white is right
Hall of Famer
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2006
- Messages
- 10,038
By Nat Gottlieb
In a sport where successful managers might have 15 to 25 fighters in their stables, Ivaylo Gotzev has just two. Yet this brash and outspoken immigrant from Bulgaria is a power broker in the heavyweight division today because, as the song says, "He's got the whole world, in his hands."
Gotzev is the managerial version of a boxer with power in both fists.
In one fist, Gotzev holds newly-crowned WBO heavyweight champion Sergei Lyakhovich. In the other, Samuel Peter, the high-ranked contender with a brutal right hand reminiscent of Earnie Shavers. Both are under 30 and arguably put on the two most exciting performances by a heavyweight in the last eight months  Lyakhovich in his stunning upset of belt-holder Lamon Brewster on April Fool's Day, Peter in a gallant loss to Wladimir Klitschko last September in which he knocked the current IBF champion down three times.
Since facing Klitschko, Peter has been working to improve his boxing skills under new trainer Jesse Reid. He is ranked fourth by both the WBC and IBF, and it is not inconceivable that by year's end Gotzev could hold an improbable 50 percent lease on heavyweight championship property.
That undoubtedly would be upsetting to some movers and shakers in the industry, who prefer doing business as usual... which is to say, down and dirty. Gotzev is a maverick, one who does not shy from saying nasty things about the Machiavellian lords of boxing.
"A lot of managers out there are career criminals in that they steal a fighter who another manager or a promoter has worked so hard to develop." Gotzev said.
Neither is Gotzev diplomatic about "champions" he considers gutless compared to his two young lions:
"Here we go again with Klitschko," Gotzev said. "Now, they're hyping him all over like he's the total package, a guy with good size and athleticism. But when it comes to the heart ticking, Sergei easily surpasses him."
It is not unusual for boxers like Peter and Lyakhovich to seemingly come out of nowhere and become major players. But what is atypical is for one manager, who selected just two fighters from different Olympics, to have molded them into championship-caliber boxers.
So who is this guy Ivaylo Gotzev? Try Googling his name and you come up with just 51 pages, which pales next to the thousands and thousands for almost any other man of power in boxing. Don King, for example, has 234,000.
All the great wizard Google will yield about Gotzev is the same stuff you read in numerous website interviews, and the often outrageous statements he makes from press conference podiums: lots of info about his fighters, nothing about him. To find out about this man who took a brute, unpolished Nigerian with just 23 amateur fights, and a refugee from Belarus and steered them through the shark-filled waters of boxing, we abandoned high-tech searches and reached for the telephone.
As usual, Gotzev was courteous, willing to give of his time, and wonderfully quotable  when it came to talking about his boxers. As the conversation shifted to him, however, the usually long-winded Gotzev spoke almost in sound bytes. Still, he gave up (it felt like that, a reluctant letting go) some details that shed light.
Ivalyo Gotzev grew up in Bulgaria, one of the few countries in the world never to produce a professional boxing champion, let alone many professional fighters. Mapquest tells me (who knows geography?) it is located in Eastern Europe, north of Turkey and Greece on the Black Sea. On the west, Bulgaria is bordered by vacation spots like Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Suffice it to say, Gotzev did not grow up near a Disneyland, which explains his feisty, brutally honest and ultra self-confident air  pure survival modus operandi.
A drive north from Bulgaria to where Lyakhovich was born and raised in Belarus, passes through the country of Klitschkovia  errr... make that the Ukraine  under the great shadow of the former Soviet Union, which only 25 years ago still forbid its formidable amateur boxers from turning pro. So how did Gotzev, who did not grow up in a fight town like Philly, New York or Detroit, come to boxing?
Gotzev got his first taste of the sport when he joined some neighborhood friends who were training regularly at a local gym. These orphans of the Communist storm were chasing the only improbable dream open to them behind the Iron Curtain, Olympic glory. Gotzev was, by his own admission not a great boxer, and had no illusions of gold medals dangling around his neck. Gotzev's love affair with boxing did not begin in a ring, but in front of a television set.
The teenager was watching boxing from the 1988 Olympics in Seoul when all the circuits in his brain suddenly morphed into a single thought: boxing! "One of the kids I used to box with, Ivailo Hristov, beat Michael Carbajal for the junior flyweight gold medal," Gotzev said. "Then in 1992, a lot of my ex-teammates went to the Barcelona Olympics. Seeing kids I grew up with achieving their dreams got to me. I wanted to be part of boxing. I said to myself, 'I have got to bring these guys to the U.S.' So I went to America when I was 20."
Gotzev, a sturdy East European used to hard work, got into construction. With brains as well as brawn, he eventually was put in charge of subcontracting work, and then ended up owning his own firm with businesses in Hawaii, Arizona and California. With enough money in his pocket now to buy his way into the game, Gotzev left the construction business for good in the late 1990s and headed off to the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, buying tickets to only one event: boxing. Gotzev was in search of talent.
He did not have a lot of money, certainly not enough to bid for future professional world champions who represented the U.S. that year  Floyd Mayweather Jr., Fernando Vargas, Antonio Tarver, David Reid and Eric Morel. His pocket was deep enough to afford only a prospect, and it had to be one that fell under the radar of established boxing promoters, managers and trainers in attendance.
Gotzev found that prospect in Lyakhovich, a 20-year-old who had won his first round before losing. From Gotzev's research, he also knew that Lyakhovich earlier in the year had beaten the then highly-regarded and future 2000 gold medalist Audley Harrison in the European championships in Minsk. Gotzev signed Lyakhovich, and thus began his vision quest.
"I just loved going to the Olympics, grabbing a kid, and then later going through the process it took to see my dreams fulfilled," Gotzev said. "If you look where I am today, it wasn't by luck. I had to work very hard, to chip away all the time to move my fighters up."
Gotzev did not immediately try to cash in on his first investment. Instead of letting Lyakhovich turn pro, he gave him nearly 18 months of amateur competition.
"Sergei is a late bloomer," Gotzev said. "It took him time to evolve. He had to grow naturally and develop his style."
But what Lyakhovich did have, and what Gotzev valued in a boxer, were talent, heart and a willingness to fight through adversity.
"Where Sergei is from, they have very tough winters and hard summers," Gotzev said. "His family did not have much money. He would walk around with this old jacket with holes in it, and nobody looking at him would imagine that some day he would be a world champion."
Belarus was and still is, a dangerous country, where first communist oppression and then bitter political violence were an every day occurrence and continue to be today. A kid grew up with a tough skin in Belarus, or he didn't get to grow up at all.
When Gotzev felt Lyakhovich was ready for the pros, he gave him his first fight in December 1998, against a ham-and-egger in fellow Belarusian Igor Sharapov (0-4). The tag line in Boxingrec.com says the fight took place in "Aquarium, Minsk, Belarus." Assuming they didn't stage the match under water in a shark tank - even mighty Google wouldn't yield anything about this mysterious Aquarium â€â€- Lyakhovich's debut was an easy one: KO 1. From an Aquarium to the fish bowl of championship boxing, maybe this debut was fitting.
By March 2000, Lyakhovich had won his first nine fights and Gotzev felt buoyed enough to dip back into the Olympic talent pool in the Sydney summer games. This time Gotzev went for an entirely difference kind of heavyweight. Samuel Peter was a 6-foot-1, 240-pounder with shoulders wide enough to force him to move sideways through doorways in his native Nigeria. Having only started boxing at 16, and with just 21 amateur fights before making it to the quarterfinals, Peter was in the eyes of Gotzev a wrecking machine without the gears yet to control it.
"Sam and Sergei were at different stages when I signed them," Gotzev said. "Sam was always very raw. At the Olympics, I just saw an athlete without fear. And every time he threw and connected with one of his bombs, the other guy was breaking up and trying to find a way to protect himself."
Peter's raw power did not go unnoticed by top promoter Dino Duva and his Hall of Fame father, trainer Lou Duva. When Gotzev signed Peter, he hooked up with the Duvas to promote and train him.
Unlike Lyakhovich, Gotzev saw no point in having a power puncher like Peter waste time in the amateurs, where boxing skills and body-tapping points usually carry the day. Peter had his first pro fight seven months after the Olympics. He knocked out 16 of his first 17 opponents, and was 24-0 with 21 KOs when he was thrust into the ring against the far more experienced Klitschko. It was a match Gotzev was reluctant to make, feeling Peter needed more seasoning. But he was frustrated at the time with trying to find opponents willing to climb in the ring with his boxer.
"Writers who say, 'Who has he fought?' They don't know how hard we tried to get good fights. But nobody wanted to fight Samuel. They run for the hills when I call," Gotzev said before the Klitschko fight.
Lou Duva wasn't worried about seasoning, so enamored was he of Peter's raw power.
"He's like the great big heavyweights of the past, Ken Norton, Earnie Shavers and Sonny Liston," Duva said at the pre-fight luncheon. "His jab is a two-by-four, and he uses it from different directions. The first punch he gets off clean on Klitschko's chin, it's all over."
Peter knocked down Klitschko three times in the fight, but a combination of not knowing how to put away an opponent and Wladimir's incessant clinching when in trouble wound up putting a loss by unanimous decision on the 24-year-old's record. Gotzev, while unhappy with the way Peter had been schooled for Klitschko  trainer Pops Anderson admitted later he had only one fight plan, knock out the Ukrainian  was not discouraged.
"A lot of people looked at that fight on TV and they said they found a lot of holes in Sam," Gotzev said. "What they don't know is every time Sam misses, his punch whistles by his opponent's ear and they become petrified. Klitschko was petrified, and he was knocked down by only grazing shots. Sam never caught him cleanly on the chin. When Sam Peter hits you on the chin, you will go down and stay down. No fighter can survive his power."
Longtime HBO commentator Larry Merchant, who worked that fight, saw it the same way Gotzev did, and is eager to see what Reid can do working with Peter.
"Finally Duva has wised up and is getting a name trainer to teach Peter to box," Merchant said. "If Peter had known how to box, he would have crushed Klitschko. If Peter can learn, then he will walk through the division."
With Reid on board, Peter has come back with two victories against lesser opponents, and is currently ranked fourth by both the WBC and IBF, eighth by the WBO and 12th by the WBA. Despite showing exciting punching power against Klitschko, Gotzev was dismayed at how quickly the networks seemingly lost interest in Peter.
"I had wanted to give Sam a few more months to develop, but the upside in the Klitschko fight was the hype was so big for Sam," Gotzev said. "Then, after he puts down Klitschko three times but loses, they dropped the ball on him."
It was a discouraging 2005 overall for Gotzev. Not only did Peter suffer his first loss, but just when he had engineered Lyakhovich into position for a big fight, setbacks came.
In December 2004, Lyakhovich jumped onto contender radar with a unanimous decision over once hot prospect Dominick Guinn, who was 25-1 at the time. Gotzev then lined up a potentially career-making fight for Lyakhovich with Klitschko (Wladimir) in April, only to be forced to pull out because of visa problems. Lyakhovich had come to America in 1998 and had been living in Arizona. But he had no passport of any kind, and with the Klitschko fight scheduled for Germany, Lyakhovich was afraid he could not get a visa to return to the States.
Gotzev then scheduled a September fight against fellow contender Owen Beck, but Sergei suffered a chest injury in training and had to withdraw from that bout, too. When Lyakhovich was healed, Gotzev started pounding on doors looking for a fight with a contender. He had no interest in a tune-up. What Gotzev got was immeasurably better, a championship fight this past April with Brewster.
In a division where every manager and promoter with a contender was hungry to fight one of the dubious champions, it was no small feat for Gotzev to pull this off. After all, Lyakhovich was a relatively unknown quantity, with only one quality opponent on his record, and would be fighting off a 16-month layoff.
"It was a difficult fight to make," Gotzev said. "He was a foreigner and the big promoters were looking for ticket sellers. They wanted a young heavyweight who will be like Mike Tyson, and do business right away for them. I told them (promoters) what he was capable of, and they thought I was crazy."
Gotzev may have been crazy, but like a fox. "I was never more sure my fighter would beat an opponent," Gotzev said of the Brewster bout. "I laughed when Guinn's people called me to make a fight, too. I had seen both Guinn and Brewster, and I knew what they could and couldn't do."
Lyakhovich rewarded his manager with a stunning unanimous decision over the power-punching Brewster, who said later that a detached retina hampered his ability to fight. Despite what Brewster said, the bout was very exciting, and Lyakhovich not only bravely hung on in the later rounds when the champion was punishing him with power, but gave back some pain of his own.
"He beat Brewster in the late rounds because he knew in his mind where he had come from and how hard it had been to get there," Gotzev said. "Growing up in Belarus is what won him this fight. It kept him gong."
Besides a world title, Lyakhovich caught the eye of promoters and the networks because of the qualities Gotzev had always seen in him: consummate boxing skills, power and an aggressive, exciting style.
Even with a championship belt and a crowd-pleasing contender, Gotzev still is experiencing problems making fights. Peter has been called out by Shannon Briggs and Sultan Ibragimov, but has no scheduled opponent. The one guy Gotzev wanted badly for Lyakhovich  Klitschko  ducked him, according to Gotzev.
"Klitschko made us an offer but never followed through on it," Gotzev said. "Then they (Klitschko camp) told the press they had had contractual issues with us and couldn't make the fight. That's not true. If they really wanted to make the fight, I would have been able to make the fight."
Even more grating, Gotzev said, was the lack of respect Klitschko's people showed toward the new champ.
"They said Sergei was 'a possible opponent.' Sergei is a champion and Klitschko is a possible opponent. We have other options. Instead of fighting Sergei I'm hearing they will fight (James) Toney (in September). James Toney is not a name out there for the fans. He did nothing to deserve a title shot after what he did with (Hasim) Rahman on HBO (a draw in March). Toney is an over-aged, overweight fighter who has never really done anything as a heavyweight. They said (Toney) was an easier fight to make. Well King is a co-promoter for Toney (with Goossen-Tutor), and we are with King. We could have made a deal just as easy."
Gotzev, never to be mistaken for a diplomat, shows nothing but contempt for Klitschko. "What will he do, jab Toney to death? He'll stay on the outside and try to wear him down. It's a perfect mismatch, just like Byrd was,' Gotzev said. "Klitschko's style is tailored only to win, but is never exciting to watch. Sergei showed how a champion wins."
As for Lyakhovich and Peter fighting each other, Gotzev says the only way that scenario goes down is if Peter wins a championship, both win unification fights, and "then they are the last two guys standing."
In the meantime, while Gotzev deals with a strong hand, he is already looking to add to his clout.
"They are holding the 2006 World Championships in my hometown, Ploviv. I am excited about going there and seeing this whole pool of talent. I already got my eyes on a couple of fighters," Gotzev said.
Based on his track record so far, expect Gotzev to return from Bulgaria with even "heavier" hands. ..... Seems like he is another Horatio Alger story. I semi expected him to be mobbed up but it seems he is another interesting hardworking guy who made his money the hard way.....
In a sport where successful managers might have 15 to 25 fighters in their stables, Ivaylo Gotzev has just two. Yet this brash and outspoken immigrant from Bulgaria is a power broker in the heavyweight division today because, as the song says, "He's got the whole world, in his hands."
Gotzev is the managerial version of a boxer with power in both fists.
In one fist, Gotzev holds newly-crowned WBO heavyweight champion Sergei Lyakhovich. In the other, Samuel Peter, the high-ranked contender with a brutal right hand reminiscent of Earnie Shavers. Both are under 30 and arguably put on the two most exciting performances by a heavyweight in the last eight months  Lyakhovich in his stunning upset of belt-holder Lamon Brewster on April Fool's Day, Peter in a gallant loss to Wladimir Klitschko last September in which he knocked the current IBF champion down three times.
Since facing Klitschko, Peter has been working to improve his boxing skills under new trainer Jesse Reid. He is ranked fourth by both the WBC and IBF, and it is not inconceivable that by year's end Gotzev could hold an improbable 50 percent lease on heavyweight championship property.
That undoubtedly would be upsetting to some movers and shakers in the industry, who prefer doing business as usual... which is to say, down and dirty. Gotzev is a maverick, one who does not shy from saying nasty things about the Machiavellian lords of boxing.
"A lot of managers out there are career criminals in that they steal a fighter who another manager or a promoter has worked so hard to develop." Gotzev said.
Neither is Gotzev diplomatic about "champions" he considers gutless compared to his two young lions:
"Here we go again with Klitschko," Gotzev said. "Now, they're hyping him all over like he's the total package, a guy with good size and athleticism. But when it comes to the heart ticking, Sergei easily surpasses him."
It is not unusual for boxers like Peter and Lyakhovich to seemingly come out of nowhere and become major players. But what is atypical is for one manager, who selected just two fighters from different Olympics, to have molded them into championship-caliber boxers.
So who is this guy Ivaylo Gotzev? Try Googling his name and you come up with just 51 pages, which pales next to the thousands and thousands for almost any other man of power in boxing. Don King, for example, has 234,000.
All the great wizard Google will yield about Gotzev is the same stuff you read in numerous website interviews, and the often outrageous statements he makes from press conference podiums: lots of info about his fighters, nothing about him. To find out about this man who took a brute, unpolished Nigerian with just 23 amateur fights, and a refugee from Belarus and steered them through the shark-filled waters of boxing, we abandoned high-tech searches and reached for the telephone.
As usual, Gotzev was courteous, willing to give of his time, and wonderfully quotable  when it came to talking about his boxers. As the conversation shifted to him, however, the usually long-winded Gotzev spoke almost in sound bytes. Still, he gave up (it felt like that, a reluctant letting go) some details that shed light.
Ivalyo Gotzev grew up in Bulgaria, one of the few countries in the world never to produce a professional boxing champion, let alone many professional fighters. Mapquest tells me (who knows geography?) it is located in Eastern Europe, north of Turkey and Greece on the Black Sea. On the west, Bulgaria is bordered by vacation spots like Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. Suffice it to say, Gotzev did not grow up near a Disneyland, which explains his feisty, brutally honest and ultra self-confident air  pure survival modus operandi.
A drive north from Bulgaria to where Lyakhovich was born and raised in Belarus, passes through the country of Klitschkovia  errr... make that the Ukraine  under the great shadow of the former Soviet Union, which only 25 years ago still forbid its formidable amateur boxers from turning pro. So how did Gotzev, who did not grow up in a fight town like Philly, New York or Detroit, come to boxing?
Gotzev got his first taste of the sport when he joined some neighborhood friends who were training regularly at a local gym. These orphans of the Communist storm were chasing the only improbable dream open to them behind the Iron Curtain, Olympic glory. Gotzev was, by his own admission not a great boxer, and had no illusions of gold medals dangling around his neck. Gotzev's love affair with boxing did not begin in a ring, but in front of a television set.
The teenager was watching boxing from the 1988 Olympics in Seoul when all the circuits in his brain suddenly morphed into a single thought: boxing! "One of the kids I used to box with, Ivailo Hristov, beat Michael Carbajal for the junior flyweight gold medal," Gotzev said. "Then in 1992, a lot of my ex-teammates went to the Barcelona Olympics. Seeing kids I grew up with achieving their dreams got to me. I wanted to be part of boxing. I said to myself, 'I have got to bring these guys to the U.S.' So I went to America when I was 20."
Gotzev, a sturdy East European used to hard work, got into construction. With brains as well as brawn, he eventually was put in charge of subcontracting work, and then ended up owning his own firm with businesses in Hawaii, Arizona and California. With enough money in his pocket now to buy his way into the game, Gotzev left the construction business for good in the late 1990s and headed off to the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, buying tickets to only one event: boxing. Gotzev was in search of talent.
He did not have a lot of money, certainly not enough to bid for future professional world champions who represented the U.S. that year  Floyd Mayweather Jr., Fernando Vargas, Antonio Tarver, David Reid and Eric Morel. His pocket was deep enough to afford only a prospect, and it had to be one that fell under the radar of established boxing promoters, managers and trainers in attendance.
Gotzev found that prospect in Lyakhovich, a 20-year-old who had won his first round before losing. From Gotzev's research, he also knew that Lyakhovich earlier in the year had beaten the then highly-regarded and future 2000 gold medalist Audley Harrison in the European championships in Minsk. Gotzev signed Lyakhovich, and thus began his vision quest.
"I just loved going to the Olympics, grabbing a kid, and then later going through the process it took to see my dreams fulfilled," Gotzev said. "If you look where I am today, it wasn't by luck. I had to work very hard, to chip away all the time to move my fighters up."
Gotzev did not immediately try to cash in on his first investment. Instead of letting Lyakhovich turn pro, he gave him nearly 18 months of amateur competition.
"Sergei is a late bloomer," Gotzev said. "It took him time to evolve. He had to grow naturally and develop his style."
But what Lyakhovich did have, and what Gotzev valued in a boxer, were talent, heart and a willingness to fight through adversity.
"Where Sergei is from, they have very tough winters and hard summers," Gotzev said. "His family did not have much money. He would walk around with this old jacket with holes in it, and nobody looking at him would imagine that some day he would be a world champion."
Belarus was and still is, a dangerous country, where first communist oppression and then bitter political violence were an every day occurrence and continue to be today. A kid grew up with a tough skin in Belarus, or he didn't get to grow up at all.
When Gotzev felt Lyakhovich was ready for the pros, he gave him his first fight in December 1998, against a ham-and-egger in fellow Belarusian Igor Sharapov (0-4). The tag line in Boxingrec.com says the fight took place in "Aquarium, Minsk, Belarus." Assuming they didn't stage the match under water in a shark tank - even mighty Google wouldn't yield anything about this mysterious Aquarium â€â€- Lyakhovich's debut was an easy one: KO 1. From an Aquarium to the fish bowl of championship boxing, maybe this debut was fitting.
By March 2000, Lyakhovich had won his first nine fights and Gotzev felt buoyed enough to dip back into the Olympic talent pool in the Sydney summer games. This time Gotzev went for an entirely difference kind of heavyweight. Samuel Peter was a 6-foot-1, 240-pounder with shoulders wide enough to force him to move sideways through doorways in his native Nigeria. Having only started boxing at 16, and with just 21 amateur fights before making it to the quarterfinals, Peter was in the eyes of Gotzev a wrecking machine without the gears yet to control it.
"Sam and Sergei were at different stages when I signed them," Gotzev said. "Sam was always very raw. At the Olympics, I just saw an athlete without fear. And every time he threw and connected with one of his bombs, the other guy was breaking up and trying to find a way to protect himself."
Peter's raw power did not go unnoticed by top promoter Dino Duva and his Hall of Fame father, trainer Lou Duva. When Gotzev signed Peter, he hooked up with the Duvas to promote and train him.
Unlike Lyakhovich, Gotzev saw no point in having a power puncher like Peter waste time in the amateurs, where boxing skills and body-tapping points usually carry the day. Peter had his first pro fight seven months after the Olympics. He knocked out 16 of his first 17 opponents, and was 24-0 with 21 KOs when he was thrust into the ring against the far more experienced Klitschko. It was a match Gotzev was reluctant to make, feeling Peter needed more seasoning. But he was frustrated at the time with trying to find opponents willing to climb in the ring with his boxer.
"Writers who say, 'Who has he fought?' They don't know how hard we tried to get good fights. But nobody wanted to fight Samuel. They run for the hills when I call," Gotzev said before the Klitschko fight.
Lou Duva wasn't worried about seasoning, so enamored was he of Peter's raw power.
"He's like the great big heavyweights of the past, Ken Norton, Earnie Shavers and Sonny Liston," Duva said at the pre-fight luncheon. "His jab is a two-by-four, and he uses it from different directions. The first punch he gets off clean on Klitschko's chin, it's all over."
Peter knocked down Klitschko three times in the fight, but a combination of not knowing how to put away an opponent and Wladimir's incessant clinching when in trouble wound up putting a loss by unanimous decision on the 24-year-old's record. Gotzev, while unhappy with the way Peter had been schooled for Klitschko  trainer Pops Anderson admitted later he had only one fight plan, knock out the Ukrainian  was not discouraged.
"A lot of people looked at that fight on TV and they said they found a lot of holes in Sam," Gotzev said. "What they don't know is every time Sam misses, his punch whistles by his opponent's ear and they become petrified. Klitschko was petrified, and he was knocked down by only grazing shots. Sam never caught him cleanly on the chin. When Sam Peter hits you on the chin, you will go down and stay down. No fighter can survive his power."
Longtime HBO commentator Larry Merchant, who worked that fight, saw it the same way Gotzev did, and is eager to see what Reid can do working with Peter.
"Finally Duva has wised up and is getting a name trainer to teach Peter to box," Merchant said. "If Peter had known how to box, he would have crushed Klitschko. If Peter can learn, then he will walk through the division."
With Reid on board, Peter has come back with two victories against lesser opponents, and is currently ranked fourth by both the WBC and IBF, eighth by the WBO and 12th by the WBA. Despite showing exciting punching power against Klitschko, Gotzev was dismayed at how quickly the networks seemingly lost interest in Peter.
"I had wanted to give Sam a few more months to develop, but the upside in the Klitschko fight was the hype was so big for Sam," Gotzev said. "Then, after he puts down Klitschko three times but loses, they dropped the ball on him."
It was a discouraging 2005 overall for Gotzev. Not only did Peter suffer his first loss, but just when he had engineered Lyakhovich into position for a big fight, setbacks came.
In December 2004, Lyakhovich jumped onto contender radar with a unanimous decision over once hot prospect Dominick Guinn, who was 25-1 at the time. Gotzev then lined up a potentially career-making fight for Lyakhovich with Klitschko (Wladimir) in April, only to be forced to pull out because of visa problems. Lyakhovich had come to America in 1998 and had been living in Arizona. But he had no passport of any kind, and with the Klitschko fight scheduled for Germany, Lyakhovich was afraid he could not get a visa to return to the States.
Gotzev then scheduled a September fight against fellow contender Owen Beck, but Sergei suffered a chest injury in training and had to withdraw from that bout, too. When Lyakhovich was healed, Gotzev started pounding on doors looking for a fight with a contender. He had no interest in a tune-up. What Gotzev got was immeasurably better, a championship fight this past April with Brewster.
In a division where every manager and promoter with a contender was hungry to fight one of the dubious champions, it was no small feat for Gotzev to pull this off. After all, Lyakhovich was a relatively unknown quantity, with only one quality opponent on his record, and would be fighting off a 16-month layoff.
"It was a difficult fight to make," Gotzev said. "He was a foreigner and the big promoters were looking for ticket sellers. They wanted a young heavyweight who will be like Mike Tyson, and do business right away for them. I told them (promoters) what he was capable of, and they thought I was crazy."
Gotzev may have been crazy, but like a fox. "I was never more sure my fighter would beat an opponent," Gotzev said of the Brewster bout. "I laughed when Guinn's people called me to make a fight, too. I had seen both Guinn and Brewster, and I knew what they could and couldn't do."
Lyakhovich rewarded his manager with a stunning unanimous decision over the power-punching Brewster, who said later that a detached retina hampered his ability to fight. Despite what Brewster said, the bout was very exciting, and Lyakhovich not only bravely hung on in the later rounds when the champion was punishing him with power, but gave back some pain of his own.
"He beat Brewster in the late rounds because he knew in his mind where he had come from and how hard it had been to get there," Gotzev said. "Growing up in Belarus is what won him this fight. It kept him gong."
Besides a world title, Lyakhovich caught the eye of promoters and the networks because of the qualities Gotzev had always seen in him: consummate boxing skills, power and an aggressive, exciting style.
Even with a championship belt and a crowd-pleasing contender, Gotzev still is experiencing problems making fights. Peter has been called out by Shannon Briggs and Sultan Ibragimov, but has no scheduled opponent. The one guy Gotzev wanted badly for Lyakhovich  Klitschko  ducked him, according to Gotzev.
"Klitschko made us an offer but never followed through on it," Gotzev said. "Then they (Klitschko camp) told the press they had had contractual issues with us and couldn't make the fight. That's not true. If they really wanted to make the fight, I would have been able to make the fight."
Even more grating, Gotzev said, was the lack of respect Klitschko's people showed toward the new champ.
"They said Sergei was 'a possible opponent.' Sergei is a champion and Klitschko is a possible opponent. We have other options. Instead of fighting Sergei I'm hearing they will fight (James) Toney (in September). James Toney is not a name out there for the fans. He did nothing to deserve a title shot after what he did with (Hasim) Rahman on HBO (a draw in March). Toney is an over-aged, overweight fighter who has never really done anything as a heavyweight. They said (Toney) was an easier fight to make. Well King is a co-promoter for Toney (with Goossen-Tutor), and we are with King. We could have made a deal just as easy."
Gotzev, never to be mistaken for a diplomat, shows nothing but contempt for Klitschko. "What will he do, jab Toney to death? He'll stay on the outside and try to wear him down. It's a perfect mismatch, just like Byrd was,' Gotzev said. "Klitschko's style is tailored only to win, but is never exciting to watch. Sergei showed how a champion wins."
As for Lyakhovich and Peter fighting each other, Gotzev says the only way that scenario goes down is if Peter wins a championship, both win unification fights, and "then they are the last two guys standing."
In the meantime, while Gotzev deals with a strong hand, he is already looking to add to his clout.
"They are holding the 2006 World Championships in my hometown, Ploviv. I am excited about going there and seeing this whole pool of talent. I already got my eyes on a couple of fighters," Gotzev said.
Based on his track record so far, expect Gotzev to return from Bulgaria with even "heavier" hands. ..... Seems like he is another Horatio Alger story. I semi expected him to be mobbed up but it seems he is another interesting hardworking guy who made his money the hard way.....