Why Do We Love the Heavyweights?
I've always found it strange that heavyweight title fights, no matter how poor their matchup, always draw relatively high amounts of interest from media and fans. I'm no exception to the rule. My favorite period of boxing, its black power movement, if you will, from 1965-1975, is most interesting to me because of the heavyweights. And I know far more about the heavyweights of that era than its other fighters, even though that means that I know far more about the likes of Ron Lyle than I do Emile Griffith, and am aware that I voluntarily consume an inferior product because of it.
I'm not into decline narratives; I think a lot of things are better than they ever have been before. But today's heavyweight division isn't one of them. Today's heavyweight division sucks. Not one of the fighters, in their current incarnation, would come close to showing up in my top fifty all-time heavyweights. Do you think any of these guys would be a lock against Ingemar Johansson?
A lack of talent has plagued the heavyweight division for a long time. I believe that one would have to go back about 15 years, to the first two Holyfield-Bowe fights, to find a fight in which both participants, on the night they met, could be called top-fifty all-time heavyweights. It's been a long time since we had a great heavyweight champion; I think Holmes was the last. But even if you think Tyson, Holyfield, or Lewis were great champions, you would be hard pressed to find fights in which they were tested by very good heavyweights. Tyson and Lewis, in their primes, managed to lose to some less-than-very-good heavyweights.
So why do we love the heavyweights so much? What makes the heavyweight division so interesting? Why did Ricardo Lopez make so much less than Andrew Golota? Is this more media driven or fan driven?
posted by Mike Ezra @ 9:00 PM
10 comments
10 Comments:
A very good question, Mike. I say that as probably the most flagrant offender among the Boxing Standard crew when it comes to pro-heavyweight bias. (My one self-defense: I often write for magazines that usually don't take an interest in boxing, and editors at such places usually want to hear about heavyweights.) I seem to be entirely capable of trampling underfoot a magnificent fighter like Ricardo Lopez (Watch it, shorty!) in my rush to get close to a heavyweight ham and egger like, say, Tex Cobb, so I can plumb the subtle depths of the big fellow's character and cultural significance. I can lovingly review and dissect the clash of styles between the 42 year-old Holmes and the tough but limited Ray Mercer, returning again and again to find endless layers of truth and beauty in their bout, but by doing so I leave myself open to the very plausible criticism that their encounter was rudimentary or worse by welterweight standards.
As you can probably guess by now, I'm not going to attempt to answer your question. But I think it really does deserve one. Beyond the usual reasons offered--heavies are the biggest, and therefore at least in theory the heavyweight champ can beat everyone else on earth--I wonder if the unique conditions of heavyweight style aren't part of it. Because the perception is that power is most important in this division, the KO hovers over every moment of every fight, threatening to trump anything else going on in the ring at any moment, in a way that isn't as true of other divisions. Maybe that helps to attract fans and press attention all by itself. It's like one of those gimmick poker games in which aces, red fours, and queens are wild, which means that the winning hand is more likely to be four of a kind or something else "big." For some card players, that's a lot more interesting than winning a straight-ahead five-card stud hand with a decent pair, even if this latter game is much better poker.
I think one thing not mentioned yet, is the boxing public loves to see knockouts. Heavyweight fighters not only punch harder than the lower weight fighters, they're also slower and lack real good defense, making them more vulnerable to be caught with a big shot resulting in a knockdown or knockout.
It's not a coincidence that Muhammad Ali is the only true Superstar heavyweight champion, who was a monster draw, that wasn't a knockout puncher.
People like heavyweights because they believe bigger is intrinsically better, and this applies to smart people as much as it does to dumb ones.
The heavies are more interesting because most people aren’t 6’5” and 230 pounds, so whatever skills Ricardo Lopez has in surfeit can never compete with a hardwired awe we have with all things big, people in particular. It has nothing to do with boxing.
In front of me are two biographies of Huey Long. One is Harry Williams’s 884-page door stopper and the other is William Ivy Hair’s “The Kingfish and his Realm,” not a third as long as the former. There’s not a doubt in my mind Hair’s is better - amazingly so - but guess which nabbed the Pulitzer? Then there’s Robert Caro. Throw his Johnson bios in a sling and you’ve got a true WMD hammerthrow, though only Goliath would have the strength to heave the goddamn thing.
I'm interviewing Stephen S. Hall, author of "Size Matters," a book on height and its effects on men and boys. He doesn't seem like a boxing type, but he knows his size stuff. I'll ask him and get back to y'all.
Point taken, Brian, and I don't say you're wrong, but "bigger is better" is a conventional response, as you and the esteemed Mister Hall are saying, and one thing that's very true of the fight world is that much of its knowledge runs against conventional responses. Like, for example, most everybody on the planet, trapped in an 18-foot square enclosure with a guy who just hurt them very badly with a punch in the face and is trying to do it again, would shy away from him, but a well trained fighter would get close to him, bury his nose in his clavicle, and embrace him heartily, smothering his leverage. So sure, bigger is better, but I think Mike's question is still not entirely answered. In the fight world, bigger is also slower, less adept, fistically dumber, and generally less good. And we know this, and yet we still go along with an instinctive reaction that we should have trained out of ourselves. (And, I might add, the Pulitzer Prize judges should also know better than to favor fat books over lean ones, even if, say, people buying Christmas presents don't.)
And, in fact, I think part of the answer to Mike's question lies in the fact that everybody else goes along with that reaction. If writing about boxing is writing about what it _means_, and not just the tale of the tape and the blow by blow, then it makes sense to go to the division where the most people find the most significance, even though you know that the boxing isn't as good in it. Ali was Ali because he was a heavyweight. Picture him at 126 pounds--same personality, same politics, same life story--and you don't have an icon of the Sixties who attracted millions of words and every camera around. You've just got a smart little guy with fast hands and a quick mouth, and you probably also have a guy who never made any real money. To some extent, I think we're replicating the bigger is better logic by writing about heavyweights, but then again, when it comes to meaning-making at the fights, size does seem to matter to most people, so we might as well go where the action is--even if by doing so we tend to make sure that that's where it stays.
Then how 'bout this - for good reason, people tend to correlate "bigness" with aggression, so heavyweight fight promises a level of carnage not implicit in lower weight classes. Whether the violence is less expertly delivered is doesn't matter. People like boxing because it's violent, and people think big people are more violent. So heavyweights are more popular.
In any event, it seems to me being a little guy with a big mouth attracts greater attention than a little guy with big skills. Volume adds stature.
It's instructive to note that in the theatrical world of professional wrestling, the only physical attribute of value is size; there are no small wrestlers.
In a way, it's a testament to people's discernment that there's any interest at all in the lower weight classes.
I see what you're saying, Brian, but, in fact, there's nobody less "aggressive" (granted, the word doesn't mean much when it comes to boxing, since everything about boxing is aggression in one form or another, even defense) than heavyweights. I mean, picture a Briggs-Valuev distance fight. There would be at most 10 minutes of obvious aggression--the kind that a regular watcher of SportsCenter would recognize as such--over 12 rounds, or maybe as little as 4 or 5 minutes. Now picture, say, Barrera and Morales, or Corrales and Castillo. So even if people do tend to correlate size and aggression--and I'm not even really buying that they do--even a casual observer of boxing (and Mike was putting the question to people who are more than casual observers of boxing) should know better. Not that we do know better, since we talk about heavyweights disproportionately, but we should.
I'm wondering if in other countries, even those who don't have the population to sustain decent contenders in the heavyweight division, value size in boxing the same way American fans do? Is this interest in the heavyweight title worldwide or western? Anyone know this?
Another question: Has this devotion to the heavyweight championship as the sport's #1 icon/draw/site of interest been uninterrupted in boxing history or have there been periods where other sites ruled?
Was Ray Robinson, the sport's all-time greatest fighter, a bigger star than Floyd Patterson, a mediocre to slightly good heavyweight champion?
This is a compelling topic. I think Charles is right in citing the Could-Superman-beat-up-God? question. For the vast majority of boxing fans, especially casual boxing fans, the interest in any given match-up isn't often (if ever) based on the nuances of skills and styles; those fans simply want to see who can beat up whom. Duran's characteristic bravado notwithstanding, the heavyweights are almost always going to beat the smaller guys, therefore -- according to the casual fan's logic -- why bother with anything other than the heavyweights? The simplistic take is that the heavyweight champ can beat up anybody else in the world, so THAT's the guy I wanna see!
Most people would say it's the same in all sports: the NFL commands the most attention because, face it, no high school or college team could hope to beat an NFL team; people would rather watch the Olympics than a high school track meet because in the Olympics they're going to see the world record holder, and so on. Of course, that analogy doesn't really work in boxing. The BEST boxers may well not be in the heavyweight ranks (in fact, it's almost certain that they're not), but the average fan doesn't know enough, or care enough about what's really going on in the ring to make that distinction.
As for Mike's question about whether there have been eras in which the heavyweights didn't command the most interest, I wonder if the Leonard-Hearns-Hagler middleweight era fits the bill?
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