Did deep enough and you will see the dropping of the belt was not to fight Coetzee that was just something that coincided in the long haul. The sanctioning bodies were not what stopped Holmes - Coetzee. The fight was sorted and allowed but the money/demand wasn't there in the end. It had nothing to do with sanctioning bodies whatsoever. If Coetzee beat Page perhaps they may have had another look but he got knocked out.
Jose Sulaiman , had threatened to strip Larry of the WBC title if he should fight Coetzee before Page. The WBA threatened to strip Coetzee if he didn’t fight before their deadline. The Holmes Coetzee fight still collapsed mostly because It wasn’t going to be promoted by Don King…who had a relationship with the WBC. Boxing politics did not want heavyweight unifications until the HBO stepped in and paid for it.
Trevor at that time wasn’t seen as much. He really had no significant wins. His biggest step-up fight he had gotten bombed out in one round by Bernardo Mercado and he was two fights removed from a hometown draw against trial horse Leroy Caldwell. Berbick basically got the fight because he was Canadian and they wanted some Canucks on the undercard of Leonard-Duran I in Montreal. But wait, there’s more. Arum and King co-promoted the fight. When King ran into Arum’s matchmaker sometime soon after the main event was made, he asked when they wanted to get together to figure out the undercard. King was informed that Arum had already made the complete undercard and already had signed contracts. Don, of course, wasn’t happy about this. He was getting screwed by his rival. So he reached out to Berbick’s team and funded a world-class training camp with top sparring partners and such to prepare him for Tate — basically ‘if you’re going to do me like that I’m going to see if I can help this guy knock off your top heavyweight.’ Arum surely lost millions when Tate went down as he was still an attraction and would have been back in title contention soon enough for a big-money bout. You mess with the bull, you get the horns.
The WBC gave Holmes 30 days to sign to fight Page. Coetzee didn't even hold a title. There was no talk of unification. Holmes signed so the WBC lifted that but refused to sanction Frazier as a title fight. Coetzee won the title after all these shenanigans were long underfoot and the damage was done prior to this even if the title had not yet walked. The saga had dragged out and out and out. Holmes was never going to face Page and they were at a stalemate from the start even after he signed for the fight. Coetzee come out at the very end and regardless Holmes was losing the title as he flat out said he wouldn't fight Page and no more money was going to come forward to test that. The fight did end up kaput thru promoters but again - sanctioning bodies did not stop the fight and King and Arum aren't sanctioning bodies no matter how desperate you are to try and align them. End of.
I think we are both right. The governing bodies didn’t want to unify the heavyweight title and Larry rejected Page in favour of more important fights. Technically Larry didn’t want to fight Page for 2.5 when he could get 3.1 for Marvis and he still sought 15 mil for Coetzee (and the good of boxing) over the contracted 2.5 for a Page title defence. He did say he would fight Page for 5 but king already had a contract for 2.5 which looked ridiculous when a unification was on the table. For the good of boxing the WBC should have waved mandatory commitments in favour of unifications… instead they supported King in enforcing the Page fight. Which was silly. The WBA were no better. They gave Coetzee a narrow window to fight Larry strictly on their terms before stripping him and refused to increase their deadline for the good of boxing when there was a delay.
Interesting documentary. Tate is one of those heavyweights I really don’t know much about. I think I watched the Weaver fight a few years ago. Other than that, I remember getting Ring magazine in the 80’s. During Tyson’s era. One of the governing bodies, the WBC I think, listed a top 20 instead of a top ten. I saw Tate’s name & wondered if he would be a challenge for Tyson. Heavyweight boxing really became a mess in the 70’s with all the belts. Good fighters but too much bs.
Big John’s tale is a sad one, that included a few unsanctioned bouts in the mid-1990s, the last of which he lost. He was scaling close to 400 pounds in a brief comeback before that. He did jail/prison time for theft, had massive drug problems (which is where his money went from what I understand) and ended up panhandling on the streets of his hometown in Knoxville, Tennessee. Sometimes no one can save someone from themselves. I choose to remember John Tate this way: roughly around 1990, after he had retired (before the ill-fated comebacks), I ran into him at a gym and a couple of amateur shows. Kerry Pharr, a good guy who had a gym with pros and amateurs in a suburb of Nashville, had brought him in. I may be wrong, but I think John may have been living in the gym. I saw him interact with amateurs — kids, maybe up to 15 or 16 years old but also younger — and show them things. He didn’t have nice threads or any trappings of his better days as a champion, but it was very clear he was happy. He had a bit of a childlike quality and really lit up working with those kids. Big smile. Very encouraging whether they won or lost. So as poorly as things worked out for his career after tasting success, John did find some degree of happiness. He died in 1998 in a one-vehicle accident after having a massive stroke while driving caused by a brain tumor. I wish he’d have been able to stay around and work more with young fighters. RIP champ.
