"Boxing from the inside." Anton Kadushin

“It’s impossible to make money in professional boxing, just to maintain your pants.”

Coach Anton Kadushin tells especially for Ultimatum Boxing how he accidentally became a cutman, practiced on his pregnant wife and helped Chudinov win.

I started boxing in 1993. Initially, I became very interested in hockey and, perhaps, if not for boxing, I would have continued to play. But one day a classmate invited me to a competition. He said that he was fighting, and that it was either scary or boring to go alone. I went. Since then I left hockey. I was 12 years old, and every day I fell more and more in love with boxing. I was no longer interested in the street, the regime was “home-study-training”, and so on until I was 25.

Already when I was a master of sports, I helped the coach with the younger generation - held pads, gave tips, seconded. At 25, I stopped performing, but continued to train and spar. At 27, I decided to completely switch to coaching. I told myself that since I won’t become a champion myself, I’ll try to raise him.

I became Cutman by accident. Eduard Kravtsov was forming the Russian team for the World Series of Boxing (WSB), and called me as the personal trainer of Alexander Khotantsev. In 2012, WSB made it mandatory to tape hands, but no one on the team knew how to do it. I won’t say that I actually knew how to do it, but I studied it for myself. Purely out of love for professional boxing, I watched videos of how famous cutmen like Chuck Bodak and Joe Souza work.

I practiced on my pregnant wife. She was 6-7 months through, and I was wrapping her hands. I found the optimal solutions through trial and error. I delved deeper into this topic. At that time, trainers generally took half a bottle of water and a towel into the corner, and I already had a “disturbing” suitcase: irons, adrenaline, tampons, Vaseline. In 2013, AIBA removed headgear from boxers, and this is where my skills came in handy. For my athletes, I was not only a coach, I could stop the bleeding, deal with cuts and wrap their hands correctly.

There are many difficult cases, I will highlight two. In 2015, Pyotr Khamukov competed at the European Championships in Bulgaria. He got cut in the first fight, and to win, he had to fight four more. And Peter passed through them with a severe cut. Every fight I treated it so that the doctor wouldn’t suspend him. The second case was when Fedor Chudinov boxed in Kemerovo with Ryan Ford. A very unpleasant hematoma with a cut, but we managed to stop the bleeding. Fedor won, and his eye closed after the fight.

I have always gravitated towards professional fights - they are more spectacular, more interesting and there is time to create a plan for the fight. When I worked at the St. Petersburg Boxing Federation, I met manager Oleg Bogdanov. He entrusted me with two of his boxers - Ruslan Berchuk and Igor Selivanov. I prepared them, they both won. I decided that I liked the approach, methodology and atmosphere of professional boxing. More than Olympic. I have only one amateur now - Gleb Bakshi.

My first success as a professional coach was the fight between Ruslan Berchuk and Oleg Malinovsky in Kyiv. It may have been a little short, we lost on points, but the guys showed a performance. Everyone was delighted. And I was pleased with the work done. I realized that I felt the fight, I understood how to lead a boxer at a distance of 10 rounds. I see how to distribute forces, where to add, where to hold back.

My wife monitors the weight and nutrition of all my fighters. She is my other self, and she does her job perfectly, even if you wake her up at night. Anna builds an individual program for everyone. No matter how you train, if you eat incorrectly, you will not show your maximum. It's like filling an expensive sports car with low-quality fuel - it will stop running.

In Olympic boxing, if you become a world or Olympic champion, you get grants, prize money, cars and apartments. But these are isolated cases, and for this you have to go through so much. It’s impossible to make money from professional boxing in Russia. It's only enough to keep your pants up.

Fighters here do not have fees like in the USA. It seems to me that everyone wants to go overseas, only a few would like to continue their career in Russia. All the money there comes mainly from television, and we don’t have pay TV. There are good boxers, but the system for them to earn money is not built. And I don’t think it will appear any time soon. Professional boxing exists only thanks to the people who love it - patrons, sponsors. They make fights, help boxers live and move on.

Recorded: Alexey Alyokhin

Anton's IG: @antonkadushin