HUMAN SIDE OF THE RAGING BULL
by Nick Walshaw
Sunday Telegraph (Australia)
September 11, 2011 Sunday
1 – State Edition
Vic Darchinyan is a proud Aussie, but Nick Walshaw goes on a journey
to Armenia and finds out why he’s the true people’s champion
THERE’S no gold on the old man, which is why he waits. Quietly
sipping vodka from a small glass, while on the other side of this
heaving Armenian restaurant, Vic Darchinyan is continually swamped
by European millionaires – they are all black Armani and blinding
jewellery. In one case, an entire top row of gold teeth.
And loudly, they begin toasting their hero.
Politicians and police. Businessmen and restaurateurs. Even Tata
Simonyan, the Armenian pop star whose record sales are measured by
the million, is in the house.
Properly explaining the wealth now surrounding this table requires
a quick trip across town. Less than 20 minutes to that enormous,
white mansion, which, for reasons best known to the owner, has been
purpose-built to mirror the Las Vegas institution known as Caesars
Palace Casino.
That’s right, one of these Armenian boxing fans has created a home
of all classic Roman architecture and rearing stallion statues.
Extravagance right down to the gold-rimmed tumblers inside his
cupboard.
Yet tonight, even Caesar is only one of a crowd.
He is patiently waiting his turn among these men in their diamond
Rolexes and Clive Christian cologne.
Glock pistols are on more than one hip.
Cigars, too, are being lit by the Russian billionaire whose own
lavish home, neighbouring that of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin,
boasts the ultimate accessory for any Moscow winter – a mechanical sun.
Which is why the old man waits in the distance and understands how
every Armenian worth his chest hair will be chasing an audience with
this 54kg fighter. A bantamweight who hasn’t just defended his IBO
world title in the country’s first professional boxing event, but
afterwards climbed barechested and bloodied into the stands to dance
with Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan.
Darchinyan, you see, is the undisputed superstar here in this country
of his birth.
He is a national hero whose dressing room is guarded by armed militia.
Whose walkouts are shadowed by secret service. Who right now cheers
as grown men skoll $1500 cognac, the type once favoured by no less
than Winston Churchill, straight from the bottle.
Honestly, when was the last time you saw a boxer boast the Mercedes
logo on his trunks?
Or have parliamentarians jostle for signatures?
And if you reckon Anthony Mundine can pull a crowd Down Under,
consider that tonight in a country of more than 3 million people,
90 per cent of all television sets have been tuned into Darchinyan’s
12 rounds against South Africa’s Evans Mbamba.
“And because there’s no professional boxing association, they don’t
even have real commentators,” laughs close friend and manager Elias
Nassar. “It’s just a couple of locals yelling ‘Bravo Vic, Bravo’
every time he punches.
“I always thought the way fight fans treated him throughout America was
huge. But here in Armenia . . . they’ve even written songs about him.”
And so less than 15 minutes later, an ageing crooner, all sharp
threads and jet black hair, takes to the stage with his band;
launching immediately into a rockin’ Armenian classic, where the
only words discernible to this hack are the repeated cries of
Daaaar-chin-yaaaaaarn.
“Basically, they’re talking about climbing Mt Ararat,” smiles Olga
Darchinyan, who like her husband speaks Armenian, Russian and English.
“They’re explaining how Vic can do anything. How the whole country
is behind him.”
Over and over tonight it continues this way. Armenians singing his
name. Toasting his triumphs.
Enamoured by this man whose fists are so internationally acclaimed
that NBA star LeBron James once asked to play a few hands of poker
“alongside my favourite fighter” in Las Vegas.
Yet amid all the chaos and cognac, all the toasting and Tata hits,
there is one inescapable fact that catches you . . . Vakhtang
Darchinyan is a proud Aussie.
You first noticed it a few hours earlier, when, in his dressing
room only minutes out from the historic bout with Mbamba, Darchinyan
desperately searched for that Australian flag he always carries to
the ring.
At first, no flag could be found.
Anywhere.
It led someone within the camp to quietly suggest that with Armenians
having paid up to $4000 for this homecoming, maybe it wasn’t the best
arena for flying a Southern Cross anyway.
At which the boxer stopped, lifted his head, then replied: “Brother,
if that flag doesn’t go to the ring, I don’t go into the ring.”
Indeed, in Darchinyan you have a man who dedicated his Yhonny Perez
fight, in part, to the Anzacs. Someone, who despite being given
more than $1 million in prime Yerevan real estate by the government,
prefers to continue paying off his Concord home.
Who right now has paused celebrations to demand Frank Hadley, Gary Dean
and the rest of the Australian Boxing Commission be brought immediately
to the Cherry Blossom restaurant so they, too, can eat from these 20
tables covered in breads, cold meat and unfinishable piles of barbecue.
This is important for the Super Flyweight of the Decade.
Speaking later with Nassar, you learn that Darchinyan demanded that
more than $100,000 be spent on flights, accommodation and transfers
for these seven Australian officials he now seeks out. A fair effort
when you consider that for a hundred bucks he could have brought the
entire Georgian Boxing Commission across the border by taxi.
“But Vic’s Australian,” Nassar says. “So is every member of this team.
Yes, we have backgrounds in Armenia, Lebanon, Greece, but when we
travel the world, it’s done as a group of proud Aussies.”
And still Darchinyan knows that back home in Australia there will
always be those who can’t quite accept him. Those who point to the
Armenian colours topping his trunks, to those unmistakable European
looks and rough, broken English as some kind of proof the fighter is
somehow less Australian than the rest of us.
Hell, even Ring magazine lists him as Armenian.
So why? Why tonight has Darchinyan been so determined to bring an
Australian flavour to proceedings; he even insisted on walking out
to that unmistakable boom of our leading ring announcer, Mark Warren?
“Australia’s my country,” the fighter says simply, his confused look
making you want to immediately re-phrase the question.
“It is where my son was born.
Where I became boxing champion of the world. Yes, I grew up in Armenia.
But Australia . . . it’s where I choose to live.”
And please believe us when we say Darchinyan has had offers to live
everywhere. Which is also why he shelled out $1 million to make this
latest fight. Why he spent three months so glued to his mobile during
preparations, it would eventually hamper the way he fought inside
Karen Demirchyan Sports Complex.
“But just as Australians are proud of me, so the people of Armenia
are proud,” Darchinyan continues. “Even when I moved to Australia
after the Sydney Olympics, they’re still proud.
That’s why I have this fight here . . . I never want Armenians to
think I’ve forgotten them.”
It’s a loyalty that exists in everything Darchinyan does.
Like the fact he flew Angelo Hyder, his Australian trainer, halfway
around the world for this fight, only to have Vazgen Badalyan, his
original trainer and now chief of police, employed as lead cornerman.
Or that top American promoter Gary Shaw, after 13 years in undoubtedly
the most cut-throat sporting business on the planet, says Darchinyan
is the only fighter he represents without a contract.
“Can’t even remember when it ran out,” the brash New Yorker laughs.
For those not well acquainted with the fight game, Shaw is something
of a big deal. He is a millionaire who has overseen the careers of
countless world champions, including Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis, even
Manny Pacquiao. And yet still there is only one boxer with whom he
eats breakfast on fight day.
“But you have to understand how loyal this guy is,” Shaw says over
a few beers on fight eve. “Say a brawl breaks out in this bar right
now and, of all the fighters I’ve ever represented, I can call only
one to help me out . . . man, it’s Vic Darchinyan every time.”
Loyalty, humility, respect. These are the three words on which
Darchinyan has built his empire . . .
combined, of course, with a hard left that landed so heavily on Mbamba
in the seventh round that we’re fairly sure hundreds of neighbouring
Turks were outside in their pyjamas trying to work out where the
bloody noise was coming from.
There is also an unbreakable hunger, a desire in Darchinyan that sees
him called Batoon, a Lebanese word for concrete, by the men that are
more family than fight team.
“If you tell Vic he cannot lift a tree from its roots,” smiles hulking
strength coach J Fares, “he will go lift a tree from its roots.”
Indeed, when Victor Burgos made a throat-slitting gesture at the
Australian before their 2007 bout, Darchinyan promised to send the
disrespectful Mexican to a hospital ward.
And he did.
He beat Burgos so badly over 12 rounds that the flyweight would suffer
three heart failures between ringside and hospital and spend three
months in a coma.
“Which left Vic in a terrible way,” Hyder recalls. “He was frantic.
Kept praying until, finally, the kid recovered. Many people don’t
know that.”
While he may be the southpaw, who, according to Shaw, “revived the
fight game for little men”, Darchinyan also remains the humble son
of a petrol station attendant.
He’s the same fella who never enters a room without first opening
the door for every member of his crew.
“Does it all the time,” Fares confirms of the ritual.
“Even when we went to meet the Armenian President, Vic made sure I
entered first.”
IT’S why the old man with no gold has waited so long to speak with
him. Why now, around 4am, with the businessmen having moved to a
downstairs bar, he finally approaches and, in Armenian, asks not only
to toast the champ, but that someone may translate for the small crew
of Aussies gathered around him.
For this is a story he wants everyone to know. A yarn taking place
only a few years back when his daughter, still only a young girl,
was involved in a terrible car accident right here on the streets of
Yerevan. No seatbelt, the interpreter says. Broken back.
Now this, remember, is not the man who calls Caesers Palace home.
Nor the Russian billionaire, who bought a sun to warm himself.
No, this is the old man with no gold; which also made him a father
with no answers.
A man who suddenly had no way to help his little girl. No money for
the operations or the medications required – not just in the following
days and weeks, but for what would effectively be the rest of her life.
And then, he says, the cheques started to come in.
They arrived on a regular basis from Australia, because, even though
he hardly knew Vakhtang Darchinyan, someone else did. They not only
told the champ about this humble man’s plight, but asked if, maybe,
he might help?
And today, well, his daughter lives.
“So tonight, we drink,” says the old man with no gold, lifting his
glass of vodka high into the air. “Not to Vic Darchinyan as boxing
champ . . . but to Vic Darchinyan as a man.”
LITTLE BIG MAN Vic Darchinyan IBO BANTAMWEIGHT WORLD CHAMPION Born
Armenia Lives Sydney Age 35 Record 37 wins, 3 losses, 1 draw