No Place for Cruisers in Heavyweight Boxing
This past Saturday night saw yet another nail brutally driven into the coffin of heavyweight boxing as Vitali Klitschko predictably dominated challenger Tomasz Adamek in their WBC Championship bout. The fight screamed mismatch from the get go, with pundits making frequent references to David and Goliath. Adamek, the former light heavyweight, did not look the 6’2” he was billed as and certainly looked to be giving up in excess of forty pounds in weight. Try as he might (and he did try, valiantly) he was utterly outmatched in this unedifying contest. One has to admire the Klitschko brothers, both of whom have learned to use their impressive physical attributes perfectly, maximizing their strengths and minimizing their weaknesses. Nevertheless, this fight like the much-hyped bout between Wladimir Klitschko and David Haye earlier this year was, at best, tiresome to watch.
The plain fact of the matter is that the modern heavyweights have become so big that frankly stupid fights are being made. Back in the seventies, even George Foreman was usually no more than 20-25 pounds heavier than his opponents. These days, with the heavyweight division including any boxer of 200 pounds or more, ludicrous mismatches seem to be more and more frequent. Something needs to be done and the only sensible solution that I can see is a wholesale redefinition of weight limits. The weight limits, as they are currently set by most boxing organisations, are woefully out of date. The light heavyweight limit of 175 pounds just does not reflect reality anymore. That is 15 pounds lower than the average man’s body weight today, according to the most recent data that I was able to find online! Even allowing for couch potatoes distorting the average, it is clear that something is out of whack.
I would personally advocate the minimum weight for heavyweights being reset to 230 pounds. I would put cruiserweights at 210, light heavyweights at 200, super middleweights at 190 and just keep going down by 10 pounds for each weight class below this until welterweight, which would now be 160. After this, I would keep going down in 5-pound units, to reflect the greater difference a pound makes at lower weights. Others might offer different scales. The problem, of course, is that this would require all of the alphabets to acknowledge and agree to the new limits, and would mean that most of the championships would have to be declared vacant and fought out once more. Then again, think what a money-spinner that could be!
This redefinition of boxing, long overdue in certain weight classes (the light heavyweight limit has remained the same for almost one hundred years), would give the sport a chance to re-launch itself. With the right hype and marketing push it would be a real chance to win back some of the viewers that the sport has lost. Sadly, I can’t see it happening as the governing bodies in boxing are generally incapable of acting in concert and rarely show anything resembling vision. Nevertheless, something has to change because, as it stands we know that a good big ‘un will always beat a good little ‘un. For some reason, however, we seem to be determined to keep testing that theory.
