Vitali Klitschko is a very rare bird, and at 6 feet, 7 inches and 245 pounds a very big rare bird. He holds a Ph.D. in sports science, boxing’s world heavyweight championship title, a seat in the Ukrainian Parliament, and is head of one of the main opposition parties, UDAR — which in English means “Punch.”
In October, Mr. Klitschko, whose popularity has surged in the turmoil enveloping Kiev, announced his intention to run for president in 2015. But is a man who has spent decades studying the “sweet science” of cracking heads in the sometimes seedy realm of professional pugilism really prepared to take the helm of a rudderless nation? Perhaps.
In the world of flying fists, the 42-year-old Mr. Klitschko, who began his professional boxing career in 1996, is something of an enigma. He has always been a strategic and cautious combatant, yet he is a deadly power-puncher with a record of 45-2, with 41 knockouts — the highest knockout-to-win ratio of any heavyweight champion in history.
When studied carefully, the sweet science (a term coined by the 19th-century British sportswriter Pierce Egan) has a lot to teach about life outside the arena. Teddy Roosevelt was a lifelong student of boxing and while president participated in many sparring sessions in the White House. In his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom,” Nelson Mandela recalled his rigorous training in the ring. He wrote: “I did not enjoy the violence of boxing so much as the science of it. I was intrigued by how one moved one’s body to protect oneself, how one used a strategy both to attack and retreat, how one paced oneself over a match.”
You cannot be successful in the bruising art without learning to control your emotions. Boxing teaches how to read others, how to husband your energies, how to turn with the punches that life and politics deliver, and above all, how to scrape yourself off the canvas.
Last spring, I pressed Mr. Klitschko to explain how he thought boxing had prepared him for the gloves-off world of politics. “Success in any sport requires concentration, training, determination and talent,” he told me. “Sports gave me the will to win, the ability to make quick decisions, to realize their full potential. These qualities are very important in politics.”
Mr. Klitschko demonstrated some of these talents this week, when he persuaded police forces menacing a camp of UDAR protesters to back off. At another tense confrontation, during the first days of protests in Kiev over President Viktor Yanukovich’s refusal to sign political and trade agreements with the European Union, the man popularly known as Dr. Iron Fist made a quick decision that helped avert bloodshed. As a large angry mob marched on the presidential palace, Mr. Klitschko, towering over his fellow demonstrators, called for restraint and warned his followers to avoid the trap of initiating the kind of mayhem that would legitimize a violent crackdown.
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