Wladimir Klitschko Rolls On

NEW YORK, N.Y.– You need to see your champion in person. It’s not enough to read about Wladimir Klitschko’s 18 consecutive title defenses, encroaching on the records of Larry Holmes and Joe Louis. It’s not enough to watch him on HBO. You need to breathe the same air as him, especially if that air is Madison Square Garden.

Maybe you are a big man in a trident tee-shirt, or maybe you are a woman with a wreathe of flowers in her hair. You have a beer in each hand and a blue-and-yellow flag around your shoulders. Blue for the sea, sky, and mountains. Yellow for the wheat fields of Ukraine.

You soldier on through the boring undercard. Although you disapprove of the lopsided scoring in Sadam Ali’s victory over Francisco Santana, life has taught you equanimity in the face of injustice.

You cheer when the jumbotron shows Wladimir and his brother Vitaly warming up backstage, looking like Great Dane puppies play fighting. Theirs is an unassailable intimacy. They both wear red, the color of joy.

You do not boo when Bryant Jennings makes his ring walk. Jennings is a working-class fighter who boasts of hunger gained in the North Philly streets, but you think your champion’s hunger, born in a shack outside Kiev, is deeper. Wladimir wears a thousand-mile stare as he walks to the ring and steps over the top rope.

You are sitting so far away that it is tempting to watch the huge screen, but you make yourself look at the ring itself because that is what you came for. Wladimir’s broad, golden back looks like an action figure’s. Bryant Jennings scuttles around him, nervous and evasive.

The jab controls everything. Sometimes Wlad triples it up, barely cocking before he fires again. Jennings dissipates his energy in constant movement.

You join in the cheers of “Ukraine” and “Klitschko” that sweep through the stadium. At 39, your champion lacks the speed of youth but compensates with efficiency. You relate to that, because you aren’t young anymore either. The trick is to work very hard in spurts and rest when you can.

During the round breaks, Jennings looks lost and exhausted. Wlad looks like a racing car in a pit stop.

In the seventh round, Bryant Jennings tries to trash talk Wlad, but Wlad is a smooth surface to which disrespect does not cling. You wish you could be like that. In the ninth, Jennings gets brave, and Wlad responds with the hardest right hand of the night. In the tenth, Wlad gets a point off for holding. You spill the rest of your beer.

You cheer for Gennady Golovkin and Lennox Lewis’ jumbotron bromance. You cheer for Wlad’s celebrity fiancé Hayden Panettiere, a ringside fertility goddess. You cheer for Bruce Willis, not because you care, but because everyone else is cheering. You’re happy. Wlad is winning. For a while you forget that tomorrow is the 29th anniversary of Chernobyl.

The judges give it to your champion 116-111 (twice) and 119-109, but from where you are sitting he wins every round.