The State of Boxing

It all started about five years ago. It was a nightly ritual for my dad and I to sit down and watch ESPN classics with dinner. The six o'clock hour was always boxing and I got to see some of the greatest fights of all time. Naturally the the most exciting ones centered around the biggest stars, but there were two in particular that always grabbed my attention no matter how many times I saw.

The first fighter was Mohammed Ali, formerly Cassius Clay. With Ali, it wasn't just about the fighting, but it was about the entire package. I don't believe that we have since seen an athlete that has combined such swagger and confidence with the actual skills to back it up. He had the skills and speed of a lightweight in the body of a heavy weight. He could dodge a punch or simply take it in such a way that it didn't hurt him. He would allow his personality to get in the head of his opponents to the point where they were ineffective. In the 1996 documentary When We Were Kings, it details the fight Ali had with George Foreman, the Rumble in the Jungle. In the movie it talks about how Ali looked to the people of Zaire to help give him an advantage. Ali purposely went down their early to insight the people to be on his side. Eventually the people in the streets began to chant in their own tongue, Kill Foreman. Foreman and his trainers became fearful for their lives and didn't leave their hotel rooms or eat food prepared by natives. Inside the ring, Ali used one of the strangest tactics ever seen in boxing, the rope-a-dope. He simply leaned against the ropes and allowed Foreman to hit him. Young Foreman was known for one thing, his incredible power that decimated so many before him. Ali simply took the punches and waited for the perfect moment. During the 8 round, Ali came alive, landed a series of punches and laid out Foreman. Although the punches weren't the most powerful you had ever seen, the exhaustion from the first 7 rounds of non stop had power punches had taken it's toll on Foreman and he never did get back up.

The other fighter was Mike Tyson. He was never the best technical boxer. He was never the biggest, but his punches certainly packed the most power that I have ever seen. He was explosive putting his entire body behind some of the punches. Growing up from a rough background, Tyson had a certain killer instinct that you didn't see in many. From the time the opening bell rung, he was looking to take his opponents head off, and a couple of times he nearly did. Cuts aren't something unheard of in boxing, the the time that I saw one of Tyson's punches nearly rip a man's nose off, I new I was watching something different.

There is one fight in particular that stands out in his career and it's not one fight that he won. Twenty years ago yesterday, February 11, 1990, Tyson flew to Tokyo to take on Buster Douglas, a top contender at the time. Buster has often been viewed a lazy fighter. He never trained particularly hard for his fights. He often showed up a little overweight and a little out of shape. Everyone in the sporting world expected it to be a quick fight. No one could have predicted the outcome based on the events before the fight though. A short time before the fight, Douglas's mother passed away and there was a questions of whether or not he would even fight. That death motivated him in a way that no one could imagine. The Douglas that showed up in Tokyo was lean, mean and ready to fight. The rest is history. Douglas looked a step ahead the whole night and eventually knocked Tyson out with a series of vicious combinations.

It turns out that that night meant more in the boxing world than just a knockout of the current champion. It marked what I consider to the be the end of one of the most entertaining sports in history. Boxing has never been the same and newer more exciting sports have come to fill it's place. The heavy weights the 60's, 70's and 80's are now gone, replaced by overweight fighters who stand in one place and exchange punches. And none of that particular quality that made both Tyson and Ali so exciting to watch. When you saw a fight of theirs, you could feel that something great was going to happen. Since then, that feeling has been gone, and the boxing world has died because of it.