Time-aged portraits of prizefighters hang on the walls, staring down at the man perched at the edge of the ring. 
Yes, Zachary Wohlman looks like a vintage fighter. His old-style charm is accentuated by the scar tissue above his brow and the cartilage missing from his nose. He is a throwback, an anachronism. He even has a “Kid” nickname: “Kid Yamaka” [sic]. “I get my hair cut the day of my fight. It’s a tradition. Well, I’ve only had one [professional] fight so far, but it’s going to be a tradition,” jokes the former Golden Gloves champ. 
Wohlman is comfortably back in street clothes, after wrapping up the photo shoot for this magazine. He’s slipped on a pair of black Nike Cortezes, his shoes of choice, far from the $3500 stingray YSLs he was rocking for the camera a half hour ago. We are four days from the 23-year-old’s second professional bout. He thinks that’s pretty amazing. Wohlman also thinks the following fact is pretty amazing: He is getting paid to box. 
Well, sort of. Wohlman is selling his own tickets. That’s how a young boxer makes it these days. “How does it work?” I ask him. “Do you get a cut of each ticket sold?” 
Wohlman simply points to the Star of David necklace hanging from his neck and jokes, “What do you think?” 
It’s a joke about his Jewish upbringing, but it’s also a testament to the idiosyncratic world of boxing promotion. It’s never just been about tough guys who needed to punch to release some innate aggression, some animalistic pugilism. Boxers have to be salesmen, too. Or as they like to describe it: to hustle.
Wohlman’s hustle derives from his checkered past. Of course it does.
According to Wohlman, in any boxing gym in America, you will find a dozen or so sob stories, each filled with enough heartbreak to fuel a dozen shows on the Lifetime Channel. In Wohlman’s case, growing up was rough. He fell into the obvious trappings of life as a teenager in the San Fernando Valley. Most people think the metropolitan areas of L.A. are messed up, but the boredom of the suburban Valley breeds the truly fucked up shit. The Valley is full of temptation. He tried to temper that temptation at age 14, when he wandered into a boxing gym for the first time. There, he realized he had talent, and that enabled him to find solace in the ring. “You can walk into a boxing gym and you find a substitute father figure instantly,” Wohlman says.
But staying a boxer, and becoming successful at it, that’s the hard part. 
For starters, his real dad wasn’t exactly Cliff Huxtable. “I’d known my pops, but briefly, when I was a kid,” says Wohlman. “I just knew that he was a criminal. I met him again when I was 16. We started running together, doing dope and crime and all that. We got arrested together when I was 17.” 
Wohlman was tried as a juvenile, but he only spent a few days in Sylmar Juvenile Facility. “They put me on fucking probation for the rest of my life,” he jokes. “I mean, I’m off of it now. That’s what I got an attorney for. But my dad didn’t. He had to go do a couple of years.” 
Wohlman continued to get loaded and do dirt into his late teens, while working on oil tanks in Oakland. He was over 200 pounds with a scraggly beard at the time, and he drove a 1970s Lincoln Continental. He was on the road to a life of labor, hardship, and being a total fuck-up. “I remember getting into the ring, and taking a bunch of drugs and drinking. I woke up outside with a transgender stepping over me, asking me if I needed some help.”
Then, his father reappeared. He’d been sober since the day of their arrest. “I saw what two years clean looked like on him—saw that big, beautiful smile.” 
Wohlman realized he needed to clean up his act, too. He checked into a halfway house that had a gym with a heavy bag in it. One day, a counselor at the house mentioned he knew the legendary boxing coach Freddie Roach. He told Wohlman that if he stayed clean for 30 days, he would take him down to Roach’s Wild Card Boxing Club and make an introduction. On the next visit, he handed him an autographed photo from Roach that said, “To Zac, keep punchin’. Freddie Roach. I’ll see you soon.” And so the story goes: That first day at Wild Card, Wohlman was thrown into the ring to spar with a world champ. “I wanted to see if he really wanted to do it,” Roach says. “He took a beating and he came back the next day with no problem.” For three months, three times a week, Wohlman would take a beating and leave, no questions asked. He never complained and never asked why or what he was doing all this for. His only release was to go behind the dumpsters in the parking lot and cry to himself—not out of pain, but frustration.
Being beaten up hurt Wohlman’s feelings more than his body. “I’m very sensitive,” says Wohlman, “and I’m very emotional, and I take that with me in the ring, you know? That sensitivity—I learned to make it a good thing. I have very good intuition. I feel my way around the ring.”
It’s easy to make the connection between his fighting style and his approach to life: slow and steady, quiet and confident. Focused. Adding to that focus: the reconnection with his former partner in crime. The guy he used to sit with in an apartment full of stolen goods, he now sits with quietly and reflects. “My father is my best friend,” Wohlman says. “We had breakfast this morning. He’s doing great. He’s got his real estate thing going. I’ve got my thing going. We just look at each other like, ‘Wow.’”
Wohlman really has his thing going. Fighting under Freddie Roach has people watching Wohlman closely, but the boxer doesn’t seem to feel the pressure. Having Roach in his corner doesn’t hurt. If a legend like Roach believes in him, it must mean something.
“I’ll take the pressure,” Wohlman says. “I like it. And I like having the fans there. I had all the tickets, and I sold them by hand, so it wasn’t like the box office sold 400 tickets for me. I went to 400 people and sold them the tickets. I knew everyone who came to see me. And it wasn’t like, ‘I have to put on for this crowd,’ it was like, ‘Let me take this love and support and take this energy and soak it up. I don’t have to show off to these people, they’re just here to love me.” ***

  On the night of the fight, Wohlman climbs into the ring sporting purple satin trunks cut high above his knee like Sugar Ray Robinson used to do. The crowd is clearly behind Wohlman. 
In the opposite corner is Tatsuro Irie. His name hasn’t even made the fight bill. Within seconds, the crowd understands why. The Japanese fighter is overwhelmed by Wohlman’s structured repertoire of jabs and combinations. 
There is drama in the air, but this fight isn’t one people will talk about. Wohlman’s victory is almost a certainty. He’s fighting on the protected side, the “A” side, as the pro’s put it. There’s no way he can lose, not this early in his career. Still, he boxes as if he was fighting a champ. “He’s sparred with world class fighters,” Roach says after the fight. “We’re starting to see the results of that.”
When the announcer declares Wohlman the winner by unanimous decision, the young boxer raises Irie’s hands out of respect. That’s the old way of doing it—Wohlman’s nod to the days when boxing was a classy sport. 
You have to remember, boxing has always been fought by tough kids. “Tough guys make great punching bags,” the old saying goes. Adds Wohlman, “It’s the smart fighter you need to be scared of.”