Seeing all the chaos of current HW division today..shows you how good Wlad was

Imo Wlad dominated one of the weakest eras in the divisions history. That's not his fault of course, and he should still be in any good top 10 all time heavyweight list.

 

Fury dominated Wlad and has been the big daddy of the division since taking over in 2015.

 

Was it weak? Povetkin is near 40 and still knocking out to contenders. Pulev 39 and fights Johsua next. Wlad beat these two soundly years ago. They are still around, what does that say about todays competition?

This signals the quality was fine when Wlad was dominated champion, but it isn't today. Fury need to fight Johsua or one of the up and comers.

 

Wlad fought everyone he had been given to fight with in amatuers, was world and Oly champ.

Out if prime his version, like A.J and like A.J vs out of prime Povetkin. What an big marquee fight.

Approx week later he turned 41. Maybe looked enough old to safely match up him vs Whyte.

 

Right, Povektin at an older age had AJ in some trouble too. Fans of Fury and AJ need to prop up these old men. They have little legacy without them.

 

Like in most weak eras, there were a handful of stand out fighters in Wlads era.
But overall I think the division was lacking in talent.
Wlad
Vitali
Pulev
Povetkin
Haye
Byrd
Brewster
Peter
Those were some of the best heavyweights during Wlads reign.

Fury
Joshua
Wilder
Whyte
Parker
Ruiz
Usyk
Ortiz
These are some of the best heavyweights of the current era.

I think this era has the better overall quality and I think that if you took all of the best heavys in both eras and put them into the heavyweight division's strongest eras (70s,90s) that the current crop would do better than the Wlad era.

Also Pulev is mandatory, but I really don't think he deserves to be. Since the loss to Wlad his best wins have been Chisora and Hughie Fury.

 

Even Helenius just KOed top 10 Kovnatski.
Whyte was number 2 ring HW before KO loss to Povetkin, but I don't think he would even be in top 15 in Wlad's era.

 

How is this even logical if second tier Wlad's era fighters are still at the top at age 40?

 

Exactly. Heavyweights have always been lumbering giants compared to their lower weight division peers so it's easy to say they are not as skilled. What I applaud Wlad and Vitali for doing was taking on all comers and making it look easy.

 

There is always this argument, but there is something to the saying: "Wladimir was a great champion". He always showed up in top form and rarely ever had bad performances(not to say he didn´t have **** fights, but rather that he was always quite dominant).
He defended unified his belts and defended them. He beat numerous consensus nr 1 contenders.

Fury´s career went to **** when he beat Wlad. He never defended his belts. But he had a solid comeback. Yet still, he has had more tuneups than title fights during his comeback. But he seems quite ambitions these days.
Joshua has been class. He followed the Wladimir model and it will be interesting to see how the rest of his career plays out.

Wladimir Klitschko was a fantastic champion who reigned supreme over the division.

 

not only that, but wlad redefined himself and changed the way he fought after getting sparked several times.
i can't stress enough how impressive that is.

and he didn't take the 'gently, gently' route back into the game, he took on sam peter who was a serious hitman at the time. respect.

 

That was not a dominant performance.
He clearly got the better of Wlad, but to say dominated is just straight up ignorance.

 

Yeah I also agree with that assessment. I thought Fury definitely fought a smart tactical fight, but it was a very low output fight for both fighters. If either fighter would have rushed in it could have turned out very different for either one.

 

We've all gotta admit that sometimes great fighters tend to make their eras look weak