Nikolai Valuev's beast of a chin is simply too high to hit

David Haye says he is trying to get inside the Russian champion's head – well, there's plenty of room there
David Haye and Nikolai Valuev
David Haye punches the head off a cardboard cut-out of his Russian opponent Nikolai Valuev during a press conference. Photograph: Steven Paston/Action Images

British heavyweight David Haye says he is trying to get inside the World Boxing Association champ Nikolai Valuev's head. The Russian fighter's cranium is certainly large enough to accommodate him. In fact if Haye does force an entry into it he can probably invite a couple of mates and their families round for a barbecue, too.

Valuev is, of course, the so-called Beast from the East, a man so huge he makes Wasps' Simon Shaw look like Kylie Minogue. He stands seven feet tall, weighs 25 stone, has a wingspan (the word reach hardly does it justice) of 85 inches and a body covered in tufts of downy fluff, giving the impression of a badly shaved bear.

The man from St Petersburg's stature proves an insurmountable obstacle for some adversaries. One early opponent was disqualified for hitting Valuev below the belt and afterwards protested that it wasn't deliberate – he just couldn't reach any higher. The giant's chin remains a distant dream to most who enter the ring with him.

Perhaps the epic physical scale of Valuev militates against subtlety, because it has to be said that so far Haye's mind games have erred on the Vinnie Jones side of things. There has been none of the guile displayed by the great Roberto Durán, who unsettled Sugar Ray Leonard before the pair's first world title clash using the unlikely medium of table manners. At a pre‑fight press conference in Montreal the Panamanian shocked the American by grabbing a grapefruit from a bowl and munching it down skin and all. "Some guys try to create an image by acting like an animal," the boxing publicist Bobby Goodman observed later. "Not Durán. He actually was a fucking beast." By contrast the Puerto Rican Wilfred Benítez, who turned pro at 15 and won his first world title two years later, tended to unnerve his opponents by his sheer nonchalance, strolling into the ring for championship defences like a bloke returning to the office on a Friday afternoon knowing that all that lies between him and his pay cheque is a couple of hours sitting around fiddling with his paperclips and playing minesweeper.

Haye, by contrast, has opted for a sledgehammer combination of threats, name-calling and an assault on a cardboard replica of his opponent, which, as one wag pointed out, was exactly the same size as the real thing but marginally more mobile. The latter remark indicates a commonplace feeling among the fight fraternity. Heavyweights are, naturally, supposed to be big, but once they get too big nobody takes them seriously any more.

If Valuev had followed two of his mighty compatriots into weightlifting he certainly wouldn't have suffered this obloquy. The super heavyweight Andrei Chemerkin, who tipped the scales at a tad over 30 stone, won the gold medal at the Atlanta Olympics defeating the German giant Ronny "The Slab" Weller in a dramatic contest. Chemerkin is a police officer in the Stavropol region and once commented cryptically that weightlifting "has given me everything except a two-seat helicopter".

Another Soviet weightlifting juggernaut was Vassily Alexeyev, who dominated heavyweight lifting for much of the 1970s. Alexeyev, whose 324lb body and dark eyebrows give him the look of a super-sized Leonid Brezhnev, was a man of diverse interests, claiming not only to be the strongest man in the world but also the Soviet Union's best gardener, cook, singer and billiard player. He developed his own variety of rose and named it in honour of the beautiful ladies of his home town. Asked to explain how he maintained his high levels of performance, the man who broke 80 world records replied simply: "I lift as well as I lift because it cannot be avoided."

As far as I can ascertain nobody made mock of either man, even after Chemerkin got his gargantuan frame wedged in a hotel shower cubicle in Finland and afterwards had to be content with washing himself "a bit at a time" in a hand basin.

In fairness to his detractors, it should be said that Valuev's style is a little lacking in finesse. He trundles forward throwing left hands that are hard to avoid, not so much because of their speed and precision as the fact the fist that delivers them is the size of Swindon. Those opponents who get inside the jab tend to find the Russian is suddenly wrapped all around them like boiler lagging.

For some of us the sight of Valuev in action calls to mind long-buried memories of 6ft 7in Henry Akinwande, a rubber-limbed Nigeria-born heavyweight who carried off the ABA title twice in the late-1980s with a series of performances that saw him tying up smaller opponents with the precision of a baling machine.

Not everyone was impressed with Akinwande's tactics. In an early appearance in the finals at Wembley the referee disqualified him. The big fellow reacted by reeling around the ring before finally falling to the floor in a quivering tangle of legs and arms. If you have ever wondered what Elastic Man might look like after a night on the swill with Barry Ferguson, try to catch the footage.