Non-Celebrity Champions
Carlo’s reference to a recent biography of Gene Tunney prompted me to consider champions whose title reigns immediately followed those of charismatic champions.
Among heavyweight champions, I’d guess you’d have to include Sullivan, Dempsey, Louis, Ali, and Tyson as the ones most heartily embraced by the public.
If Max Baer had stayed champion longer, he probably would have been included.
Jack Johnson has some kind of special place too, for what would have then been considered negative reasons.
George Foreman is more problematic; his status as an icon didn’t really take place until he was old enough to be more oddity than championship figure. To most of the world, he's at least as much pitchman as he is boxer.
Finally, Rocky Marciano may not have had suitable opponents to elevate him to the A List of beloved champions. But time has favored him. Maybe from a remove of forty years and more, he’s made it.
The replacement champs were, in order, Corbett, Willard, Tunney, Charles, Frazier, Leon Spinks—although Larry Holmes probably is Ali’s historic successor—and Douglas.
Aside from Frazier and Holmes, none of them was a high profile ex-champion. I think history is already starting to be kinder to Holmes than it will be to Frazier. Part of that is because Ali is starting to become ancient history. It’s possible that, when younger fight fans think of Frazier, they remember the much more recently active Foreman yo-yoing him off the canvas.
Three of the successors (Willard, Spinks, and Douglas) got lucky. None of them deserved to become champ.
Corbett was a very good, historically significant fighter.
But the rest comfortably slot in among the all-time greats. And Ezzard Charles deserves a place somewhere in the P4P top ten.
I noticed something odd. Among the charismatic champs, only Louis was a truly efficient fighter. It's possible that there was a deeply held cultural need for Louis to be perfect--to be reassuringly unbeatable.
All the rest in the immortal group had eccentricities, idiosyncrasies, and exploitable liabilities.
On the other hand, the three most technically sound champs ever (unless you want to make a case for James Toney, who most people refuse see as having held the title) are all among the follow-up group—Tunney, Charles, and Holmes.
It makes me wonder if there ever a time when consummate professionalism was prized over personality? Can a totally efficient fighting machine be seen as a hero?
posted by Anonymous @ 7:21 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
The unique character on the list is Foreman, I think. In his first go-round, he had no taste for public life, and didn't really know what to do with the attention. Certainly, he didn't draw strength from it, as Ali did, and it seemed to sap his strength in the runup to fighting Ali. (That's why Johnson absolutely belongs on the list of celebrity champions. It doesn't matter that a lot of the attention was negative; the point is that he ate it up, courted it, used it, got leverage from it.) But in his second go-round, Foreman had undergone a major transformation and had learned to do the equivalent of breathing underwater. Far from messing with his mind and taking his strength, living with and for celebrity became a strength. I'm not sure I admire it, actually, but I have to respect it.
And I think Charles is right to question, at the end, whether there really was a golden age when popular opinion could recognize and reward consummate technical craft in the ring. Yes, more fighters knew more about how to fight back then, but did the fans? And if the fans did know more, how much did they care? The standard narrative is that there was a time when your average fight fan could actually recognize and appreciate the spectacle of a guy who knows how to box getting the best of a guy with muscles who only knows how to punch. Maybe there was, but Charles is suggesting at least the possibility of some revisionism.
One other thing: I bet you'd get very good odds on the replacements, if there was popular betting to be had on a tournament between the celebrities and the replacements, and it might be wise to bet selectively on the replacements. If you line up Sullivan, Dempsey, Louis, Ali, and Tyson in their primes against Corbett, Tunney, Charles, Frazier, and Holmes in theirs, I think the replacements, with some judicious matchups, stand a decent chance of coming out ahead. Imagine being Sullivan. It would be like going to hell.
To me, there's no more perfect betting situation than a used-up celebrity champion, especially one who was popular for his power, going up against one of those punishing technicians. The celebrity is going to get kind odds just by virtue of his being a celebrity. I know Felix Trinidad was good when he was good, but he couldn't have been as great as he was made out to be, and I know that Winky Wright may not be as good as he's made out to now (after being underrated for a long time), but Wright over Trinidad is the perfect instance of this kind of matchup. So was Tunney-Dempsey, Marciano-Louis, and Holmes-Ali. You can get by Leon Spinks on aura, maybe (once, anyway), but not Holmes.
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