The Decline of the Heavyweight Championship

One question that I am often asked when discussing boxing with people runs along these lines: “what happened to heavyweight boxing?” As a friend of mine recently put it, “the heavyweight championship used to be everything” and now it seems to be merely a sporting also-ran, merely one and not the greatest of many sporting accomplishments to be pursued. It is a vexed question. There is, of course, no doubt that in boxing we do tend to view the past through rose-tinted glasses. Maybe we simply exaggerate what was when we lament what is. In this case, at least, I do not think so. A look back at the first two-thirds of the century, at Johnson-Jeffries, for example, or Baer-Louis or, most of all, at Ali-Frazier shows that the Heavyweight Boxing Championship of the World was once a far loftier goal than it now is. These fights were iconic moments. Boxers stood for something more than any other sportsman could achieve. They carried the hopes of nations and races on their shoulders. When they fought, the world watched or, at least, listened. Boxing was the stuff of the great moments in radio, television and print, the fabric of twentieth-century history. No longer. So, today, I want to take an in-depth look at what caused this decline. I have identified a number of key factors, which I here present in the order of importance that I ascribe to them.

The first factor is one that any boxing fan would identify straightaway – the difficulty of identifying a real Heavyweight Champion of the World. From the 1920s up until the 1970s, people generally knew who “the man” was in heavyweight boxing. Sure, 1963 had seen the creation of the World Boxing Council, disputing the primacy of the World Boxing Association as the official sanctioning body of world boxing. Initially, however, the two had largely agreed on the question of the World Heavyweight Champion’s identity. There was some dispute during Muhammad Ali’s first reign but by and large, the public were clear on the champion’s identity. As the 1970s wore on the gap between the two bodies grew wider but it was in the 1980s that the problem really built to a head. In 1984 the International Boxing Federation was formed, giving everybody a third sanctioning body to consider, and they became a major factor straightaway when WBC Champion Larry Holmes relinquished his title in order to claim the new IBF title (the reason being that Holmes could make a mint facing Joe Frazier’s lightly-rated son Marvis but the WBC were insisting that Holmes defend his title against Greg Page). Suddenly, there were three “world heavyweight champions” on the scene, and all had convincing but not conclusive cases to be made for their acceptance.

The irresistible rise of Mike Tyson promised to end this controversy for a while. Tyson quickly captured all three belts, WBA, WBC and IBF, and the boxing fraternity hoped that this might all just end up as being an unpleasant but brief moment in boxing history. When Tyson lost to “Buster” Douglas he lost all three titles and Douglas, in his turn, passed the undisputed crown on to Evander Holyfield. In the meantime, however, the World Boxing Organization had popped up, muddying the waters still further and when Riddick Bowe dumped the WBC title in a trash can rather than face Lennox Lewis we were back in the same boat, having three supposed champions. Moreover, new sanctioning bodies were appearing all the time, diluting the significance of world championship claims all the time.

Of course, this deplorable state of affairs affected every weight class of boxing but I would argue that it hit the heavyweight division hardest of all. The heavyweights were the standard bearers of boxing; their fights were watched by a vast global audience that was mostly made up of people that only watched one or two boxing matches a year. These casual fans had no interest in working out which series of initials meant what. The lower weights had always suffered by comparison with the heavyweights anyway. The lower in weight one went, the more the audience was made up primarily of dedicated boxing fans, people that knew the difference between a WBO Champion and a WBF Champion and correspondingly, the less devastating the impact of multiple championships was. Nothing has had a greater detrimental effect on the image and integrity of heavyweight boxing than this fracturing of the world championship.

Within the business, people have noticed. In 2002 the widely respected publication “The Ring” magazine began rigorously enforcing high standards in the awarding of championships. The magazine had always listed its own champions but now began a renewed focus on their importance. While “The Ring” continued to report on who held the regular championships, they now deemed them of secondary importance to their own belts, awarded only where they believed that a fighter had truly become the undisputed best in their weight division. At the same time, plagued by falling ratings, buy-rates and revenue, the alphabets came under increasing pressure to make and allow unification fights. Nevertheless, these measures are somewhat akin to putting a plaster on an amputation. The public at large are unlikely ever to accept a magazine as the ultimate arbiter of fighting worth and the unification fights are only of long-term value if the belts stay unified. It is hard to see any real solution to this problem in the long term.

A second factor, almost as important and arguably more so is the simple one of visibility. In the early days of the heavyweight championship, one had two main ways of finding out about the outcome of title fights: be there or read about it in the newspaper. Newsreel footage allowed a growing audience to see at least some footage from fights but in the 1930s, for most, radio was king. It was 1921, Dempsey versus Carpentier, when radio first became involved in the boxing business. As many as ninety thousand people were there in attendance for that fight but at least three times that many listened to a blow-by-blow account live on radio, with many more watching the Newsreel footage later. By the 1930s even many poorer families had radios so the total live audience for a Joe Louis fight was exponentially greater. Throughout this growth of media audience, the world heavyweight boxing championship remained at the forefront of global media success.

By the 1950s Rocky Marciano was fighting in front of crowds of between thirty and sixty thousand but making as much and at times even more money on the television, radio and cinema broadcasts than the gate receipts! As television increasingly displaced radio and as international broadcasts became a technical reality the audience for boxing just grew and grew. By this point even middleweight champion Sugar Ray Robinson could draw crowds of sixty thousand in Britain, France and Italy, underlining the growing international reach of the sport. By the time Floyd Patterson achieved his unprecedented feat of winning the World Heavyweight Championship for a second time, television revenue was worth over two million dollars, more than twice what the live gate brought in.

Throughout the twentieth century, boxing was enjoying a reciprocal relationship with media technology. The great boxing matches, particularly heavyweight championship bouts, were giving people reasons to invest in new technology, the most obvious example being Dempsey and Carpentier’s part in encouraging Americans to buy radios. The flipside of this was that these boxing matches were heard, seen and attended by an ever-increasing audience. They were major events that the whole world (at least that portion of it that was media equipped) saw. The zenith came in March of 1971. Ali-Frazier One, the biggest fight in history. No less than FIFTY countries purchased television rights. Over twenty thousand people packed out Madison Square Garden. So huge was the demand for tickets that even Bing Crosby had to be content with watching the fight on closed circuit TV down the road in Radio City Music Hall. The fight was believed to have been watched by three hundred million people. That was more than one of every thirteen people in the world at the time! More people watched this fight than the moon landing.

In fact, such was the success of boxing as a ratings draw that, ultimately, it sabotaged itself. 1975 saw the Thriller in Manila, Ali-Frazier III, broadcast to an even bigger audience than the first, seven hundred million. It was a trailblazer in the field of satellite television, just as Dempsey-Carpentier had been for radio. Yet here, boxing was perhaps sowing the seeds of its own destruction. This fight was the beginning of pay TV, the future of boxing. The 1980s saw the World Wrestling Federation pioneer pay per view and this quickly became the medium of choice for boxing as well. By the 1990s the biggest fights were on pay per view, which meant that the revenue for boxing was bigger than ever…for a time. The problem with pay per view in particular, and subscription based TV as a whole, was that it was undermining the status of boxing as a global sport.

Increasingly, the big fights were not being seen by the majority of people. Those casual viewers that did not generally watch boxing but wanted to be part of the big events were not going to pay a monthly charge to watch boxing and they were certainly not going to pay a premium on top of that for each individual fight. Combine this development with the fracturing of the world championship already mentioned and note the timing – both of these problems came to a head in the 1990s – and it is easy to see why the heady days of the Heavyweight Championship of the World came to an end. Yet, again, there is no real end to the problem in sight, despite the fact that everyone in boxing is aware of the problem. The goal of every fighter is to become a pay per view regular because that is where the money is to be made, in the short term. As buy rates dwindle, however, the fighters become more dependent, rather than less, on the pay per view money, because the money available from free TV has all but disappeared. In the long term this is killing the mass appeal of boxing and all parties, boxers, promoters and journalists recognize that a return to free TV is essential. But no one is willing to take the short term hit to their earnings necessary to re-establish boxing as a free TV ratings draw.

These two factors are the biggest reasons for the decline of the Heavyweight Championship as sport’s premier crown. They are not, however, the only reasons. Another problem, related to the first point, can be found in the comebacks and step-ups that littered the 1990s. Boxing has always had its share of ill-advised comebacks, of course but the 1990s saw several of particular significance in undermining the credibility of the sport. The first was that of George Foreman. Foreman returned to the ring in 1987, at age thirty-eight. In fairness, Foreman was still good. He’d never been quick and, as he got back in shape he proved that he still had real power and stamina. In 1991 he went the distance with Evander Holyfield but in 1994 he knocked out Michael Moorer to win the IBF and WBA heavyweight championships. Whatever the truth of Foreman’s ability, it was, in the eyes of the public, a damning indictment of the state of heavyweight boxing. That Foreman could return to boxing after ten years out of it, win a string of fights and eventually regain the world championship at the age of forty-five seemed merely to illustrate that the fighters of the nineties simply were not in the class of their mighty predecessors. When Joe Louis had fought Rocky Marciano at the age of thirty-seven in 1951 he had been punched right out of the ring. Yet even the best of the current crop, Evander Holyfield had proved unable to get Foreman out in twelve rounds, while Moorer had actually lost to him.

Worse was to come. Inspired by Foreman, Joe Bugner made his third return from retirement in 1995 and, in 1998 duly won the WBF Heavyweight Championship against James “Bonecrusher” Smith at the age of forty-eight. If Foreman was a has-been, Bugner was a never-was. In vain did the boxing establishment point out that the WBF title was a meaningless belt with no recognition, and that Smith himself was forty-five and physically spent. The damage was done. Headlines were made and millions heard that Joe Bugner had won a world heavyweight championship. The credibility of boxing had taken a massive hit. Larry Holmes was another former champion that returned in the nineties and, although he did not win another world title, he also went the distance with Holyfield.

At a similar time further, if slightly less significant, damage was inflicted on the credibility of heavyweight boxing by the numerous fighters stepping up in weight class. Throughout boxing history many had tried and failed to step up from light-heavyweight to heavyweight and win the world championship. It was not until the 1970s that Michael Spinks finally achieved this feat (although Bob Fitzsimmons had stepped down after losing his heavyweight crown and successfully won the light-heavyweight title). The next person to successfully step up was Evander Holyfield, who became Undisputed Cruiserweight Champion before securing his first heavyweight championship. Holyfield would be dogged for years by accusations that he wasn’t a real heavyweight but that didn’t stop him achieving massive success.

Of course, many heavyweight champions had previously campaigned at light-heavyweight, or cruiserweight after the introduction of that belt but the point was that only Spinks and Holyfield had won the heavyweight title after already being champion at the lower weight. At this time, stepping up was still regarded as a mammoth, almost impossible, task, due to its historical difficulty and the huge size of the modern heavyweights. Given the old maxim that “a good big ‘un will always beat a good little ‘un” it seemed ever more unlikely that anyone would step up. That changed in the early years of the twenty-first century when legendary former middleweight, super-middleweight and light-heavyweight champion Roy Jones Junior defeated John Ruiz for the WBA Heavyweight Championship. This feat was repeated two years later by one of Jones’ contemporaries, James “Lights Out” Toney, although Toney’s title win was later struck off due to steroid use.

It is doubtful that this did so much damage to the credibility of heavyweight boxing, especially given that Ruiz was not generally regarded as the “proper” champion when either Jones or Toney beat him but it is still worth noting. No one since Bob Fitzsimmons in 1896 had won a heavyweight championship after being middleweight champion and in those days neither the cruiserweight nor light-heavyweight belts existed. The heavyweights of the 1990s had been unable to beat middle-aged retirees and their successors in the 2000s could not beat blown up middleweights – that was how the most critical observers might put it. There were still also a couple of other points that had a bearing on the declining significance of the heavyweight championship.

When Lennox Lewis was recognized as the undisputed champion in November 1999 he was the leading edge of a wave of non-US champions. The WBO belt had frequently been held by non-US boxers but the WBA, WBC and IBF belts had only very rarely been outside the US. That situation was about to change. The rise of the former Soviet states brought in Ruslan Chagaev, Nikolai Valuev, Oleg Maskaev and, of course, the Klitschko brothers. While it is an exaggeration to always assume that Americans are not interested in anything from beyond their own borders, they do like to have a dog in the hunt, so to speak. The last decade has been one in which the American heavyweight scene has had little to contribute to the championship picture, with no sign of that changing. Since the USA is, in many ways, the home of boxing, this apathy towards boxing’s crown jewel has hurt the sport. A real American heavyweight contender, someone like a young Tyson or Frazier that just blitzes through the opposition and will not be denied would go a long way to re-establishing the pre-eminence of the title in American sport and would therefore seriously help to re-establish the importance of the title generally.

One final factor is that of competition. Now, I would point out that I do not think this would have any significance were it not for the already weakened state that heavyweight boxing found itself in, in the last twenty years. Nevertheless, it is worth noting. For most of the twentieth century one important assumption underpinned the significance of being world heavyweight champion and that was that it meant you were the most dangerous fighting man alive. That is how the majority of the audience saw it. That began to change in the early 1970s with the emergence of a man that became a cultural phenomenon on the order of Muhammad Ali himself. That man was, of course, Bruce Lee and the wave of changes that he would usher in was immense.

Although we are only talking about movies, Bruce Lee introduced to America and Europe the idea that straightforward fist-fighting might not be the only way of doing battle physically. Lee and his compatriots were doing things that would hardly have seemed physically possible just a few years earlier to the audience now seeing them for the first time. Almost immediately a martial arts craze took hold in the western world and boxing’s position as the pre-eminent combat discipline was under threat ever after. Capitalizing on the new popularity of eastern martial arts, many boxer versus martial artist matches were featured at travelling shows and the like in the States, and this did actually turn the tide somewhat, as the martial artists concerned were usually relative poorly trained and easily defeated by the boxers. Even so, a change had taken place that would have long-term consequences for boxing.

In 1993 the first Ultimate Fighting Championship was fought and Mixed Martial Arts took its place as a worldwide combat spectacle. Now, for the first time, the idea of the World Heavyweight Boxing Champion as the toughest fighter around was in jeopardy. Indeed, one can see it quite clearly in nicknames. Where “Iron” Mike Tyson had been “The Baddest Man on the Planet”, it was UFC Champion Ken Shamrock that ABC news later christened “The World’s Most Dangerous Man”. Rising pay per view buy-rates for UFC have shown that MMA is real competition for boxing these days. While it is true that there are many fans of each discipline that belittle and deride the other, it is also true that there are many fans that enjoy watching both MMA and boxing. Even assuming the appeal of each sport is equal, these people only have so many dollars to spend on pay per views.

On a personal note (and I appreciate that many boxing fans may not agree with this) I think one last problem for heavyweight boxing is simply that the fights aren’t as good as they used to be, and that is because the fighters are too big. In 1971 Ali and Frazier were only just over two hundred pounds. Floyd Patterson typically weighed in at 190 pounds, as did Rocky Marciano. Sonny Liston was a monster at 215. George Foreman was something unprecedented at 230. Nowadays, anyone under 230 is considered small. The average is round about 250. These gigantic fighters are, to me, dull, slow plodders that cannot match the excitement and intensity of the fights of the past. Moreover, because the heavyweight division is open-ended (anybody over 200 pounds), it frequently throws up mismatches that would be impossible in lower weight divisions, whereby a fighter might outweigh his opponent by two or even three stones. Consider the WBO title fight between Herbie Hide and Riddick Bowe. Giving up twenty-seven pounds in weight, Hide was floored six times before the referee stopped the fight. It wasn’t so much that Hide was hurt; he kept beating the count relatively easily. It was simply that the greater mass of his opponent was too much to deal with. The wider public do not want to see mismatches.

All things considered, then, it is perhaps no surprise that the Heavyweight Championship of the World is no longer the sporting Holy Grail that it once was. Maybe it never will be again. The problems that hold the heavyweight division back are solvable but too many people would have to go against their own short-term financial interests in order to make those solutions happen. Nevertheless, we can hope for a little better than we have had. If the alphabets maintain their commitment to unification bouts then at least we may, most of the time, be able to know who the real champion is. That alone would be a big improvement.

April 11, 2011 | Categories: Boxing | Tags: Bob Fitzsimmons, Evander Holyfield, Floyd Patterson, George Foreman, Georges Carpentier, IBF, Jack Dempsey, Jack Johnson, James "Bonecrusher" Smith, Jim Jeffries, Joe Bugner, Joe Frazier, Joe Louis, Ken Shamrock, Larry Holmes, Lennox Lewis, Marvis Frazier, Max Baer, Michael Moorer, Michael Spinks, Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, Nikolai Valuev, Oleg Maskaev, Rocky Marciano, Ruslan Chagaev, Sonny Liston, Sugar Ray Robinson, Vitali Klitschko, WBA, WBC, WBF, WBO, Wladimir Klitschko | 2 Comments