Robert Helenius’ secret to success isn’t complicated: Keep on grinding.
That commitment to his boxing career has taken the heavyweight contender through the worst of times to the biggest fight of his life, a pay-per-view meeting with former champion Deontay Wilder on Oct. 15 at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
It’s been a long up-and-down journey for the 38-year-old Finn, who climbed to the top of the rankings a decade ago, almost lost it all because of a shoulder injury and then ended up back in the thick of the title hunt when that seemed all but impossible.
“I have this worker mentality,” Helenius told Boxing Junkie. “I tend to grind through stuff, just do my best, and see where I land.”
Helenius (31-3, 20 KOs) became a genuine threat to the then-champion Klitschko brothers after knocking out Samuel Peter and Sergei Liakhovich and outpointed Derek Chisora, all in a remarkable 2011.
However, the victory over Chisora came with a price: The right-hander tore a tendon in his power shoulder during training for the fight. He had surgery the following year but, even after rehab, the shoulder wasn’t the same.
That made it impossible to stay active. He fought once in both 2012 and 2013 before stepping away from the sport for two years, a period when he was forced to move from his training base in Germany back to Finland and pick up work in construction and logging.
Then things went from bad to worse: He was stopped in six rounds by tough, but limited Johann Duhaupas in Helsinki in 2016 and lost a wide decision to Dillian Whyte the following year in Wales.
At that point many believed he was finished as a relevant heavyweight … if they thought about him at all.
“I (tore) a tendon in my right shoulder before the Chisora fight and everything went straight down from there,” Helenius told Boxing Junkie on Friday. “I went six, seven years where training didn’t feel right. Every camp my shoulder was hurting. …
“It was hard but I had three kids to take care of. I had to take a deep breath and keep grinding and grinding.”
The dark clouds began to lift in 2018, as he was preparing to face Erkan Teper in Germany. Suddenly the pain in his shoulder was gone, which was like being freed from boxing prison. That allowed him to train properly for the first time since his peak year of 2011, which resulted in a knockout of Teper.
He had a setback in his next fight, an eight-round knockout loss against Gerald Washington in 2019 that he described as “devastating.” However, he was ill with flu symptoms before and during the fight, which helped him make sense of the loss and maintain his confidence.
Then, after one more fight, came his renaissance.
Helenius was an afterthought going into his fight with Adam Kownacki in March 2020, just an opponent. Afterall, he had been stopped by Washington two fights earlier. And the unbeaten Kownacki was one of the hottest young heavyweights in the world.
The result? Helenius, his prodigious power on full display, stopped the Polish-American in four rounds. And then he did it again seven months later, this time in six rounds.
He was all the way back.
“He was the perfect opponent for me,” Helenius said of Kownacki. “I’ve been fighting this kind of guy all my life … shorter guys who are always coming, coming and coming. I have pretty good counterpunching and footwork. I knew I had a really good chance to prove myself.
“It was a huge relief for me,” he went on. “I knew I could get a new chance to get to the top, to keep my promise to get the belt to Finland.”
He’ll have to get past Wilder (42-1-1, 41 KOs) to do that, which will be no easy task.
Helenius knows that first hand, having sparred with Wilder. The American’s power is as destructive as it seems to anyone paying attention, as if there are any doubts. He adds one thing, though: He can crack, too.
Indeed, the 6-foot-6½, 240-plus-pounder enters the fight with a lot of confidence after his back-to-back knockouts of Kownacki even though he acknowledges that Wilder represents his “biggest challenge yet.” He believes he has what it takes to score what would be a massive upset and then set his sights on a world title.
It goes back to grinding.
“Keep on grinding, keep on doing your thing,” he said, “and I think things will turn out good in the end no matter how bad you feel in the middle.”