Well put,Scartissue. I'll always remember upcoming fights being discussed in the school classroom and slightly later in the workplace in great depth. Nowadays it's just "Oh there's a big fight at the weekend,is n't there?" and back they go to talking football or darts.
In fairness the prestige of the heavyweight champion started to decline mainly in the eighties when we had a procession of different fighters claiming various alphabet titles. Thomas, Witherspoon, Berbick, Tubbs, Page, Coatzee, Dokes, Weaver. The general public simply didn’t know them. Tyson for a while brought it back then Lewis but like the rest of the weight divisions the main culprit in all of this is the split titles and alphabet organisations simply seeing it all as a cash cow. This enabled different belt holders to avoid each other and avoid fighting the best and still being able to call himself a world champion. If the there was just one champion per weight with ten contenders it simply would be much harder for fighters to avoid each other,whether champions or contenders.
Yes. It was definitely the eighties when the rot set in. The various boxing commisions should have been adult and encouraged more unification bouts.
That depends on if he can beat the 40 year old Pulev. The wbc has submitted paper work for new division. The Seniors division. Don King is busy calling his old contracts. Fury is pissed at him. How dare he take away his geriatric opponents! Forget drug tests, he threatened to release King’s old nude pictures of his associates of Rahman and McCall IF sign with King for the seniors division. That’s low, even for King!
And the full month of prefight coverage in the mainstream magazines and newspapers that went along with them.
I’d go to high school and usually hang out in the library with friends and grab all the papers like The NY Times and such to peruse for boxing coverage. And USA TODAY would have at least one small item (even if it was just two sentences on a title fight or bout between contenders in Thailand or South Africa) on boxing basically every day (and once each week they’d run the fight schedule and one of the alphabets top 10s). It was like mining for gold.
I usually ramble too much about the 'old days', but it's pretty obvious to anyone without bias that we are at an all-time low in boxing in just about every way imaginable, from not enough fights/quality fights & fighters, to too many 'champions' and too many chumps running their trash mouths, and everything in between. In all fairness, I'm sure that if the old greats were fighting today, they would go for the slower schedule/more money situation, it's just too tempting & boxing is too rough. But those guys fought all the time no matter how worn out or injured or sick they were, because if they didn't fight, then they and their families didn't eat. We as fans benefitted from that, but the old guys would've loved less fighting & more $$ I'm sure.
I remember when the Heavyweight Champs had to adhere to the rules of defending their titles against the mandatory challengers every six months, now everybody has an alphabet champion. The champs of today call the shots, too many trilogies, that holds up other worthy challengers, I don't care for reruns. If I wanted to see reruns, I could watch them on the late late night shows. I do not want to see Fury vs Wilder for the 100 th time, boring. Yawn !.
Too many titles. I grew up in the WBA/WBC era, with unified titles being rare. But looking further back, when there was just one champ per weight class, there still were shenanigans being pulled that kept the top fighters out of getting title shots, either due to racism, or Mafia involvement, or just plain ducking. But now with 4 major sanctioning bodies, plus the even more ridiculous stuff like "super champion" and interim champions, sometimes there's like 6 champions per weight class. When everyone is champion, no one is champion.
Indeed! Followed by (subject to whichever of the boxing commissions is involved) 'Regular Champion'. Then, depending on the weather... ...'Super Champion'. It can't be taken seriously.
