are anxious to see is the twiggish, spindly, can’t-break-an-egg Zou Shiming.
Consider the numbers. For a professional, four-round fight, some fighters take home as little as $100 a round. Other prospects take home nothing, because they have to pay for their opponents’ purse and travel fees. But for a four-round fight in Macau, according to Arum, Shiming earned a purse of $300,000, a whopping figure that many world champions at his weight would struggle to make in a title fight. Back in April, I interviewed Arum at his mansion in Beverly Hills. Sitting on his veranda overlooking the city, Arum was sipping on an iced tea and gushing about Shiming and the Chinese market, like one of those early Alaskan gold miners. Macau’s high site fees were a boon, Arum said, but the real prize in the Chinese market was pay-per-view, even if that system hadn’t been built yet. If only a fraction of the nation’s billion-plus people could pay to watch a fight, the volume of views alone would result in staggering sums for Arum, his partners and his fighters. The key to that fortune, he felt, was Shiming.
“This kid is gonna be the first world title holder in the history of China,” Arum said.
A plan has been in place for the past year. Phase one comes on July 19 in Macau, where Shiming will appear for a title elimination bout, his first 10-round fight. If he wins — and Arum’s matchmakers are doing their best to make that happen — Shiming will be back in Macau this fall, presumably fighting for China’s first-ever world title on the undercard of Pacquaio’s next fight. It’s a race against time for the aging Arum and the aging Shiming. There’s only one hurdle. Shiming is a good athlete, but he has so little experience as a pro that this title fight could come too soon, and the story of The Great Chinese Hope could end in despair.
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Freddie Roach, the most celebrated boxing trainer of his generation, knows that the numbers don’t add up. “The process of taking an Olympic medalist to a world championship is four years,” Roach says during a break. “I had Virgil Hill, he did it in four. Brian Viloria, he did it in four. But two years? It’s not enough.”
It’s mid-June, and Roach and Shiming are at the Trinity Boxing Gym, down near Wall Street. For most of the year, Roach trains from his Wild Card Gym in L.A., but he’s become such a popular trainer in recent years that fighters from all over the world not only beg for his services but follow him around, like a shaman, as he travels to train with him and his team. Roach had arrived in New York to work the corner for Ruslan Provodnikov, the former welterweight champ, and Shiming had followed Roach there. Ordinarily, a trainer of Roach’s pedigree would not work with a fighter like Shiming, but with the Chinese market at stake, Arum personally asked Roach to do it.
Roach’s mission is nearly impossible. The talent and skills a fighter needs to exhibit in amateur bouts are at odds with what a pro needs to do in the ring. The difference is so vast that amateur and pro boxing are truly different sports. In the amateurs, the face and head are protected with gear, and bouts last only three rounds, so the way to win is through speed. Darting in and out like a fencer, the successful amateur moves much like a ninja, racking up points by invading the opponent’s defensives and flicking punches. To the judges, it doesn’t matter how hard the punches are, only that they land.
A pro fighter can’t flick a punch. A pro must box with bad intentions, anchoring his feet into the cushions of the ring apron, summoning the power through his hips, twisting the torso and punching with a full rotation of weight. Fighting this way requires the commitment of a gladiator, and a good punch is crucial to earning an opponent’s respect. There’s no headgear, and a title bout lasts 12 rounds instead of three. It’s a kill-or-be-killed mentality. Few seasoned amateurs adapt.
Zou Shiming’s second gold medal in London was accompanied by controversy. (USA TODAY Sports)
Shiming has skill and talent, of course. As a boy in Zunyi, a mountain city of seven million in one of China’s poorest provinces, Shiming was slight and frail, a ripe target for bullies. Like many children, he learned to protect himself through martial arts. He was a fast and talented combatant, but he grew impatient with the years of study required. He preferred boxing, though his parents were wary of the sport, which was banned in China when he was younger. In the 1950s, the Chinese government removed boxing from its roster of sports. Boxing was too violent, leaders thought, much like capitalism. But in the 1980s, sports authorities renewed China’s amateur program in the hope of winning more Olympic medals. Shiming entered the ring and surpassed expectations.
Trained by a wily coach, Shiming mixed the spirit of martial arts into his boxing repertoire, evading, striking and racking up points through his flick-like punches. It was only natural that he and other Chinese fighters didn’t punch with the same power or intentions as the Americans. The bodies and diet of China’s amateur fighters allowed them to be fast but not strong, trainers said, and the mental discipline the martial arts required allowed them to box like chess players, not knockout artists.
Shiming’s style was made to order for the amateur system. In 2004, he won a bronze medal at the Athens Games. He then went on to win a host of international amateur titles, a perfect setup for the 2008 Games in Beijing. There he won his country’s first-ever gold medal in boxing and became a national icon. Shiming wanted to turn pro then, but out of loyalty to the Chinese government, he delayed his career four more years, winning another gold medal at the 2012 London Games in a controversial decision. (Boxing’s amateur and Olympic judging and scoring systems have long been controversial.)
While Zhiming is old for a pro, he’s aged well. He’s never been badly cut or knocked out. For a pro in his mid-30s, he’s relatively fresh. But as the sparring rounds go by, his sparring partner Scott Quigg — a featherweight world champ — continues to beat him to every punch. The difference in talent and effective punching between Shiming and the younger, heavier Quigg is so stark, it’s hard to see how Shiming can compete against world-class competition as a pro. After three rounds of pressing and pushing Shiming around the ring, Quigg walked out of the ring to towel off. He conceded that he’d been holding back, trying not to hurt Shiming by throwing a serious punch. It was their second sparring session, and Quigg felt that while Shiming was doing better at planting his feet and throwing heavier punches, he lacked the primal aggression that other fighters use to neutralize opponents. After Shiming gets hit, Quigg said, he doesn’t always hit back. “At the end of the day, you need a pair of balls that you can rely on,” Quigg says. “That has to come natural. Freddie can’t teach him that.”
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Later that night, Shiming meets me for dinner at a chic sushi joint in midtown. Arriving in a pair of black leather pants and designer T-shirt, he occupies a corner on the sushi bar. He once told a reporter that if he weren’t a boxer, he would consider being a fashion designer. He speaks only a few words of English, so his friend Yang Fan translates.
Shiming has a light, playful, humble way about him, but he’s become the focal point of so many forces larger than himself. National politics. Adelson’s Macau casinos. Bob Arum’s legacy. Untold fortunes. Despite all this, he says that executing in the ring is what worries him most. Shiming has been used as a frontman for larger interests since he was a teenager, when China’s sports authorities financed his amateur career. He’s used to satisfying geo-political demands.
Shiming now has to master a different kind of art: inflicting punishment on others. Hurting others is a fundamental part of the sport, but his approach is more Buddhist. “To achieve victory, he has to be victorious with himself,” his friend explains.
Shiming says he feels like he has something to prove. In Beijing, his opponent retired early with a shoulder injury, and his London win was controversial. Four years later, Shiming says he’s been desperate to turn pro, and that with people like Roach and Arum backing him, he couldn’t be in a better position. He likes the challenge of working with a strength and conditioning coach, developing his power, planting his feet and trying to knock opponents out. That style of fighting will require Shiming to expose himself to a new level of danger.
What has him worried him most about competing as a pro? “Getting knocked out,” he said.
On paper, the fight in Macau looks like a tune-up; Arum couldn’t have selected a better opponent. Luis De La Rosa, a veteran from Columbia, has never fought in the U.S., so it’s been hard for experts or critics to evaluate him. De La Rosa has recently appeared in venues with names like “Discoteca El Escandalo” in Cartegena, and his last win was against an opponent with zero wins and 20 losses. He’s been knocked out twice in his last four fights, once in the first round. In short, De La Rosa is a bit player in the Great Chinese Hope plotline — a fall guy who, like so many before him, could flip the script with one committed punch.
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Geoffrey Gray is a best-selling author and reporter based in New York. A contributing editor at New York Magazine, he has covered boxing, bullfighting, tennis, female arm wrestling, camel racing and high-end perfume.
