Why have LHW's had bad luck trying to capture the HW crown

Moorer won the lineal title from Holyfield who had just beaten Bowe. Holyfield was absolutely the man at that time and if there was one champ he would have been it.

 

Well we saw that play out but he did actually win it. Credit where it is due i guess even if the run was fleeting.

 

I think a same day weigh in should be recorded officially as well as the 24hr one with a forfeit in place for cheating the scales beyond an agreed number of pounds.

 

At light heavyweight, you have some guys that might be walking around at 185, 190, sometimes even 200 lbs. But that doesn't mean their walk around weight suits their frame. However, it's very unlikely to run into a guy whose both well over 6 ft and well over 200 lbs for their walk around weight at light heavy. You usually don't have to worry about enormous natural heavies with elite punching power squeezing their way into the division.

Once you get to heavyweight, it's a wake up call to the difference in natural frame and size of true modern heavies. You might run into a fighter who was already over 200 lbs of solid muscle as a teenager, but you might have started as a super middleweight as an adult in your 20's and then had to eat and lift weights to fill out to light heavyweight. Depending on the light heavyweight's anatomy, genes, growth rate etc, when he gets in the ring with a real heavyweight it could almost be as wide as the gap between someone like Andre Ward and Anthony Joshua.

 

All the fighters look at heavyweights and think that they are big, slow, and stupid. And they are. There is a reason that the words big and dumb sound so good together. The skill level for heavyweights is abysmal; a great skilled heavyweight does what every middle of the road welterweight does. If there is a division where you can be a one trick pony and be successful, with limited experience and not even being all that good at your one trick, it is heavyweight.
Middleweights like Moore and Walker saw that and made a run at it. Moore had success because he got smart fighting guys like Burley and Booker.
Light heavies see how slow and stupid the heavyweights are and figure that they can outspeed and outsmart them. But the lightheavy is too close to the heavy and is not as smart as he thinks he is, so he doesn't calculate how much the additional weight is going to slow him down. And his skill level is not, generally, far enough ahead to compensate for his own loss of speed and the other guy being bigger.