Bek the bully
A LIFE at the furnace had always been the plan. For years the town of Shoimbek in Uzbekistan had been home to a family raised to thrive around spark and steel. To follow in his elders’ footsteps the heat would need to become bearable, the pressure to match artistry with brawn second nature.
“All of my life is connected, one thing leading to another,” Golden Boy’s super-middleweight prospect Bektemir Melikuziev tells Boxing News. “My family are four generations of blacksmiths. It’s in my blood, that power in my fists.”
But a different kind of fire was being stoked in the young Uzbek, not one fanned
