April 26, 2018, Almaty, Kazakhstan

 

I was going to go back to Almaty Fight Academy, where I trained mixed martial arts yesterday. I had taken a long grueling class that ended in body punch sparring against a guy bearded guy named Ulsan. We started off light, but ended up throwing harder and harder punches until the bell rang, then we couldn’t stop laughing. I heard there was going to be a boxer there tonight.

 

But I change my mind when I see on the website for Almaty Fight Club, a gym south of here, that a boxing trainer for the USSR will be coaching a class at 7:00 pm. A guy named Oleg. When was I going to get another chance to train with a Soviet coach? This was going to be like training the guy on the other side of the movie “Rocky IV.” At 5:15 I put together a plan. I find the gym on Google maps, draw it onto my guidebook map, check that against the metro stops, memorize the route, directions, and distances, put my hand wraps, gym clothes, and a compass in my backpack and head past big Soviet made apartment buildings for the Raiymbek metro station.

 

The metro is brand new. At the entrance they scan your belongings like you’re boarding an airplane. The metro police are polite and professional, saying thank you and making sure you are headed the right way. The entrances are clean, the trains are nice, and they have multiple security cameras in each car. People are civil here. Almaty, and Bishkek too, cars stop for pedestrians in every crosswalk, and not in the impatient American way, but as if it is a red light, a matter of course. I saw men and boys give up their seats for women on the metro. People pick up their dog poop and stay in the crosswalks. I wonder how much of it has to do with good policing, how much is an aftershock of totalitarianism.

 

*

 

I love it when a plan comes together. I memorized the route to the gym and it pays off. I ride the metro from Raiymybek to Abay, head west on Abay Street and south on Dostyk past Al-Farabi, and the gym is my left after the next road in a brand-new part of Almaty full of western buildings.

 

Almaty Fight Academy was a mom-and-pop business. Almaty Fight Club is a sprawling facility. It has two floors (that I see) full of compartmentalized sections, including a reception area, weight room, dance studio, CrossFit room, MMA cage, boxing ring, heavy bag space, Jiu-Jitsu mat, and a big locker room complete with sauna. It is the sort of place I doubt I could afford, even here. I offer to pay for one class, but they won’t do things that way. Instead, they take my information and I get a free day. Oleg won’t be there, they say, it will be a different coach.

 

Some guys are warming up, hitting the bag, throwing shadow punches, and I try to figure out who the coach was going to be, maybe the big Russian in the ring, but then here comes someone whose name sounds like Oleg when they say it fast. He is the right age, maybe 50 or 60, and has similar ears and chin as the guy in the photo, but it is not him. Instead, it is Eric Balzhanov, and I find out later he is a three-time USSR military boxing champion.

 

He walks around the room shaking hands. 

 

“Box,” he points at me. 

 

I nod.

 

He starts talking but sees that I didn’t understand.

 

“Russki?” he says.

 

“Nyet,” I say.

 

“Kazakh?”

 

“Nyet,” I say.

 

“Nyet Russki, Nyet Kazakh, Nyet Boxing!” he says seriously.

 

But he laughs and shakes his head no.

 

Then he points at my feet like I’m a simpleton and asks in Russian if I have shoes, “tuflye?”
 

I had thought it was going to be like MMA, barefoot on the mats, but not so.

 

“Nyet,” I say, “Izvenitia.”

 

No, I am sorry.

 

“Nyet Russki, nyet Kazakh, nyet tuflye, nyet boxing!” he says.

 

But now he is really laughing at his own joke.

 

He wants to know my name.

 

I tell him.

 

“Oh, like Benjamin Franklin,” he says in Kazakh.

 

“100 dollars,” he says in English, “Very good.”

 

We get started by jumping rope and I immediately wish I had shoes. The hard floor is smashing the smaller bones in my feet with every skip.

 

I partner with a guy named Murat, who speaks a little English. Like yesterday, we do an extended warmup, with twisting and swinging arms around. In the States we warm up for maybe five minutes at most fight gyms. But here in the post-Soviet sphere they do a super warmed up, at least fifteen minutes. I can remember the same thing in Moldova at Bercut Fight Club.

 

*

 

When I went to New Orleans with my girlfriend at the time, Kathy, we took a long walk up Bourbon Street. Although I wouldn’t want to live there, New Orleans is a great place for romance because it has culture, food, voodoo, and always a hint of danger. But especially, it has music. That afternoon we passed a bar with wide open doors, a blues band blasting sound out onto the street. The saxophonist was so good it stopped us dead in our tracks and we looked at each other in astonishment. His playing was incredible. A skinny old man walking the other way saw that we’d stopped. He might have even been a blues man himself by the looks of him, in a suit and a Frank Sinatra hat. He looked at Kathy, looked at me, then looked at the saxophone player and stood a second, cocking his head, really listening.

 

 “Goddamn!” he said.

 

*

 

Watching Eric Balzhanov teach boxing was like that.

 

I’ve learned fighting MMA style. Boxers do things differently. They stand sideways because they don’t have to worry about takedowns. They bounce in and out. He started me at zero, which was fun because I had to unlearn what I already knew.

 

After coaching MMA, kickboxing, and grappling for a while, it is easy to get set into doing things a certain way. One can begin to think that their way is the only way. So, it is refreshing to have to pay attention once again and completely change my technique while someone else is instructing.

 

From the moment he first takes his stance, and shows the jab, I know who I am dealing with. He is a classic boxer to the core.

 

He deconstructs my punches themselves, the turn of the wrist, the landing of the knuckles, the range, the aiming, and the intent. He is a master of every little part of the game, stance, motion, hands, distance. He reworks what I am doing from the ground up, telling me in Kazakh and Russian to do things this way not that way, turn your hip, straighten your leg at the end, flare the elbow out just a little. He grows impatient, he gets loud. He says “Nyet” so many times I think it is my new Russian name. He grabs my elbow and lifts it, moves my left hand here, straightens my knee there, lifts my shoulder, and makes sure he doesn’t walk away until I get it right. I imagine it is like having Gary Kasparov showing you chess, or Balishnikov ballet, or Tolstoy editing your writing, it is of a caliber of excellence and detail that I’ve almost never seen in anything.

 

He runs us through drills that I have done before, like tip and counterpunch, but some that I haven’t, mind breaking drills like mental puzzles. In one we start standing with feet in a line, step forward and throw a cross with the opposite hand, follow it with the other foot and other hand and an uppercut, and follow that with the first side and a hook. As we keep it going we switch stances. Then we do it all moving backwards.

 

During our drills Murat says, “You know he coached two world champions,” and nods at Eric.

 

At the end of class Eric comes over, and has Murat translate for him. I guess he did not coach many Americans, and Eric wants to know what I thought.

 

“Tell him that it was great to learn something from a master of the game,” I say.

 

Eric laughs, shakes my hand, and we take photos.

 

Then he holds pads for me before I leave: jabs, crosses, hooks, body shots. The pads crack as I hit them. He shouts commands in Russian, has me slip, counterpunch and cut angles, a two-minute round with a true maestro.