By Aaron Klein: With only one fight under his belt as a heavyweight, it seems as if former cruiserweight champion David Haye (21-1, 20 KOs) is already even more popular than IBF/WBO heavyweight champion Wladimir Klitschko (51-3, 45 KOs), who has been off and on a title holder in the division since April 2000. Although some boxing fans may dispute this, just take a look at the articles in the media about Haye, and then take a look for any articles on Wladimir. Unless I miss my guess, you’d lucky to find one article on Wladimir, whereas Haye would have near countless articles on him and his career.

It seems more than a little strange that Wladimir, who has been considered by many to be the top heavyweight in the division for the past two years, isn’t mentioned nearly as often as Haye is in the media. This isn’t localized to just the articles in the media, it’s also repeated in the various boxing forums on the net. Haye is almost always mentioned much more than Wladimir. This seems to suggest that Wladimir isn’t being marketed correctly by his PR team, hence he needs to consider replacing them, or he’s not doing nearly as good a job marketing himself as Haye has done in the past few months.

Who knows? Maybe it doesn’t matter to Wladimir, who is already wealthy from the past eight years in which he has been one of the top heavyweights in the division. With his promotional company K2, Wladimir has done well for himself and will likely continue to do so once his career is over with. However, he seems to have been surpassed by Haye as the most interesting heavyweight in the division, and also appears to be already surpassed too by Samuel Peter.

Could it be the lack of interviews that Wladimir gives to boxing sites? In comparison to Haye and Peter, I rarely see Wladimir interviewed in the media unless it’s from his own site or by AP. He does sometimes give interviews to some of the biggest sites on the net, but even then it’s kind of rare for me to see this. In contrast, Haye is interviewed almost every day on the net, making himself heard with bold statements which make for excellent quotes that circulate around the net in an echo effect.

With Wladimir, even when he does say anything in interviews, it’s mostly dull stuff, nor interesting to read and sounding as if it’s the same thing he said in many previous interviews. Haye seems to say something different every time he’s interviewed, and although he doesn’t have a PhD like Wladimir, he comes off as very intelligent and insightful about a wide variety of things, whether that be boxing or even Russian writers, like Tolstoy.

Considering that he’s probably the top heavyweight in the division, Wladimir should be a superstar in boxing, someone mentioned all the time. Yet, you’ll rarely hear about him at all, and although he might say he likes it that way, I tend to doubt it. If people aren’t talking about him, it means he’s probably not relevant to them for one reason or another, and because of that, they’d much less likely want to fork over big money to see him fight in a PPV bout.

A fighter like Haye with only one fight under his belt as a heavyweight, should never be mentioned more often than a fighter like Wladimir. That tells me that there’s a failure in the marketing department for Wladimir. As I said, much of it rests on his shoulders because he doesn’t appear to be making himself available as much as he should for interviews, while at the same time when he does give interviews, he doesn’t seem to have planned things out ahead of time to make the biggest statement. Interviews, after all, are a type of performance.

If the person being interviewed doesn’t plan well, they can come across as dull with little to say other than robotic answers that they’ve given many times before. However, that’s something that a good PR team should have worked on with Wladimir to make him more marketable as a fighter and as a person. That unfortunately doesn’t appear to have happened in this case, and he’s wasted a lot of precious time.

Meanwhile, Haye has singlehandedly marketed himself, making him easily the most talked about fighter in the heavyweight division despite only fighting once previously. It seems as if Wladimir needs to hire Haye as his PR director, or else try to use his PhD and learn some things from him on how to become more appealing to the boxing public. Personally, I think he needs to fire whoever his PR person is, and find someone that can do a better job and selling him to the public.