Golden Boy's Giant: Can 7-foot Chinese Boxer Taishan Dong Make it in America?

The Powerhouse Gym in Burbank, California is tucked into the back of a shopping center, and around the corner from a Mexican supermarket and a dry cleaner. From the parking lot, you can look straight through a chain link fence out onto the runway of the Bob Hope Airport.

On a quiet weekday last fall, the valley heat lingered visibly above the runway. Asphalt stuck to shoes and tires in the parking lot. Inside the gym, a 6'11'' Chinese man named Taishan Dong stood beside a boxing ring in a T-shirt with his own name printed on it. His manager, George Gallegos, had a whole bag full of them.

Taishan had just finished working out, toweled off, and was practicing his English with Gallegos. He laughed and repeated the same phrase over and over, his deep voice quivering with the uncertain new sounds.

"I am champion.

I am champion.

I am champion."

He wasn't. In fact, Taishan was in the gym to get ready for what would be just his second pro fight. For as many title-granting organizations as boxing has, Taishan was a very long way from a championship belt.

Taishan and his trainer Buddy McGirt, himself a former champ in two weight classes, had spent some of the afternoon practicing footwork. The bald, round McGirt yapped at his fighter in a New York accent, keeping up a stream of instructions while he demonstrated how to cut off the ring. He talked as if Taishan could understand him.

Taishan couldn't respond to McGirt verbally, but mimicked his actions. He moved across the canvas the way a person might walk around in a dark hotel room, afraid to bump into the unfamiliar furniture. Yet he was spectacular enough that people in the gym still stopped what they were doing, flocked from the basketball court and the weight machines simply to look at him. Taishan loomed over the 5'6'' McGirt. Muscles crawled up his body like vines.

Later, McGirt took Taishan over to work the extra large heavy bag they had to special order just for him. "The other bag was swinging like it was in a fucking hurricane," McGirt said. Every time Taishan struck the big bag, it sounded like a car accident.

After the heavy bag, they spent a few minutes, but only a few, on the speedbag. Taishan approached it methodically, his sharply angled face turning placid. But as soon as it seemed like he was about to settle into a rhythm, the bag bounced out of his control. Over the next year, his fighting career would do much the same thing.

The Official Taishan Dong Origin Story is short, sweet, and a little cloudy, which is appropriate considering his recent status as a curiosity among curiosities in a sport where promotion is still three-quarters carnival barking. He comes from the kickboxing circuits of East Asia. He takes his name from Mount Tai, which he climbed many times back when he lived in Beijing. He is still green, and only now learning to box. But when he does figure it out, he will be an unstoppable force.

And that's it. A little exotic mystery never hurt ticket sales. But who discovered this specimen? Did Don King spot him while walking down a Beijing street?

This is the best part. Taishan Dong just appeared. Emerged from among the tens of thousands of Chinese in L.A.'s San Gabriel Valley, and walked right into the law office of a man who just happened to know what to do with a boxer who stands nearly seven feet tall.

***

Taishan was born in a rural village in Gansu province on May 18, 1988. His given name was Jian Jun. The name Taishan came later, when he started fighting professionally. At 13, he was plucked from the village to play basketball in one of China's sports academies. He switched to wrestling, and by 18, he was Gansu provincial champion and on his way to Beijing.

Beijing was a hard place, Taishan remembers. He may have been nearly 7 feet tall, but the size of everything around him was overwhelming for a boy from the countryside: the crowds, the streets, the buildings. He enrolled in the Beijing Sport University and began to offset his anxiety by taking on increasingly difficult physical challenges. He switched from wrestling to the Chinese martial art Sanda, then to the rougher Muay Thai, and eventually to MMA.

In 2012, Taishan signed a promotional contract with a man named Zou Guojun and the Shengua International Wushu Club. Guojun, who would later sue Taishan, organized his first international fights: kickboxing against tomato can opponents like American Bob Sapp.

But that same year, Taishan recalled, he also began to feel depressed, lost. It was hard for him to find a support system that actually wanted to support him, not just profit off him. He grew tired of training, tired of fighting, tired of trying to figure out what was the savvy career move. He began to attend church.

Things got better when Taishan met Chelimuge, a tennis coach, in a Beijing gym. They married quickly, and in the second half of 2013, both came to America on what Taishan says was simply supposed to be a long honeymoon.

For them, that meant renting a room in a house in Monterey Park, a heavily Chinese suburb in the San Gabriel Valley. Taishan worked out regularly at an LA Fitness on South Atlantic Boulevard, a street lined with office buildings and hotpot restaurants. He regularly walked past a law office with a sign out front in Chinese.

Taishan walked into the office two days before Christmas. The desks in Gallegos' ground floor office were littered with stacks of paper. Framed posters of Picasso prints leaned up against the wall. Gallegos specialized in car accidents. He couldn't answer Taishan's immigration questions, but the two men got to talking through a translator. Taishan showed him a video of one of his kickboxing bouts.

Gallegos had represented a few fighters in contract disputes, and knew a little about the industry. Soon, he was setting up a workout for Taishan in a nearby boxing gym. He arranged a meeting with Bob Arum at Top Rank, who flew them all out to Las Vegas and pitched Taishan on the idea of fighting in Macau. He called a guy he knew at Oscar de la Hoya's Golden Boy Promotions, where the executives pitched Taishan on building his brand in the United States and returning home to China a champion. On April 29 of last year, Taishan signed a five-year contract with Golden Boy.

In July, Taishan had his first boxing match against journeyman Alex Rozman in a converted union hall in San Francisco. Taishan knocked Rozman out with a couple of jabs, a prodigious debut for a previously unknown boxer. All of a sudden, this 40-something lawyer was a boxing manager. All of a sudden, there was a new heavyweight prospect.

***

After Taishan signed with Gallegos, and then Golden Boy, his life in America suddenly transformed from a structureless extended vacation into something permanent and steady. The LA Fitness in Monterey Park wouldn't do anymore; neither would a rented room in a house.

Taishan and Chelimuge, who goes by Gege, began to settle into day to day life in Los Angeles. They acquired a car. With no credit, Gallegos signed for them on a condo in Glendale—closer to the gym, and away from the heavily Chinese enclaves of the San Gabriel Valley. It's the kind of modern building striving young couples move into, with a nice pool, high ceilings, and brightly lit common rooms. Staying in Monterey Park would have been like staying in China, Taishan said, and they wanted to feel like they lived in America.

Taishan and Gege became friends with Gallegos' paralegal, Ruby Chen and her husband Jack Cheung, who has served as an interpreter between Taishan and McGirt at fights. The couple became sort of surrogate Chinese aunts and uncles. They invited Taishan to join their church, and were there on the Sunday this spring when he was baptized. The minister climbed a stepstool to pour water over Taishan's head.

Things were not always easy. Even as Taishan's career moved forward in America, the lawsuit from his former manager Guojun, for breach of contract, nagged. Guojun badmouthed Taishan in the Chinese press, questioning both his boxing talent and his morals.

"Taishan was a talent, and we once put the hope on him," Guojun wrote in an email to VICE Sports. "But today, he is just like a lost child who falls into temptation."

There were also the more quotidian struggles of moving to a new country. Taishan and Gege once spent an hour at the supermarket searching for a bottle of vinegar. They didn't know what the packaging looked like in America.

When Gege was pregnant, they didn't know where to get baby supplies. Eventually, they were directed to Babies R' Us. In America, they learned, you can handle all your baby needs under one roof. And theirs was certainly an American baby: they named her Harper.

***

In November, a crowd gathered at LIT, a small club at the Fantasy Springs Resort Casino in Indio, California, a small desert city a couple hours east of L.A. The crowd was there to watch the weigh-in for the following night's boxing card at the Event Center next door. Fight fans and passers by looked on as young men were introduced, weighed, and prodded to pose for the cameras.

In this, his second professional fight—the one he had been working toward with McGirt in Burbank— Taishan would be facing off against Tommy Washington Jr. of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Washington was a foot shorter, but weighed the same 280 pounds. He was coming off five years in prison for drug dealing and had yet to shed the weight he'd gained while incarcerated. Golden Boy had signed Washington for the flight on Tuesday, and flown him out Thursday for his physical with the California State Athletic Commission. Instead of staying in the Fantasy Springs Resort Casino like Taishan, he had been put up in the Quality Inn down the street.

When it was Taishan's turn at the weigh-in, he stripped and flexed his arms as he stood on the scale. It was as if the bright overhead lights activated some kind of switch in his subconscious: gone was the timid, sometimes taciturn immigrant, and in his place was a charismatic giant straight out of pro wrestling. Washington, meanwhile, merely slipped out of his clothes, as if embarrassed by the entire spectacle. Afterwards, Taishan returned to his small entourage. Washington wandered off alone.

The following afternoon, Taishan and Gallegos sat together at a long table in the buffet of the casino. They were joined by McGirt, Taishan's cut man Manny Tometaka, Jack Cheung, who was serving as translator, and Taishan's wife Gege. The fighter drank plain hot water, and limited himself to only two plates of food from the buffet, mostly noodles and spare ribs. Occasionally, he ran his hand through his new hair cut: a faux-hawk. At other tables, young fighters and their teams, all in colorful matching t-shirts, sat around waiting for the time to pass.

Sitting in the buffet, Gallegos was unable to eat. He fidgeted and checked his phone. He was dressed in black jeans, a black dress shirt, and a black sports coat. His hair was slicked back. He looked like a boxing manager.

Gallegos doesn't have any kids, but he said that he imagined the nerves he was suffering from were something like those of a parent. He wanted Taishan to do well. He wanted Taishan to be loved. Not least because he had been investing his own money into the fighter for nearly a year, and neglecting his law practice at the expense of this new career.

"There are people who say this is a freak show, this is a circus act," Gallegos said. "And if he was then I could accept that and ride with that. But I don't think he is. He's an elite athlete. I want him to show that. I want people to see that. I want people to respect his abilities, his hard work."

Gallegos was voicing a concern that Taishan's Golden Boy promoters also expressed: while his size and unusual backstory were part of his marketing appeal, they didn't want to see Taishan reduced by the fight press to a mere spectacle. They didn't want a Primo Carnera on their hands.

Carnera made his American debut in January 1930, at Madison Square Garden. The papers touted him for months. He was a giant, they said, straight from the quarries of Italy, who had demolished every fighter Europe had to offer. They could barely find a ship with a cabin big enough for him to sleep in when he crossed the Atlantic.

Perhaps Carnera was just the sort of figure who could get a man's mind off the free-falling economy in the wake of the market crash of '29. At the very least, he would be something to see. Carnera knocked Clayton "Big Boy" Peterson down five times in the first round at the Garden. But fight fans who were there that night didn't see a single punch land solidly.

Carnera amassed a career record of 88-14, but was never much of a boxer. His career was managed and stage-managed. He acted in movies that were about as realistic as some of his fights. He appeared on the cover of Time. He became world champ. But his boxing abilities never had much to do with that, and all the cash he was generating went into the pockets of guys like manager Walter Friedman, and the mobsters who controlled him.

His story became the basis for Budd Schulberg's novel The Harder They Fall, and later a Humphrey Bogart movie of the same name. After the movie was released, Carnera sued Columbia Pictures for $1.5 million. He claimed the movie damaged his reputation. He lost the suit, and over the ensuing decades became a kind patron saint for boxing's uglier side: exploitation, manipulation, organized crime, and bizarre spectacle for the sake of spectacle.

Taishan's handlers, from Gallegos to Golden Boy, have repeatedly invoked Carnera as the model for what they don't want his career to be. But in some sense, the comparisons are unavoidable: so much of Taishan's marketability is wrapped up in his size. And when standing beside a fighter like Washington at the weigh-in, he recalled boxing's institutional instinct to sacrifice good sport for good spectacle.

After dinner, Taishan and his entourage walked from the buffet to the event center for a pre-fight interview with the broadcast team from Fox Sports. Workers were setting up the ring and the bleachers. Taishan stared up at the high ceilings and took it all in. He grinned. He shadowboxed across the empty cement floor.

The fight itself was short, awkward, and unsatisfying. Taishan entered the ring in a new robe, cut to reveal his massive arms. Behind him, Gallegos blew on his hands. You could see his chest heaving as he tried to calm his own nerves. His fiancee had made the trip from Los Angeles for the fight, as had both his father and his father's barber. Music from the Chinese pop star Andy Lau blared. Taishan was only 1-0, but the ring announcer bellowed his name: "The undefeated Taishan Dong."

Taishan stood mostly still in the center of the ring as Washington circled. The crowd didn't know what to do with this, so they stayed mostly quiet, mumbling as he threw a few awkward jabs. Is this guy real?

Two minutes into the first round, Taishan caught Washington on the top of the head with an overhand right, taking the air out of the room and putting Washington on the ground. Washington made it to a knee, but not to his feet. Taishan stood on the ropes and gazed out upon the crowd, his arms raised in triumph. Applause and a smattering of boos greeted him. There is something inherently unsatisfying about a physical mismatch.

Afterwards, Washington said the punch caught him in the back of the head, which is illegal. The replay verified that. It wasn't intentional, Washington said. "It's going to happen with him fighting guys shorter or whatever."

The fight seemed to mark the beginning of a stable and steady life in Los Angeles for Taishan and Gege. His career had taken on the feel of a family business. Gallegos and his fiancée had the Dongs over for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. They went fishing together and hiking. Taishan liked to walk up Runyon Canyon in the Hollywood Hills.

***

Taishan's third fight was February 27, also at the Fantasy Springs Resort Casino in Indio. Just like back in November, he weighed in on Thursday afternoon and fought on Friday night. Just like back in November, his opponent was shorter, flabbier, and hand selected for defeat. Just like November, the fight was scheduled for four rounds.

In fight parlance, this is called building a fighter. Handlers slowly increase the quality of a boxer's opponents in concert with his skills and his confidence. You don't want your prospect to lose early on. Roy McCrary, Dong's opponent, was 42 years old. He had a 3-2 professional record.

The mood in the dressing room that night was muted. Out in the event center, the crowd was not so different from Taishan's last fight. Men stood around drinking beers and cocktails out of plastic cups. Casino-goers and fighter's families sat up in the metal bleachers. Boxing junkies stalked ex-fighters for autographs and photos. There was a DJ playing between fights, and an emcee giving out old posters and t-shirts.

The emcee asked the crowd for a special round of applause for Jermaine Jackson, who would be performing in the same space the following night. Jackson, in a shiny red jacket, looked like he was carved from plastic.

McCrary came out before Taishan. One of the men in his corner was wearing jean shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. When they stood in the ring together, it was hard to imagine that they were preparing to compete in the same sport. "He looks like a fucking potato on toothpicks," yelled someone in the audience about McCrary.

For the first round, the potato on toothpicks controlled the pace. Taishan looked stiff. He felt McCrary out with his left, but the 42-year-old was able to work his way inside and pop Taishan a couple times with overhand rights. It was the first time Taishan had really been hit in the boxing ring, and he responded by throwing a few wild punches that didn't land. He knocked McCrary down in the second and third rounds and won a unanimous decision from the judges. The crowd shrugged.

When the fight ended, Jermaine Jackson went over to the dressing room. He wanted to shake hands with Taishan.

***

After the third fight, tensions between Taishan and Gallegos emerged. Taishan and Gege quietly worried they were not getting a fair shake from the manager. Taishan considered himself a future champion. His experience with the Chinese manager Guojun had left him inherently suspicious. Now he was beginning to see Gallegos the same way. Gallegos, in addition to being a relative novice at fight managing, was too controlling, he thought.

The discontent began in earnest just after the third fight when a movie producer came to Gallegos with a proposal for a documentary that would follow Taishan over the course of several years. Gallegos, in turn, passed the idea along to Taishan and Gege. The film could have been a boon for Taishan's career. But somewhere in the discussion of terms, wires were crossed. Taishan and Gege never met with the producer. They thought Gallegos was not being up front about financial details. Gallegos thought they were being silly by refusing to take the meeting during which those details would be discussed.

After that, communication began to slip. Trust began to fade. Where once, Gallegos felt like a parent, he now began to feel more like an errand boy. The Christmas dinners and fishing trips had happened only a few months ago, but it felt like longer.

Taishan believed there were many flaws in Gallegos' management style: his t-shirts didn't fit well enough; he thought Gallegos had pushed him into signing a deal with Golden Boy too fast. They quarreled over control of Taishan's social media accounts. Taishan accused his manager of being dictatorial. Gallegos, meanwhile, said he was just trying to build Taishan's brand, which was suffering because the fighter kept posting pictures of his daughter Harper to his official Instagram page. (The page has since been deleted.)

On May 4, Taishan fought on HBO on the Canelo Alvarez-James Kirkland undercard at Minute Maid Park in Houston. It was Taishan's biggest chance to make an impression with American boxing fans. Promoters don't usually put four-round fights on HBO; nor do they stick fighters with only three professional bouts under their belt on the undercards of top fighters like Alvarez.

Viewed from one perspective, Taishan's presence on the card was a sign that his promoters at Golden Boy thought he merited continued investment; that by the end of his contract, he might become a legitimate heavyweight contender. Viewed from a more cynical perspective, his presence meant they thought he might become enough of a spectacle to one day headline a bizarre card himself. Or perhaps he could at least pull in television money from China.

It was Taishan's worst performance. His opponent Jamal Woods entered the fight with a career record of just 6-18-3, but Taishan was unable to even knock him down, and escaped with a majority decision. Two weeks later, back at Fantasy Springs, Taishan rebounded. He knocked out another potato on toothpicks in the first round and improved to 5-0. The record was hollow, of course, but hollow still counts in boxing.

Taishan aggravated a nagging hand injury on May 22, and in the months since, he has eased up on his training to allow his hand to heal. He passed up on the chance to fight again at Fantasy Springs on August 8, and his next fight could be on the Golden Boy card there in late October. Meanwhile, his focus has been elsewhere.

In early August, Taishan filed a complaint with the California State Athletic Commission seeking a hearing in which an arbitrator will determine whether he has cause to fire Gallegos. The entire process—the selection of an arbitrator, the presentation of arguments, and a ruling—should be completed within 90 days.

In the meantime, Taishan also hired an attorney named Steven Bash to help get him out of his contracts with Gallegos. Last week, Gallegos received a letter from Bash challenging the validity of his contracts with Taishan and asking him to cut ties with the fighter. Bash did not respond to multiple interview requests.

Gallegos, who says he has upended his life to manage Taishan, at first compared the experience of falling out with the fighter to watching a girlfriend cheat on him right in front of his face. Now, he says, the whole thing just seems bizarre. He intends to keep managing Taishan, and hopes to eventually rebuild trust. The two are still speaking, but only when necessary.

There are challenging times in boxing, Taishan says. And this is just one of those challenging times. Taishan is not worried about his future in boxing. He has come a very long way from a farming village in the Gansu province to the condo development in Glendale. His time in America is still only just beginning, and so is his boxing career. He simply intends to move forward without Gallegos.

And he knows where his is going, and what he is moving towards. Taishan gestured the outline of a title belt along his waistline.

"WBO," he said, naming one of boxing's title-granting organizations in the same, deep-voiced English that he had been practicing in the gym nearly a year earlier.

World Boxing Organization. Champion.