Renaissance men: Current crop may make heavyweights boxing's kings again

In boxing, heavyweights were once the biggest fighters and the biggest deals. The sport just may be headed in that direction again.

Greg Bishop | Apr 24, 2017

Renaissance men: Current crop may make heavyweights boxing's kings again /

It wasn’t that long ago when the most important, famous and celebrated athletes on the planet threw no touchdowns and dunked no basketballs. These men were heavyweight boxers, champions of champions, and they ruled over sports with iron, oversized fists. Even just the phrase heavyweight champion of the world carried a romantic connotation. It meant Ali and Frazier, Tyson and Lewis, Foreman and Norton, Holmes and Holyfield.

“These guys were comic book heroes,” says Stephen Espinoza, general manager at Showtime Boxing. “Men of mythic proportions. The most popular athletes on the planet. Look back the earliest days of the sport. The heavyweights have always been the biggest personalities, the hardest partiers. They have the most impressive knockouts. They’re defined by excess.”

Espinoza says this not to lament how far the division has fallen in this millennium, even as he acknowledges the luster of heavyweights all but bungee-jumped into an abyss of irrelevance from the early 2000s until now. Sure, there were the Klitschko brothers but name their great rivalries, their most important fights, the times the world stopped when they stepped into the ring. We’ll wait …

“The general public has been wondering where the heavyweights have gone,” Espinoza says. “The easy answer is football and basketball. A guy like Michael Strahan could have been the heavyweight champion of the world, but the salaries in those sports outstripped everything else. That’s the quick answer.”

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Espinoza says this to provide context, not to mourn. Because Saturday, when Anthony Joshua meets Wladimir Klitschko in front of 90,000 screaming Brits at Wembley Stadium in London (4:15 p.m. eastern, 1:15 p.m. pacific on Showtime), boxing will take another step toward the revival of its most important division. To be clear, Espinoza is not saying this crop of heavyweight contenders will remind anyone of Ali. He’s saying this is the best crop of extra-large challengers since Mike Tyson was biting people’s ears. That’s important for boxing, with mainstream media attention and casual fans nourishing a niche sport’s health.

Joshua is a British boxer who won gold at the London Olympics in 2012. He’s 27, undefeated and all 18 of his wins have come by knockout. But the sport doesn’t need one dominant champion. It needs several compelling belt holders who are willing to fight each more than once. Heavyweight boxing was never just Ali; it was Ali and Frazier and Norton and Foreman and Spinks, all engaging each other, and for years.

Boxing is headed toward its next era regardless, for better or worse, as fighters like the Klitschko brothers, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao near the end of their respective, Hall of Fame careers. Already, the die-hards have noticed the compelling match-ups made this year in the welterweight, junior welterweight, featherweight and light heavyweight divisions. They see a sport that appears pointed in the right direction, a sport that may not be as popular in America but has gained in popularity in Mexico and parts of Europe. The heavyweights represent the next step in the sport’s reinvention. A possible next step, that is. “If we’re able to groom that division into something meaningful, boxing will be as strong as it has been in the last 20 or 30 years,” Espinoza says.

WBA World Heavyweight Title: Muhammad Ali vs Zora Folley

Muhammad Ali vs Zora Folley

Ali surrounded by media photographers during the weigh-in before the fight vs Zora Folley at Madison Square Garden, NYC 1967

Muhammad Ali vs Zora Folley