Lennox Lewis, Greatest Heavyweight of all time

Sorry to interrupt, but why does anyone care what the IBF say? Why? Who cares? So Lewis decided not to do what an organisation that gives rankings for money/favours says? Good...who cares?

 

Yeah but...your post is about his reneging on an agreement he made with the IBF. Byrd was never #1 Ring contender to my knowledge.

Byrd didn't force the issue to the extent that his being #1 was inarguable, or even completely reasonable. He is #3 on the Ring annual list for 2002, which is only 2 spots above Johnson. #3 and #5 are pretty interchangeable in a non-joke reign (I work with the top 1 and the top 5 for appraising reigns). He was #2 for 2003.

The IBF managed to rate a good fighter in their top slot, but after all horror IBF inflicted on boxing, Lewis telling them to eff off is fine, morally.

And as Byrd wasn't the #1 contender, it was fine from a sporting point of view, too.

 

Remember that these ultimatums to the heavyweight King were underpinned by the company's ability to strip their belt from the Champion, and that stripping that Champion has no real affect on his standing or legacy. And their belt is a piece of dog****. It's a bargaining chip brought into existence by greed. Any recourse to some meaning or some morally binding mechanism by the organisation that assigns to it to the paying customers that use it to gain television slots is a mistake.

 

But surely you don't expect champs to always fight "the highest rated available challenger" as ranked by a magazine who is also "willing and availalble" who is also ranked #1 by one of four corrupt ranking organisations? That's a reasonable number of hoops for the boss to jump through.

Maybe Byrd had the best "overall case" at the time but it definitely wasn't clear. Lewis set out to take on a top 10 ranked contender and then when that fell through he took on Vitali Klitschko, his soon-to-be successor as the best heavyeight on the planet. That's fine. Nothing wrong with that, nothing at all that's a fine schedule. Byrd wasn't some overwhelmingly powerful presence in the division that demanded attention and the IBF posturing was utterly without meaning.

Finally, if Lewis had ended his career with

KO4 Rahman
KO8 Tyson
UD12 Byrd

Or

KO4 Ramhan
MD12 Byrd
TKO6 Klitschko

Instead of how it did, I would have been really, really disappointed.

And probably, so would you have been.

 

I would have liked to have seen Lewis fight Byrd, definitely. I would have prefreered to have seen him fight Wladimir Klitschko though. In order I would have wanted him to fight:

Wladimir Klitschko
Vitali Klitschko
Chris Byrd

I would agree with you that he would have ducked Byrd if he had fought a rematch with Vitali, won, Byrd had won a significant fight in the interim and Lewis had fought again.

If you want me to "cut to it", I would say the following as a bottom line.

1 - I would have welcomed Byrd-Lewis.

2 - Byrd's case was not strong enough that it felt absolutely ordained to me, either at the time or retrospectively.

3 - There is no fight that actually occurred in Lewis's final three fights where I would chose to substitute Byrd. If Lewis had fought one more fight, I would not have seen Byrd as an acceptable opponent.

 

Sure, but it wasn't a disaster. It wasn't the end of the world. Lewis probably caught some flack, but it wasn't a like his position was hugely undermined by his missing out on Byrd, and certainly after Vitali, nobody cared.

Byrd's case was just never airtight. It wasn't. He wasn't the #1 contender, he wasn't a part of boxing's consciousness in the way Holyfield or Bowe or Tyson was. Or Bruno over here. He never achieved either of the most persuasive statuses for forcing the fight.

In the end, if Lewis "ducked" Byrd, he is being held to a very high standard. We often say that Louis was incredible in that he took out every #1 contender he ever had with one exception. Nobody says, "he was not bad, he took out every #1 contender apart from one but missed out on some #2 contenders which is pretty weak."

I'd describe a champion as ducking when he misses out on a prolonged clear-cut #1 contender (2 defences is a look, more is highly questionable) OR a top 5 contender when a career's best payday is put on the table. Not when he doesn't fight a #2 contender who is keen.