Russ Anber Explains Why Moses Itauma LOST, Working With Anthony Joshua, Hall of Fame Career Stories

For nearly five decades, he’s been a fixture at ringside for some of the sport’s biggest nights, easily recognizable by one small, deliberate detail: a tie, worn in the corner, every single fight, as a quiet nod to the old-time trainers who wore them decades before television made the sport glossier and more sterile.

Now, freshly inducted into his sport’s hall of fame, he’s finally putting his own remarkable journey into words.

The story begins not in a gym, but in a city that, in his telling, once ranked among the greatest in the entire world — a place bursting with ambition, infrastructure, and civic pride before a series of costly decisions, including a massive Olympic Games deficit, slowly chipped away at its golden-age glow.

That backdrop, he says, shaped everything about how he sees loyalty, tradition, and the value of doing things the right way, even when it’s harder.

His entry into boxing came almost by accident, walking into a run-down, third-floor gym as a teenager with more passion than physical talent.

A chance encounter with a ranked professional fighter, sparked by nothing more than recognizing a face from a magazine, changed the entire trajectory of his life.

That fighter took him under his wing, publicly declaring in front of the whole gym that the teenager understood boxing better than anyone else in the room — a moment of validation that, he admits, came with a cost, instantly making him a target for resentment among older, more established gym members.

By eighteen, he was already working professional corners, learning the unglamorous realities of the trade: taping glass bottles so they wouldn’t shatter if dropped, learning to read a fighter’s body language between rounds, and absorbing lessons about restraint that would define his entire career philosophy.

One especially formative memory involves watching a trainer control a fighter’s emotional state mid-fight with nothing more than a carefully timed sip from a bottle — a moment he still describes, only half-joking, as boxing’s version of performance enhancement decades before the term existed.

Over the years, his reputation for meticulous handwork became legendary, eventually leading him into the corners of some of the sport’s most recognizable current stars.

He described the winding, almost accidental path that connected him to one particular pound-for-pound great, an introduction sparked by a mutual acquaintance and solidified after handling a fighter’s damaged hands with such care that he was welcomed formally into the team on the spot.

That relationship, built on quiet trust rather than flash, eventually extended to some of boxing’s most dominant current heavyweights, even as he insists every fighter’s hands, and every fighter’s needs, require a completely different approach.

He was candid, too, about the sport’s harder truths — including a young heavyweight prospect’s shocking, exhaustion-driven collapse against a far more experienced opponent, which he attributes not to lack of talent but to a dangerous modern impulse to accelerate young fighters past necessary developmental steps.

Comparing it to lessons learned the hard way with his own fighters years earlier, he argued passionately that skipping foundational rounds and experience, no matter how gifted a prospect appears, almost always catches up with a fighter eventually.

Beyond the ring, he reflected on painful chapters that still weigh on him decades later, including a tragic ring death early in his career that continues to color how he views corners that hesitate to stop a fight, and a pointed, ongoing crusade for basic safety improvements he believes the sport still refuses to adopt.

Despite the accolades, the championship runs, and the now-iconic brand bearing his fingerprints on some of the sport’s biggest broadcasts, he remained most emotional discussing the people who believed in him before any of it began — insisting that no success means anything without acknowledging those who gave an unproven kid a chance when absolutely no one else would.