Duluth Boxer Andy Kolle

by Chris Godsey

Andy Kolle stuns with good looks. At a Canal Park coffee shop, his lean 6’ 2” frame rests dapper and serene in knee-length plaid shorts, white t-shirt, and minimalist running shoes. His skin and tight blond hair have soaked up Duluth’s sun ration. His 27-year-old face is angular and strong. But that face, while not unkind or expressionless, stays serious and inscrutable. Granite eyes show hardness beyond his years. Lumpy knuckles and knots suggest his large hands have been used as hammers. Even slid low in his chair at a two-top table, taking occasional sips from a paper cup, his movements, his whole bearing, embody carefulness and effi ciency and latent power. If you’re an average guy and you sit across from him, any ostensibly evolved theories about masculinity—maybe you see it as a baseless social construct, not as a concrete natural law—might disappear. You might feel frivolous, even inferior. He exudes steady confi dence (but not, in this context, a whiff of reckless cockiness), and neither his prettiness nor his calm mask an elemental ability to protect his life, and the lives of others, with those beat-up hands, and with the brain behind those eyes. Andy Kolle lives by his fi sts and his wits. Back in his hometown of Fergus Falls, MN, and as a student at North Dakota State University, he became a fighter; he trained his body and mind intensely enough to win ring bouts and street brawls, to earn acclaim, and to have trouble fi nding sparring partners he wouldn’t drop in a few seconds.

Now he’s a professional boxer, still able to bludgeon in a raw fi st-fi ght, if he needed to, but refi ned in the mental and physical subtleties of a brutal sport that’s defi ned by at least as much nuanced power and grace as are ballet, jazz, or any other physical art.
“When I was 13, in Fergus Falls, I played basketball. I had a buddy who ran away, and he called me one day to go to a boxing gym. He didn’t want to go alone. I got my butt kicked,” he says with a smile that’s something like soft. “I fi gured I had to stay and learn long enough at least to beat that guy.”
His first coach, Chuck Elliott, trained fi ghters in a Fergus Falls middle-school wrestling room.
“It was pretty hard-core,” Kolle says. “No ring or much other equipment, just guys sparring. Sparring is good, but it should be worked in gradually, as part of training. We’d just go there and fi ght. Everything back then made me tough. It gave me a work ethic.”
Today, Kolle—a.k.a. Kaos—is ranked sixth out of 226 middleweights in the United States, and 43rd (of 1,040) in the world, according to BoxRec.com. In March 2008 he became Middleweight Champion of Minnesota. His professional record is 19-2, with 14 knockouts. He tends bar on the side, but he never, he says, fi ghts for less than fi ve fi gures. His fi ghts have been broadcast on HBO and Versus. He’s the real deal.
“That kid can straight up fi ght,” says Chuck Horton, Kolle’s manager and trainer of the last few years, and owner of Horton’s Gym, a Duluth institution. “He’s got a good punch, just sheer punching power. He’s mastered some boxing technique. He’s clever and systematic. A smart kid. Andy and Zach are both smart.”
Kolle and Zach Walters both came up under Elliott; Walters—”Jungle Boy”—moved to Duluth to train with Horton, had some success, and eventually persuaded Kolle to follow him.
“I met Chuck [Horton] at a fi ght in Wisconsin,” says Kolle. “I was 16. No one said I could beat the 30-year-old guy I was fi ghting. I did. Chuck kept wanting me to come up to Duluth. My fi rst coach passed away when I was 20 or 21, and the fi rst year after I turned pro, when I was in school, in Fargo, I was training myself in my garage, trying to spar with mixed-martial-arts guys. I’d go through them pretty easily—they don’t know how to box. I’d just go out and punch things. I’d run and run and run. I was not a smart trainer.”
Kolle and Walters both say they learned to box—as opposed to just fi ght—from Horton. They’re part of a tradition that Horton says has existed in Duluth for decades, and that he’s simply carrying on with professional boxers like Kolle, Walters, and Duluth native Gary Eyer.
“I like to teach the art of boxing,” says Horton, whose time as a fi ght promoter shows in his ability to speak endlessly, usually fl uently, and always with an aggressive point of view, on many topics. “It used to be called the manly art of self-defense. Boys learned it in school, and it was taught in the military. Every town used to have its own boxers. Duluth was very well-known for its fi ghters. Part of that tradition is young fi ghters looking up to the men who came before them, but the older guys respecting the skills of the young guys, too. There’s a lot of loyalty between my fi ghters and me. It’s old school.”

Horton manifests his end of that reciprocal loyalty by preparing his boxers—who now include some women—and by protecting them physically (by not getting them into unsafe ring situations) and, in the case of professionals like Kolle, Walters, and Eyer, fi nancially.
“Throughout the country,” Horton says, “it’s known that you don’t want to take advantage of my guys.”

“That kid can straight up fi ght,” says Chuck Horton.

Before and after workouts in the basement of Old City Hall—Horton’s Gym used to be in West Duluth, but it’s moved around a bit recently, and it might soon be somewhere else— Horton is on his iPhone taking and making fight offers. He says Kolle doesn’t have a fi ght scheduled, but many opportunities, including a surprising number of offers from Russia, exist. He also says that Kolle is still getting better.
“You’re going to see great things from Andy. He’s got another four or fi ve years before he peaks, and no one in the Midwest can touch him.”