Rethinking Vitali Klitschko's career

I pretty much agree with this. Legacy/Resume wise he's nothing special because he simply doesn't have enough wins over quality opponents, but when head to head he is unique.

A 6'7 fighter that can move like him is strange, his movement doesn't look pretty but it's nearly impossible to look fluid when you're that tall. No matter how anyone spins it, the facts are he's 6'7, never been down, hits hard with each hand, and is good defensively. He's no ATG, but head to head he is a hard matchup for anyone.

 

He does a few other things well. Defense wise he uses his feet in there coupled with his boxing radar to detect incoming punches. And if/when he uses those legs to slip away the opponents usually go off balance since they have to take 1 if not 2 steps to keep that same gap. Couple that with the arc necessary to land on that tall of opponent, & you see why he seldom gets hit clean.

He's always in shape. He goes out and throws 50-60 punches a round. He might look tired after 3 rounds but the guy never actually rests except for between rounds. He just comes out the next round and throws.

He throws combos. So many heavies out there throw a single shot and do not have the balance to throw follow ups. Or the stamina. Vitali throws oddball combos that sometimes start with a right lead and follows it up with a jab. It makes him hard to figure out in there. And he is accurate with those hands so opponents are getting hit while trying to figure something else out.

Overall, he's one of those guys that look easy to take advantage of on tape. When opponents get in the ring with him and have to deal with that size, they seem to do about 20% of the work they thought would be easy against the guy. And they find themselves getting 1-2'd to death due to his conditioning and accuracy.

As for level of competition, I sure didn't hear any big name opponents calling him out when he was 24-0 w/ 24 ko's either. 10 years ago managers and promoters simply weren't putting their guys in against the pedigreed up and comers.

 

He's one of those guys who looks very impressive in a fantasy head-to-head style, but doesn't necessarily have the resume to back those claims up.

However, the fact that he completely dominated Peter and Gomez while only losing a grand total of one round, after a four year injury-plagued layoff at the age of 37, does sort of confirm that head-to-head picture.


One thing particularly impressive here is that he intimidates his opponents into eating themselves out of shape. I mean really, Sanders, Williams, Peter, Johnson, Gomez, and soon Arreola, they are all fat!

 

Which is funny because being in shape enough to close the gap is the best tactic against such a man. Shows more about the sorry state of the division in truth though

Vitali is a hard man man to fight but his style has its weaknesses that only an Old Lennox has so far had the ability to expose

BTW OP I'd rate Williams higher than Hide as a win

 

I think the key question here is, what's a legacy?

Vitali owns several records.

Among them are all time highest KO% in the history of boxing champions at all weight classes.

One of two heavyweight champions never to have been floored by a punch.

The best ratio of rounds won to round losts....towering over Dempsey, Louis, Ali and Holmes, who if truth be told lost more rounds than Vitali did in his entire career vs two non champions.

Came back after a near 4 year layoff, with no warm up fights, and took back his title vs. the #2 heavyweight in the world at age 37 with a dominating performance. Much like Ali, Vitlai lost his prime years due to injury and geo-political pursuits outside of the ring.

The lone boxing heavyweight champion who also was a professional world kick boxing champion.

All of the above are legacies.

It seems the Klitschko suffer from being too good vs. the field. Roy Jones had a similar problem. I actually think if Vitali wasn't quite as good as he really is and had to struggle to win a bit more, people would think his competition is much better.

I heard Vitali on XM sports radio yesterday. He plans to stay active. As Vitali is less than two years away from his 40th birthday, I get the hunch people will start to give him his due as a great older fighter.

Has there every been a heavyweight champion turn 40 with his belt intact from prior title defenses? Never. If Vitali can win 3 more fights and retire at 40+ without a loss....WOW.

 

Just how many heavies are able to stay at the top for long periods of time? Very few hold the title for > 6 years or remain fighting and beating top 10 competition that long. And when they go downhill they stay at that 2nd or 3rd tier. This guy and his brother have been at the top for more than a decade. By 98 they were serious contenders back when HBO was buying into Mike Grant. It's been ages since Grant came and went.

But there just aren't all that many heavies that stay at the top of the sport for a decade & that's something special. Adding a few more years to that total is very impressive.

 

Vitali fan redefinning legacy to suit agenda, legacy boils down to opposition and performance against that opposition. Vitali's opposition has been pretty poor as a whole and not only that he didn't take on the best of his era Lewis aside. However he was clearly dominant against this opposition bar Lewis

But no Ibeaubuchi, Tyson, Holyfield, Ruiz, Rahman, Maskaev, Toney. Now the top HWs like Haye, Povetkin, Brock, Brewster, and Chagaev are lined up or been taken out by Wlad and not Vitali. Compare the amount of ranked fighters Wlad and Vitali have both faced and Wlad is yards ahead.

Having said that his comeback has been good Gomez and Peter were both top10, if nothing special, good quality wins.

Plus you say 'Has there every been a heavyweight champion turn 40 with his belt intact from prior title defenses'. Well now everyone except I declared Wlad Linear HW Champion, isn't Wlad the Real HW Champion and not Vitali anyway?

Vitali needs a big win, Haye in a unification fight would fit the bill

 

All of these things are only great if you fought against excellent opposition.

If you are only fighting against a pile of under par opponents then of course you're going to look good.

At least Roy Jones had good wins over Toney and Hopkins.

This is why Ali, Frazier, Lewis, Holyfield etc are great. They may not have perfect ko records, they may have been knocked down, they may have lost rounds but it was against elite competition who were tough to overcome.

 

Well, The Byrd loss was a fight that Vitali was way ahead a dominat fight. I think Vitali took all doubt away with his fight with Lewis. I think he started to prime after the Lewis fight and wiped out Kirk Johnson who many thought would beat him. Thing is Lennox lost to McCall and Rahman but redeemed thos loses. His fights vs Evander and Mercer were impressive but not really dominant. Tyson was already rolling down hill but we still reconise these fights a serious wins. I think the dominant way Vitali ran through the division and came back after 4 yrs and beat Peter and Gomez ( a champion with only 1 previous loss) is impressive. I think the Areola fight and who gets to fight the winner of Haye/Valuev and the outcome will mean a lot for his legasy. Vitali needs a serious fight but I think he would spell trouble for any of the previous Champs. I think he did well vs Lewis (the cut was a problem) Lewis was 38 but for Vitali it was his first really big fight) and Lewis was still formidable at 38 but had the experience of 2 KO losses. The result of that fight really demanded a do- over....I think Vitali would be a serious problem for any former champ...Foreman, Ali ,Holmes,Lewis,Louis,Marciano, Dempsey,Tyso, Liston Etc.

 

As far as determining ATG status, it's pretty clear what a legacy is...

... It certainly isn't that, otherwise we'd see people rating boxers like Lamar Clark and Brian Nielsen a lot higher. I think you do Vitali a great diservice by lusting after statistics, Mendoza; rather than look at the quantitative side of careers, it's better to look at the qualitative side.

The best way to assess Vitali is to look at how he beat and how he perfomed in his losses. And do you know what? He comes out of that assessment extremely well! I've always been a Wlad fan rather than a Vitali fan (the two tend to go together, but not in my case) yet I've never had the sort of utter hatred for Vitali that some of my fellow Lewis fans seem to have.

Let's start off with the negative and look at Vitali's losses: I think the Lewis one hurts him the most, since Lewis came in the worst shape of his career and took a lot of shots from Vitali without looking like he was going to be KO'd. This tells us that Vitali wasn't a monster puncher and wasn't the kind of boxer who would be likely to beat a prime Lewis.

But, as far as black marks in careers go, that's hardly a bad one. Vitali won at least three out of the six rounds and I would say four of them against an ATG. Yet many people are willing to read a lot into, for example, Bonecrusher's performance against Larry Holmes in which Bonecrusher also did very well until being stopped on cuts, and yet seem less willing to extend the same kudos to Vitali. The Lewis fight tells us where Vitali DOESN'T stand, but that's a position that very few boxers throughout history would stand in.

The Chris Byrd doesn't really do anything negative to Vitali's legacy. He was putting in a very good performance against one of the best boxers of the day and quit due to a legitimate shoulder injury. That might tell us he didn't have the will to win of a Muhammad Ali or even a Danny Williams; but very, VERY few heavyweights ever have. If quitting with a shoulder injury automatically makes one a coward, then people shouldn't go on about Carl Thompson having a huge heart, which would be ridiculous. Again, the loss shows Vitali's limitations, but as limitations go they aren't bad at all.

Then we come onto Vitali's wins. Forget records and percentages and statistical comparisons: just look at his wins and how he got them. Herbie Hide, Larry Donald, Kirk Johnson, Corrie Sanders, Danny Williams, Sam Peter and JC Gomez is a very good list of top wins. Is it a top 10 ATG resume? No, but only 10 heavyweight boxers have one of them. Not having one of the 10 best resumes in heavyweight history doesn't mean you aren't a great fighter. Vitali beat a diverse selection of very good boxers and showed no major vulnerability to any one style. There's no basis to think that anyone but the best boxers of all time would beat a prime Vitali, which counts for a lot in my rankings.

Furthermore, Vitali was very dominant in his wins. If he didn't do his usual "club 'em down and stop them in the mid-rounds"-schtick, it was because he'd blasted them out in the first few rounds. He never looked invulnerable but he almost always looked like he was in control and going to win. Aside from after one round against Herbie Hide and the first round against Corrie Sanders, I can't ever remember thinking "Vitali is going to lose this one", except of course against Lewis.

In an era with too many disgracefully fat and lazy boxers, Vitali was a busy boxer who threw a lot of punches and always trained hard for every fight. That counts against him and his brother, perversely, since they rarely got the chance to fight athletically respectable opposition, but it also counts for them because it shows a fundamental dedication to the sport.

I'm not going to give a final ranking on Vitali (I did rank him when he retired, but obviously his latest two performances will have had some impact on his rating, particularly in fact the win over JCG) but needless to say he's been overrated by some and underrated by others. But let's neither go on about meaningless records or read things into his losses that aren't there. Look at his wins and his losses; look at how he performed in them; look at the trends in his career; and try to make a balanced judgement.

 

Not wishing to shift the debate off course but how can you possibly justify that?

Hide was a WBO champion and a genuine top contender while Williams is just a British level fighter who beat a shell of Mike Tyson.

 

:good:good:good You are coming along my friend! For a fighter who gets rated so "High" h2h by modern boxing fans, I have never seen such a fighter with as weak a win resume.

 

Yes. It is pathetic the fights he has missed out on.

 

Hide fought the weakest titlist of all time to get the completely unregarded WBO belt, outside of that win he beat an ancient TUcker. Hide's chin and heart are just a walking joke, he lost to a few complete nobodies. Williams resume is allot better, better wins, better fighter, bigger hitter, stronger, better technical boxer, better chin. Hide's faster but thats it

Williams would have walked through Hide in a couple of rounds, I'm not sure but there might have been rumours

BTW Herbie Hides Myspace is hilarious worth joining myspace and reading it for a goo laugh