Some will tell you that the Ali days were The Old Days and therefore apt to be romanticized; exaggerated and seen as better than they actually were because they bring the speaker back to his younger, more vigorous days.
But you can’t explain away everything that occurred before August of 2010 that easily, now can you?
So here is the strait story……
One of the necessary ingredients of being great is having other great fighters available to fight against, defeat and rise above.
Ali, Liston, Frazier and Foreman didn’t become great simply by facing each other.
The supporting cast they had around to build themselves against is why they themselves are remembered as superb.
Their legendary clashes with each other were highly celebrated occasions of one proven, superb champion against another; a clash of the titans situation, if you will.
That is something that is simply not possible to stage it this moment in time, today.
The heavyweight division will always be the flagship of the fleet because they are the biggest fighters and head to head, a good big man will usually beat a good small man, so these are your alpha-males; your champion of champions in the heavyweights, and therefore; they matter greatly, even during the periods when they seem uninspiring, such as now.
The pool of talent is always in a state of flux, based both on the sheer participation numbers (normally there are between 870 and 1950 active heavyweights on the scene at any given moment) as well as the number of extraordinary talents fighting; men who’s natural aptitude represents a spike beyond the norm so significant that they make it look….phenomenal.
Today the Klitschko brothers are so far above the rest of the lot that they make it look easy, and too often, they make it look boring as well.
But this has almost as much to do with their combined strengths as it has to do with the incompetency of their available adversaries.
Even so, they are really the only two ‘phenomenal’ talents active today, whereas during Ali’s time there were half a dozen besides him or more, and the fact that the only two excellent heavyweights around today happen to be brothers & won’t fight each other are facts that are keeping widespread fan interest in the division on ice.
The Klitschko’s (I can never tell them apart) are defending the title (or some of the titles, I can never keep track of how many there are or who owns them) against someone who’s pudgy and Slavic looking and who’s name a cannot pronounce”
That’s not just the talk of the peripheral fan of the would-be fan; that’s the talk of the average Boxing fan, at least here in North America, and that’s something that the heavyweight division hasn’t had to deal with to this extent in 300 years; Fan apathy.
Although better known outside of the U.S. than almost all that stars of the NBA, NFL or MLB, not being American, the Brothers Klitschko face an uphill battle securing the love and support of the fickle, landlocked U.S. fan base who see Boxing more and more as a “global sport”, and American sports fans, the most fanatic in the world, hate “global sports”, witnessed by their collective yawn at this year’s world cup of Soccer in spite of our media’s best efforts to shove it down our throats.
The other problem that the Klitschkos have in practical terms is that they both are composed of great strengths and glaring weaknesses, both of which have been put on vivid display for critique.
Much of that the harsh kind of critique.
It seems to many observers that there two brothers are two halves of a whole; that Vitali has the stamina, resolve, tenacity, resiliency, but lacks in inspiration, creativity, speed, maneuverability and grace. Conversely, Wladimir has the speed, creativity, maneuverability and ring generalship but seems lacking in stamina, resolve, tenacity, and resiliency.
Between Muhammad Ali and his brother Rudy Clay, who was also a heavyweight fighter, Muhammad got everything and Rudy got shit.
If it had worked out that way for the Klitschko brothers, the recipient of all the good boxing traits would certainly rank as one of the greatest champions of all time, given their modern size and old fashioned discipline, while the other brother would be a full time politician in the Ukraine, famous due to the exploits of his athlete sibling.
The easement of personal freedoms bestowed upon citizens of the so-called “Eastern Bloc” nations has filled the ranks of professional boxing with that rare bird of balance; people with both bad local employment conditions and access to great boxing programs, which is, as immigrant and depression era America taught us, is the perfect climate for boxers to thrive, and these days that is what you have in much of eastern Europe/Western Asia.
The shift the government tolerance for individual enterprise & hanging out your own business shingle which began in the early 90’s has provided boxing with a new avenue to generate fighters, but instead of adding to the already bountiful pot that housed Ali. Frazier, Foreman, Norton, Quarry, Lyle, Shavers, Bugner, etc., a simultaneous turn of events in the West made these Eastern additions into replacements instead.
In the West and most prominently in the U.S., increasingly plentiful opportunities for education, vocational training and financial reward across an easier path lead fewer minorities and other downtrodden cluster groups to put their health on the line for cash in prizefighting.
Today, while MMA draws white, suburban high school (and sometimes college) graduates to the cage as a low paying, part time hobby pursuit, the more committed professional grade fighter has taken up residence in 9 to 5 jobs.
For those would-be candidates who are more “Athlete” than “Fighter”, teams sports had finally caught up to boxing in pay scale during the last quarter century since the Ali’s, Leonard’s, Hearns’ and Hagler’s hung up their gloves, making the decision to fight for a living seem that much more far fetched when you live in the land of plenty.
While the Eastern European Heavyweights are surely the best around today, therefore, they are not at all better than the Western heavyweights who filled the top slots 30, 40 or 50 years ago. They’re merely the last ones to stick around and be punished in a fight sport where quitting mid fight is considered cowardly.
When daily life gets easier, people get softer, and that’s a fact; and adding wrestling, weightlifting, kicks & elbow options to their repertoire, dying their hair pink & blue and spending 5500.00 on cartoonish tattoos doesn’t change that one little bit; it just masks it a little by making incompetency seem fresh.
For some method of measure, I’ll assign a subjective numerical value to today’s top dozen-plus and do the same with 25 of the top heavyweight fighters from Ali’s era, which people can either confront or spit in the wind.
Ali Era Heavyweights:
1. Muhammad Ali (1967) 100
2. George Foreman (1973) 96
3. Joe Frazier (1970) 93
4. Sonny Liston (1961) 93
5. Jerry Quarry (1969) 88
6. Cleveland Williams (1959) 86
7. Ken Norton (1976) 85
8. Ron Lyle (1975) 84
9. Zora Folley (1960) 83
10. Ernie Shavers (1977) 82
11. Floyd Patterson (1960) 80
12. Eddie Machen (1959) 80
13. Jimmy Ellis (1969) 78
14. Eirnie Terrell (1966) 77
15. George Chuvalo (1966) 75
16. Joe Bugner (1975) 73
17. Henry Cooper (1962) 72
18. Oscar Bonavena (1968) 71
19. Jimmy Young (1976) 70
20. Karl Mildenberger (1966) 68
21. Buster Mathis (1968) 67
22. Thad Spencer (1967) 65
23. Duane Bobick (1977) 64
24. Mac Foster (1971) 62
25. Leotis Martin (1970) 62
2010 Heavyweights:
1. Wladimir Klitschko 89
2. Vitali Klitschko 85
3. David Haye 72
4. Tomasz Adamek 67
5. Alexander Povetkin 66
6. Chris Arreola 65
7. Nikolai Valuev 64
8. Ruslan Chagaev 62
9. Denis Boytsov 60
10. Sam Peter 60
11. Eddie Chambers 59
12. Odlanier Solis 59
13. Alexander Dimitrenko 57
14. Kevin Johnson 54
15. Kali Meehan 51
