The last American heavyweight champion with a title defense was Hasim Rahman

Adonis Creed defended his belt numerous times.

 

And he is less fictitious than Wilder

 

No. He's legit. Those fights were professional.

 

Now you're just making **** up. Wilder doesn't exist lol? You may not like him but he won the WBC and defended it several times.

American heavyweight boxing is hurting and has been for a long time. Maybe it will comeback in time.

 

Maybe I'm just a naive Brit, but the US produces some absolute specimens and sooner or later one of them will choose boxing over basketball or American football, and when they do it'll be like the glory days again, at least for a bit

 

You should have enjoyed Deontay Wilder while you had him. It's all Richard Torrez's and Jared Anderson's from now on.

 

I always felt the change in Heavyweight boxing happened when the iron curtain came down
Obviously it took a few years for those fighters to transition from amateur to professional
The wall was down for the start of 1992.
From there it would take a good few years of adjustment, but from around 2000 onwards it changed dramatically which I think was due to the above
Since then -
Wladimir Klitschko
Vitali Klitschko
Nikolay Valuev
Alexander Povetkin
Oleg Maskaev
Sultan Ibragimov
Serguei Liakhovich
Vladimir Virchis
Ruslan Chagaev
Alexander Dimitrenko
Denis Boystov

To name a few by the end of 2009

 

6 of the top 10 HW's Ring ranked HW's in 1999 were non-American. Guys like Tua and Ibeabuchi were in there too, it had become a much more global sport.

 

2023 Pan American games SHW gold medallist (won by walkover, against an opponent who beat him the previous year) and Olympian (lost in the last 16 against the Italian by SD) now 6-0 pro Joshua Edwards may well be worse than Anderson and Torrez, let alone Wilder. He has no stoppages in 25 listed amateur fights (19-6) on Boxrec. He went the 6 round distance with a 7-1 (1 KO win) Italian-Canadian journeyman (ranked the 6th best HW in Canada by Boxrec) in his most recent fight, losing the 6th round and arguably the 5th. Edwards was 25 years old in that fight and started boxing at 6 (heavily encouraged by his father, who was an avid club boxer), so there is probably not going to be huge improvement. He also looks smaller than 6'3, turned pro at 221 lbs in 2025 and has put on more than a stone since, so his weight management is questionable. You would expect a smaller HW to be able to hunt down a basic mover like his last opponent and Edwards failed to do so. I would also say that from an interview I saw he lacks great self-belief, effectively dismissing the idea of fighting Usyk "any time soon", really ever.

 

I agree. Eventually someone with the genes and disposition will choose boxing. It’s not like we (I’m American) don’t produce plenty of big dudes. We do.

On the other side of the coin, I think soccer NOT being popular here is helping us out in the middle weight ranges. It’s no doubt taking talent in plenty of other countries.

and there’s never been anything for little dudes other than combat sports. so you’d think every country has got a fair shot there.

 

If Wilder never existed, I can only imagine how much further Fury's career legacy drops.

 

Crazy tho, isn't it? Wilder is the last American to fight for a Heavyweight title, and this was in 2021.
Hell, the only two current American in the vicinity of a title shot are Richard Torrez Jr and Jarrell Miller. Yup, this is how bad it is.

Joshua Edwards is a decent prospect, but at this rate he will be past his physical prime by the time he gets close to a title shot. And I used the word decent instead of good, for a reason.

 

One can't be anymore a specimen than AJ and we've seen the good and not-so-good of that. Boxing is only an athletic endeavor by ancillary measure. We've seen James Toney and Andy Ruiz any many other less than specimen types get to the highest rung. Because it is primarily a combat sport. And for this reason, I do not think football and certainly not basketball are stealing talent. Both sports have been wildly popular for many decades, but it is MMA that is stealing the talent.

 

No doubt
But the point I was making was that there was suddenly 1000s of more people from another part of the world that could compete that couldn't before
New Zealand was always able to compete and could always have had competitors

You are right that there were others from other countries it I think comparatively many of the HW world champions were suddenly from Europe
Vitali Klitschko, Wladimir Klitschko, Valuev to name a few as there are several others and all were from behind the iron curtain