by David P. Greisman

Sergey Kovalev and Andre Ward each had tune-up fights ahead of their Nov. 19 pay-per-view. Wile Andre Ward had an easy night winning a unanimous decision over an undersized, unheralded Alexander Brand in August, Sergey Kovalev struggled a bit while winning on the scorecards over contender Isaac Chilemba.

That’s OK with Kovalev’s promoter, Kathy Duva.

“That’s exactly what I expected. That’s exactly what I wanted,” Duva told BoxingScene.com. “I wanted Sergey to be in a tough fight so he wouldn’t fall into that trap of, oh, this is going to be easy. I come from a different background, obviously, than Ward’s promoters. I was taught, my husband’s theory was the way you make a guy the best in the world is to challenge him. My feeling about Chilemba, when Jolene [Mizzone, the matchmaker for Main Events] first proposed it to me, my first reaction was, ‘Oh my god, no, Sergey’s going to struggle.’ And then I went, ‘Oh my god, yes, Sergey’s going to struggle.’

“He needs to struggle. You’re going into the biggest fight of your life, the defining fight of your career, probably. This locks him into the Hall of Fame if he wins. It is so easy to fall into this trap of thinking, ‘I’m the biggest, I’m the best, I blow on people and they fall down. He’s had a few opponents like that. [Nadjib] Mohammedi, a mandated opponent, when you start blowing through guys like that, doing the things that he did to Jean Pascal, having what turned out to be a far easier time with Bernard Hopkins than people expected, it’s real easy to fall into that trap. I thought if we put someone in front of him who’s just going to stand there and let him knock him out, what’s he going to learn? What self-realization will there be?

That’s why they went with Chilemba, who is also with Main Events. There are some stylistic similarities between Chilemba and Ward, which while giving Kovalev an idea of what he may need to work on, may also give Ward more of an indication of what he can exploit in Kovalev.

Duva brushes that aside.

“Ward already knew what he could do to give Sergey trouble,” she said. “While Isaac doesn’t fight exactly like Ward, I knew that he would wrestle him, try to grab his arms, try to tie him up, and he would do it more effectively than Hopkins did. He’s bigger and stronger than Hopkins. So he needed to feel what that was going to be like. He wants to spar with Isaac now.”

Pick up a copy of David’s book, “Fighting Words: The Heart and Heartbreak of Boxing,” at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsamazon or internationally at http://bit.ly/fightingwordsworldwide. Send questions/comments via email at fightingwords1@gmail.com