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When they were kings

 
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PostPosted: Fri 19:54, 13 Sep 2013    Post subject: When they were kings

When they were kings
The sounds of a boxing factory fill the air at the fabled Gleason's gym in New York: gloves thudding into heavy bags; the rhythm of jump-ropes snapping against the floor; the whappity-whap of taped hands impacting on speed-bags. At regular intervals, a buzzer sounds, simulating three-minute rounds and the one-minute rest period in between. Three world champions are on the floor. Title-holders Zab Judah and Vivian Harris are regulars at Gleason's, as is World Boxing Council cruiserweight king Wayne Braithwaite. Exposed pipes run parallel to the ceiling. The walls are painted battleship grey, matching the pockmarked concrete floor. Cheap mirrors reflect distorted amusement-park images of fighters who shadow-box before them. One thing is missing. For the next 100 years, the most treasured prize in sports was largely American property. Max Schmeling of Germany won the title by disqualification over Jack Sharkey in 1930, but lost it in a rematch. Sharkey was defeated by Primo Carnera of Italy, whose short-lived reign was ended by Max Baer. In 1959, Ingemar Johansson of Sweden defeated Floyd Patterson but was knocked cold by Patterson in his first title defence. Lewis has retired, but there's no sign that America is about to reclaim the throne. The fighter most likely to be recognised as the world's best heavyweight in the near future is 33-year-old Vitali Klitschko from Ukraine, whose brother Wladmir is also highly rated. The Klitschkos' father was an officer in the Soviet army and their mother was a school teacher. Vitali turned professional in 1996 after compiling a 195-15 amateur record and is the present WBC heavyweight champion. Critics note that he has yet to beat a quality American fighter. His signature wins were against Kirk Johnson of Canada and South African Corrie Sanders. Ali brought unprecedented glamour to boxing. Prior to his appearance on the fight scene,[url=http://duveticajacketsjp.albirank.net/][b]デュベティカレディースダウンジャケット[/b][/url], crowds at championship bouts were comprised of hard-core boxing fans, most of them men. But starting with Ali's 1970 comeback bout against Jerry Quarry in Atlanta, an Ali fight was as much a social as a sporting event: there were capes and gold chains and beautiful people; men in tuxedos and women wearing fur coats over next to nothing. Superstars such as Frank Sinatra eagerly traded favours to be seated ringside. Ali's willingness to fight in Europe and in developing nations made the sweet science a true world spectacle. Dictators such as Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines spent millions of dollars of their scarce foreign currency to lure Ali within their borders and be photographed at his side. Ali upheld his part of the bargain. Thanks to his wit, the 'Rumble in the Jungle',[url=http://duveticajacketswomenjp.albirank.net/][b]デュベティカ 激安[/b][/url], against Foreman in Zaire in 1974, and the 'Thrilla in Manila', against Frazier in 1975, became part of the vernacular. That Ali fought mythological monster after monster added to his aura. In recent years, 10 heavyweights born outside of the US have attracted notice. Lewis is first among them. Then,[url=http://duveticacoats.webmium.com/][b]デュベティカアウトレット[/b][/url], after Vitali Klitschko, comes David Tua, who was born in Samoa. Managerial problems have kept him out of action since a March 2003 draw against Hasim Rahman. But with the possible exception of Mike Tyson, Tua remains the hardest puncher in the division. Poland-born Andrew Golota was beating Riddick Bowe in both of their 1996 encounters before being disqualified for low blows. Golota recently fought International Boxing Federation champion Chris Byrd to a draw in a fight that most ringside observers thought he won. He compiled a 20-0 record with 15 knockouts and was the second-ranked heavyweight in the world. He handed Tua his first defeat and was the only fighter to knock out Byrd. In July 1999,[url=http://duveticaonline.halod.com/][b]デュベティカ 店舗[/b][/url], Ibeabuchi called a telephone service and asked that a lap dancer be sent to his room at The Mirage hotel and casino in Las Vegas. According to courtroom testimony, the dancer insisted on cash payment in advance, at which point the fighter became enraged and attempted to sexually assault her. This followed similar allegations against Ibeabuchi made by two dancers in Nevada and Arizona. Ibeabuchi is now in prison. Meanwhile,[url=http://duveticaonline.halod.com/][b]デュベティカ 激安[/b][/url], America's heavyweights are faltering. Tyson was knocked out by Danny Williams of Brixton on 30 July. 'Look at me. I'm not a big guy; I'm not a true heavyweight. Roy Jones, James Toney, me. Right now, all of us could get down to cruiserweight. In fact, Roy is fighting at 175 pounds again. There's no way we should be among the top American heavyweights, but we are.'Emanuel Steward, who guided Lennox Lewis to greatness, takes things a step further. 'The next generation of elite heavyweights is going to come from Europe and Africa,' he says. 'It's happening already. You can look ahead now and see that America is simply not developing heavyweight boxers any more in the amateurs. In fact, the last outstanding class of American amateur heavyweights was in 1988 when Riddick Bowe and Ray Mercer came out of the Olympics. And the amateurs is where your future heavyweight stars come from.'So what happened to the American heavyweight? There was a time when boxing and baseball were America's two national sports and virtually anyone in the Western world interested in sport knew the heavyweight champion's name. The first reason is that boxing is no longer part of the social fabric and dreams of America's underclass. It has been supplanted by basketball and American football. 'There are hundreds of great potential heavyweights out there,' says TV boxing commentator Larry Merchant. 'But they're all playing power forward in the National Basketball Association or linebacker in the National Football League.'The average salary for an NBA player is now $4.9 million (£2.7m). For Major League baseball players, it exceeds $2.3m (£1.27m). In the NFL, the figure is $1.26m (£690,000). The heavyweight champion of the world is well paid, but very few fighters make as much money in an entire career as an American team athlete makes in a single season. It's no longer uncommon for elite high-school basketball stars such as Kobe Bryant and Lebron James to skip college altogether and go directly to the professional ranks for tens of millions of dollars. Money is a great motivator. 'If Vitali and Wladimir Klitschko had been born in the US, with their size and coordination, they would have probably become basketball stars,' says Steward.'If I had grown up in the United States with its football and basketball culture, I might not have become a fighter,' Lennox Lewis told me. 'But I grew up in Canada, where I was surrounded by hockey. I got to the level of being able to skate and even skate backwards, but my feet kept growing and skates were expensive, so I took up boxing.'In America today, there is more glory in football or basketball, even at the college level, than there is for most professional fighters. 'Seeing something on television makes kids want to get into it,[url=http://duveticajacketsmenonsalejp.halod.com/][b]ダウンジャケットduvetica[/b][/url],' says Steward. 'Television is a great motivating factor. All young men want to be on television,[url=http://duveticajacketssalejp.albirank.net/][b]デュベチカ専売店[/b][/url], but there's almost no boxing on free television any more. It's all on cable and pay-per-view.'The glory once bestowed on fighters has been further diminished by the proliferation of world titles. There are now four major sanctioning organisations with 17 weight classes in each. That's 68 'world champions'. Vitali Klitschko, John Ruiz, Chris Byrd, and Lamon Brewster all presently claim a heavyweight title. Having four heavyweight champions is like having four kings of England. It is absurd. It doesn't work. Heavyweights such as Lewis, Ibeabuchi,[url=http://duveticajacketswomenjp.albirank.net/][b]デュベティカダウンジャケット[/b][/url], Golota and the Klitschkos still come to the States to train and to become, as they say in the gym, 'more like American fighters'. But there are fewer opportunities for American fighters in general to learn their trade. Great fighters start young. In the US, when a child is athletically gifted, he or she can develop in most sports by participating on a school team. But very few Americans have access to a gym where they can learn to box. Teddy Atlas, who helped shape Tyson's early career, says: 'Quality trainers are rare; and when you don't have good teachers, you don't learn.'Roy Jones is in accord. 'My father taught me how to box,' he says, 'but there are very few people around now who can teach the fundamentals from the ground up.'It's not just heavyweights: there's an overall deterioration of the skill level of boxers in the US. The middleweights have been called boxing's second glamour division. During Sugar Ray Robinson's heyday in the Fifties,[url=http://duveticajacketssalejp.albirank.net/][b]デュベティカ 激安[/b][/url], it was said that the division was divided into Sugar Ray and everyone else. Joe Frazier, as honourable in the ring as any man who ever lived, once declared: 'I was never big with words. I wanted to fight; not talk. I wasn't no philosopher or poet. No, sir; I was a fighter.'Lamon Brewster celebrated his World Boxing Organisation title victory over Wladimir Klitschko earlier this year with the declaration: 'Americans don't lay down. You hit us and you hit us and we just keep coming. We'll take whatever punishment is necessary to get to our target.'But the truth is,[url=http://duveticashoponline.webmium.com/][b]デュベティカ 激安[/b][/url], being a fighter requires a special commitment and character. People 'play' football and basketball. Nobody plays at boxing. It's hard getting punched in the head day after day in the gym. And being a fighter requires certain intangibles that are missing from many American lives today. Jim Lampley, a boxing commentator on Home Box Office, one of the two main pay-TV networks, addresses these intangibles when he says: 'There used to be a societal reverence in the US for working hard to overcome hard circumstances. Now the reverence is for getting over on someone and making money without working hard. I'll go so far as to say that the talent pool for boxing is diminished by the fact that, in some areas where fighters traditionally come from, there's easy money to be made on the streets,[url=http://duveticajacketsoutletjp.albirank.net/][b]デュベチカ専売店[/b][/url], dealing drugs and engaging in other criminal activity. The guy who works hard is considered to be a sucker.'Trainer Bouie Fisher, who has been with Bernard Hopkins since the second fight of the self-styled Executioner's career, has a similar view. 'You have to live right between fights,' he says. 'But the way things are today, there's parties here, parties there and vices everywhere. A young man today makes a few thousand dollars and the first thing he wants to do is to go partying. If you don't have proper discipline, you get caught up in partying and hanging out and wind up cheating yourself - particularly if, like most of the top heavyweights today, you only fight once or twice a year. Too many times when you try to tell young men something today, they become resentful and don't want to listen.'For Donald Turner, who trained Holmes and Holyfield, the requisite intangibles are particularly lacking in the heavyweight division. 'There's a lack of toughness and discipline,[url=http://woolrichusaonlineshop.blogspot.com/][b]http://woolrichusaonlineshop.blogspot.com/[/b][/url],' he says. 'Generally, the smaller fighters are tougher than heavyweights. That's because, growing up,[url=http://discountduveticajackets.webmium.com/][b]デュベティカ 激安[/b][/url], they had to fight simply to survive; whereas with the heavyweights, people said, "Don't mess with him; he's big." Then you come to the discipline issue. No one is harnessing the thug in a lot of these guys. And on top of that, there's a lack of pride. In the past 50 years,[url=http://duveticajacketsoutletjp.albirank.net/][b]デュベティカ ダウンジャケット[/b][/url], there are only five heavyweights I can think of who gave their all every time out. Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Larry Holmes and Evander Holyfield. As for the rest, you can forget about it.'During his first reign as champion, from his 1973 conquest of Frazier through to his 1974 loss to Ali,[url=http://woolrichusaonlineshop.blogspot.com/][b]woolrich usa online shop[/b][/url], George Foreman said: 'People talk about my title, but it isn't mine. It belongs to the world. It's the same title that was around before me, before Muhammad Ali, before Joe Frazier; and it will be there when we're all gone.'Note that Foreman didn't say that the title belonged to America. Tennis's Davis Cup, for instance, was inaugurated in 1900 and each of the first 27 competitions was won by the US, Britain, or Australia. Then, after a brief French reign, the same three nations won every competition until 1973. The National Hockey League has many European stars, as has the NBA. Why should anyone be surprised if the next generation of great fighters comes from eastern Europe or Africa?Still, it should be noted that Lennox Lewis remains the only dominant non-American heavyweight of the past century. And, for most fans, the division is defined by its champion. For example, the division was pretty thin for most of Joe Louis's tenure, but no one talked about the decline of American heavyweights because Joe was there. Jack Johnson,[url=http://duveticajacketssalejp.halod.com/][b]デュベティカ ダウンジャケット[/b][/url], Jack Dempsey, and Rocky Marciano were also great heavyweight champions but had few true inquisitors during their respective reigns. Boxing, like most sports, tends to run in cycles. After Gene Tunney retired in 1929, there was a dreary nine-year period until Joe Louis arrived on the scene. After Louis,[url=http://discountduveticajackets.webmium.com/][b]デュベチカ 通販[/b][/url], there were 13 years when title was in the hands of Ezzard Charles (in truth, a light-heavyweight), Jersey Joe Walcott (37 years old), Rocky Marciano (the real thing), and Floyd Patterson (he of the glass jaw). If Tyson had reigned into the next millennium, as expected, there would be less talk now of the decline of the American heavyweights. 'I don't agree that there's a decline in American heavyweights,' says Lewis. He is sitting in the outdoor garden of a restaurant in suburban New York. He's casually dressed, a bit above his fighting weight, looking content and serene.'If you look at history, during what some people call golden eras,[url=http://duveticashop.webmium.com/][b]デュベティカアウトレット[/b][/url], very often there was one great heavyweight and not much else. The 1970s were an aberration. Depth like that is rare in the heavyweight division.'In the era that's passing now you had Tyson,[url=http://duveticajacketsoutletjp.albirank.net/][b]ダウンジャケットメンズ[/b][/url], Holyfield and Bowe. Those are three A-list American fighters. In fact, if Tyson and Bowe hadn't self-destructed, you probably wouldn't be writing this article. So be patient. What might seem like a decline now is just the period before a new era. The next great American heavyweight will come.'That may be so. But not for a while. The ranks are thin,[url=http://duveticaonline.halod.com/][b]デュベティカ ダウンジャケット[/b][/url], with little hope in sight. The world's heavy hittersVitali Klitschko, Ukraine
Current WBC title-holder. The 33-year-old university-educated champion stands at an imposing 6ft 8in. Yet the 31-year-old remains unbeaten. Andrew Golota, Poland
Thought a potential champion until charged with attempted sexual assault in 1999 and convicted in 2002. In prison. Thomas Hauser's award-winning biography, Muhammad Ali: his Life and Times, is published by Robson Books.
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