His legs barely seem to move as his eyes follow me around the ring. He is so immense that his hairy arms, almost as thick as my torso, can reach me from any point and at any time. I try to find a safe haven but there is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.
A glove as big as my head comes crashing into my side. It's feeding time for the Beast of the East. We are in the Max Schmeling boxing gymnasium in Berlin, just a few hundred metres from the Olympic stadium that staged the infamous 1936 Games and was the venue for the 2006 World Cup final and last August's world athletics championships. It is here that Nicolay Valuev, the WBA world heavyweight boxing champion, often works out before a fight and this weekend, in Nuremburg, he has to contend with the brash challenge from Britain's David Haye.
The sporting world has never before come across anyone like 35-year-old Valuev. He was the first Russian to be crowned world heavyweight champion, stands 7ft 2in in his bare feet and has a fighting weight of 23st. He is, by some distance, the tallest and heaviest man to have won the title. He defeated the previous champion, American John Ruiz, in December 2005 and now boasts a record of 52 bouts, and just one loss. Since then, the world has woken up to a new phenomenon and, with this has come the nicknames. Beast of the East is the most common, though Frankenstein and King Kong have also been mentioned but never to his face.
So it is, I feel, with justifiable foreboding that I decided to take up the invitation to become the first journalist to swap punches in a ring with Valuev. For this dubious opportunity, I only had myself to blame. Some years ago I fought three rounds against Roy Jones Junior, the best pound-for-pound boxer in the world. In preparation for Jones, I spent eight weeks learning the dark arts of boxing in a gym in the East End of London. For five hours a day I pounded the punchbag, shadowboxed and sparred, but it was to little avail. The American was a light heavyweight, half the weight of Valuev, but his intoxicating mixture of lightning speed and sledgehammer fists left me with a broken nose, a bloodied face and concussion that lasted a week. A few years later, Valuev would not countenance sparring with anyone other than another, albeit smaller, heavyweight.
But word has got round that there was an English guy who had done this kind of thing before, and was crazy enough to do it again. And so the stage was set. The Beast of the East versus the Wimp from the West. Against Jones I experienced intense emotions and fear, anger, humiliation and pain, even though he was the same size as me. He beat me up, but there were times when I could run to a corner or maybe land a punch on his head, even if it had the effect of a pop gun hitting a tank. Valuev was a different proposition, and one which, before his arrival on the scene, could be imagined only in a film with particularly impressive special effects.
No wonder the Russian has been offered the role of a pirate in a movie alongside Robert De Niro. In truth, he could play the whole ship. As I waited for our bout in Berlin to begin, leaning back in my corner and surveying the unique human being in front of me, I realised that the ring had become Lilliput, and before me stood Gulliver. Boxers are supposed to be brave, but the actions of some of his previous opponents are now perfectly understandable.
Take Gerald Nobles, for example. The American had the good sense to land enough low punches on Valuev in the first round to be disqualified. He fled from the ring without suffering a single blow. Another American, Clifford Etienne, first set eyes on Valuev at their pre-fight weigh-in. He knew, of course, that his opponent from St Petersburg was big. But he hadn't realised Valuev was 8st heavier and a foot taller. Etienne returned to his hotel, started drinking and declared: 'Nobody told me I was taking on Bigfoot.' He packed his bags and booked a seat on the first flight home, only to be persuaded to stay by his manager. Etienne was knocked out in three rounds.
A third American, Larry Donald, summed up Valuev thus: 'He's like Neanderthal man, something from the Dark Ages.' I thought of that comment as I watched Valuev enter the ring, his left and then right leg hopping over the top rope with contemptuous ease. It had suddenly become very warm in the Max Schmeling gym. It was about to get a great deal hotter. The agreement for our encounter was that Valuev would land punches but he would not kill me. Just to oppose him, face to navel, and experience his fists would be more than sufficient. I feared that even a misdirected cuff would turn off all my lights. Yet I had not been prepared for the intimidation I felt as the sparring began. Valuev's hulking size meant he utterly dominated the ring.
Every punch I threw was pawed away by a huge glove that hung forever a few inches from my face. If I attempted to get around this glove I was confronted with arms the girth of Baobab trees. To land a punch on his body required throwing my glove upwards. To land a punch on his huge, uncompromising head involved not only getting through the mass of gloves and arms, but standing on tiptoe and exposing myself completely to fatal retribution. Amid all this I felt compelled to stare into his deep, dark and menacing eyes. These are the eyes that witnessed a childhood of cruel jibes and an adult life that for ten long years, until he was discovered by German promoter Wilfred Sauerland in 2003, had seen him box for almost nothing and treated like a freak. 'I felt like a hamster on a wheel,' Valuev explaieds later. 'And everyone saw me as a weird circus act.'
These are the eyes that now stared back at me, cold and black like a great white shark's. I would rather have been hit repeatedly by Roy Jones Junior than face this. There was absolutely no respite. I spent ten minutes trying to work out ways of escaping from his reach, having all but given up on landing any meaningful blow, but I soon ran out of ideas. Valuev did not want to cause me any serious damage. But, at the same time, I could tell his holding back was frustrating him. It was time to up the ante. I may be a little flaky, but I had no desire to end my days in a Berlin ring.
I agreed that Valuev should start putting some effort into his punches, but only after I wrapped a padded body protector around my torso and only after he promised to aim low. My concern, as I felt sweat cascading down my back, was that 'low' from Valuev's perspective was around the height of my head. Within moments I found myself in a corner. To escape meant fighting my way past him. This was not an option. Then came the most frightening experience of all. Valuev started to pound my body. At first he tested my reaction.
The stupid, stubborn, masculine streak inside me let it be known that this was not a problem. In reality I was stressed out of my mind. The body protector was good, but not that good. I was feeling his punches. Given the green light, Valuev started to put more oomph into his blows. I attempted to block them with my gloves and arms but my defence was as strong as a wet paper bag. A few blows landed on my unprotected side, which jarred every bone in my body and later produced purple bruising. But the most alarming aspect of all was the speed at which Valuev delivered two and sometimes three-punch combinations into my body. I started to grunt and groan and could hear the sound of air gushing from my mouth.
In desperation I launched myself at him and clung around his girth. All Valuev had to do was send me hurtling back into the corner with an effortless shove, before the relentless pounding begun again. I closed my eyes and prepare for the worst. 'OK, enough,' Valuev uttered suddenly, using his limited English for the first time. It was clear that the Wimp from the West had not unduly troubled him. And, after 15 minutes in the ring, I felt like a man given a last-minute reprieve on Death Row. Having taken a shower together (and that, from a man's point of view, is as intimidating as being in the ring with him), Valuev and I had a post-fight lunch, the Russian tucking into a steak that appeared to be the whole cow. Inside the ring he exuded pure menace. Outside he became the gentle, misunderstood giant.
He fills his spare time being a dutiful husband to Galya and father to seven-year-old son Grisha. He goes hunting and fishing, writes poetry or reads the likes of Tolstoy and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He names Muhammad Ali as his biggest idol, not for what he achieved in the ring but for his stances on the Vietnam War and human rights issues in America. He has a desire to visit and learn more about Stonehenge (someone please warn him not to lean against any of the stones). And he is making plans to set up an establishment to help street kids and the underprivileged back home in St Petersburg. Valuev, an only child, was sent to a sports boarding school at 13 as he was already 6ft 2in and after he was seen playing basketball by a coach.
The boxing would come much later. 'I used to be teased a lot about my height and I never liked it,' Valuev recalled. So alarming was the boy's size that doctors even suggested to his parents that 'little' Nicolay could be suffering from a disease of the pituitary gland. But his grandmother told them of an Asiatic tribe called the Tartars. Her grandfather, she recalled, was a giant of a man called Vasily, and he was a direct descendant of this warrior race. 'At first I used to warn other boys that if they carried on mocking me I would punish them,' Valuev said. 'Then they would stop. But an intelligent friend at school told me never to let it show. And so I never did, even though it hurt. 'I have learned to do the same thing in the boxing ring. I never show if someone's hurt me. I didn't mind being so tall, though. I learned very early in life that nature intended me to be this way and I am what I am.' He smiled. 'And now I think it has done me a favour.' But it has been a long wait. 'For ten years I boxed all over Russia and sometimes in America and England. But they were always small bouts in front of very few people and I was making very little money. When I married, I had to move into my wife's apartment. This was not easy for me because I felt the man should be providing, but Galya is clever and told me it was OK. All this time as a boxer nobody was treating me like a sportsman, not even a human being. I was just a monster.'
So disillusioned was Valuev that he was within days of hanging up his gloves when Sauerland persuaded him to sign a promotional contract. Then, in 2005, he became world champion. 'I didn't know I had won until I heard my name,' he said. 'Then I felt a huge weight lift off my shoulders. But I had a responsibility, not only to myself, my family, friends and supporters, but to the whole of Russia. I wanted to prove that anything is possible, and now everything is.'
But some things will remain the same. 'People will never care how I feel, but only about business, so names such as Beast of the East and King Kong will stick with me until the day I retire,' he added, resignedly.
'It's OK. Unless I find it really offensive I can turn a deaf ear to it. Anyway, today I am very happy.' This is in part because his management company had spent 300 Euros on having a warm weather front named 'Nicolay'. Warm weather fronts A to M have already passed so, by chance, weather front Nicolay arrived in Berlin on the day we fought. The man whose head is almost in the clouds appreciated this. But there was another reason for his beaming smile. 'I am happy that you enjoyed fighting me and that you are still alive,' he said. Me too, my gigantic friend. Me too.
