Our beloved sport is usually one in which many who take up the craft aren't exactly known as choir boys, to put it lightly. Brushes with the law and then some can follow more than a handful of fighters, and those are the ones that often draw people's attention. But today, let's take time to acknowledge the upstanding men, the "good boys" of boxing, role models. Let's list them. Please allow me to begin: Lennox Lewis Vitali Klitschko Wlad Klitschko
Joe Frasier, Mickey Ward, GGG, and Hagler all strike me as fundamentally decent and respectable. Maybe I forgot something. I think a lot of the greatest embassadors are redemption stories, such as Sugar Ray Leonard and Johnny Tapia. A lot of people have problems with drugs and anger and whatever else and need to see someone who went down but got back up. There are also the people who were bad, stayed bad, but would have been so much worse if they had had to make a living (solely) on the street. Floyd Mayweather Jr fits here, Sonny Liston, a lot of guys in this cateogry.
Current fighter Daisuke Sugita (he's a full time Policeman) Yo Sam Choi (what he did in death hardly needs a mention)
Floyd doesn’t deserve to be on this list. He refused to call Muhammad Ali by his name. He went on a religious crusade in the build-up to their fight, calling Ali un-American and saying he was going to bring the title back to America, citing his Christianity versus Ali being a Muslim and saying that Ali, by virtue of joining the Nation of Islam, had done the equivalent of joining the KKK. (His words.) Patterson also represented boxing so well that he spent outrageous amounts of money on disguises so no one would recognize him. That’s not an ambassador. Oh, and let’s not forget that Patterson openly dodged his top challenger for at least a couple of years (before finally finding he could run but not hide and agreeing to fight Sonny Liston). And he completely disgraced the single most important title in all of sports by defending it against a man with zero professional fights just to put a few extra dollars in his pocket. That’s not an ambassador. That’s an embarrassment.
Hiroyuki Sakamoto Rough ass childhood, became a fighter, now runs an award winning charity focused on helping children in foster homes reach their potential
