Did the Klitschkos have an easy time after Lewis retire or not?

No doubt it was widely regarded as the worst heavyweight era in boxing history.

 

There generally needs to be a reasonable passage of time to determine the strength of an era, but even at this point it's safe to say that the immediate period following Lewis' retirement was unusually weak.

Fighters who were beaten several times during the Lewis era like Maskaev and Briggs were able to win titles at an advanced stage of their careers. With a bit more luck you could throw Golota in there as well. Naturally smaller fighters like Byrd and Toney were at the top of the pile, and the likes of Brock and Barrett were top 10. The 2000 Olympic SHWs appeared to be unusually weak, with few fighters making much of an impact as pros.

Where you have fighters moving up the ranks later in their careers without any obvious reason to think they improved as fighters, it's a good sign that the division is weak. A strong division usually has new blood building on top of the established guard, rather than the other way round.

I think things picked up in quality by the end of the decade, with the emergence of Povetkin, Chagaev, Ibragimov and Haye, below the Klitschkos. That isn't a bad top 6 by any stretch, even if that mix didn't deliver many compelling fights.

In Wlad's case, he reigned so long and beat so many challengers that you have to give him his props. The odds of lucking out with a weak era become less plausible when you hold the belt for a decade.

 

I don't agree it was the worst era ever. I think the worst era ever was post-Marciano retirement. You had some pretty dismal names in the Top 10 for a while there. There have probably been other worse eras that aren't jumping to mind.

A big part of why the landscape was so bleak when Lennox retired was that promotional issues prevented the K brothers from mixing it up with the heavyweights that were actually legit. Love them or hate them, John Ruiz, James Toney, & Chris Byrd were all better than 'Hurricaine' Jackson, but Byrd we didn't see any of them fight a Klitschko in 2004, when it would have counted for the most.

Instead we got pointless fights like Tony vs Rydell Booker, Byrd vs. TOS Williamson, and Vitali vs. Williams. Eventually the Don King aligned fighters started getting shuffled out of the deck and you saw guys like Sam Peter and Calvin Brock emerge

 

Awful era, slave contracts. Beat me, then you fight my brother and if you beat him you must rematch me again!!!!

Absolute joke

 

Must be the worst era in heavyweight history

 

Was a baaad Era.

 

when theres no doubt, theres no reason against it.