by Fox Doucette
Welcome to the exciting conclusion of the What If Klitschko Special, in which Lennox Lewis learns that bleeding Ukrainians are sometimes a sign from the gods:
When last we left our friends in the Soviet Union, Vitali Klitschko had passed the Olympic super heavyweight torch to his younger brother—in our timeline, this would continue an era of Soviet dominance in Olympic boxing that would span the careers of guys like Alexander Povetkin, Vyacheslav Glazkov, and even Magomed Abdusalamov, whose amateur career in our history was not nearly as deleterious to his health as the combined efforts of Mike Perez punching him silly and Benjy Esteves Jr. completely failing in his duty to protect the fighters in the ring in his capacity as referees. Wherever the Olympic Games were contested, there was a Soviet fighter waiting to win gold, and the only reason it was so diverse was because the Soviet Olympic Trials were home to a wing of the Red Army so elite that many outside of the USSR wildly speculated if those guys could beat the world champions in the pros—and most were of the view that they could and it wasn’t close.
See, we ended our last episode with Lennox Lewis knocking out Mike Tyson in eight rounds, precisely according to Hoyle in the prime timeline. Lewis, the undisputed champion, who had held some version of a belt for all but the smallest fraction of the past decade, with only Oliver McCall and Hasim Rahman having had anything meaningful to say about the matter, looked for his next opponent. Not available: Vitali Klitschko. Lewis had to find someone else with whom to do battle and defend his crown. He found his mark in the person of the WBA’s titlist, denying Roy Jones Jr. a shot at the top, but setting up a plodding if workmanlike mark for Lewis:
March 1, 2003: Lennox Lewis UD12 John Ruiz
Many arguments have been made about the greatest fight of all time. Ward-Gatti, Ali-Frazier (all three of ’em), Arguello-Pryor, Marciano-Charles, Corrales-Castillo…this was precisely the polar opposite of that. This was known in the boxing press as the Cure For Insomnia Fight, as John Ruiz’s style not only completely failed to entertain in its own right, it brought out a pure-boxer counter punching style from Lewis, who refused to engage on his opponent’s terms.
Potshots were the order of the day on the outside; wrestling was the order of the day on the inside. It didn’t matter that the WBC, IBF, and WBA “Super” championship belts were on the line, it didn’t matter that Ring Magazine hyped the hell out of this fight as being for its own version of the heavyweight title.
This was just categorically absurd, turn-off-the-casuals stuck-in-the-mud “boxing” that satisfied neither the technical-excellence purists nor the bloodthirsty casuals. The pay-per-view numbers were atrocious; fewer than 250,000 buys, and there was much hand-wringing as people wondered if the heavyweight division was dead—after all, the world was getting the Ward-Gatti trilogy at junior welterweight if they wanted boxing that was actually worth watching right around this same time.
Well, you think that’s bad…
September 6, 2003: Lennox Lewis KO4 Jameel McCline
Lewis, saying this would be his last fight win or lose, decided to make a final statement and unify all four belts—he had the WBC, WBA, and IBF, so only the WBO remained.
In the prime timeline, the WBO belt holds the odd distinction of having been the only one passed between the Klitschko brothers, albeit with the assistance of a third party. Vitali was champion from 1999-2000, until he lost to Chris Byrd. Wlad then knocked out Byrd to avenge his brother’s honor before holding the belt himself until Corrie Sanders and Lamon Brewster knocked Wlad out in consecutive title shots—Brewster, in the process, earning the distinction of being the last man on earth to defeat Wladimir Klitschko in a boxing ring.
So who’s the champ if you take the Russians out of it? Well, the knee bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone’s connected to the hip bone, and (in order):
Chris Byrd took the title from Herbie Hide in 1999. Byrd got stopped by Obed Sullivan, who got pasted by Frans Botha, who beat Ray Mercer before getting pasted by Derrick Jefferson, who dragged Tony Tucker out of a three-year retirement for an “optional” defense—and lost—before Tucker got sent back to the old fighters’ home by Jameel McCline.
All of this, of course, took place under the not-very-watchful-eye of the kinds of people who have gambling problems and just wanted to put money down on the “Not Named Lewis Champion.” When Lennox Lewis stepped into the ring, Vegas couldn’t set the line high enough; it finally settled on Lennox Lewis as a 25-to-1 favorite.
Four rounds later, the kinds of people who thought they could scare up the money for a high-end steak dinner by betting ten bucks found they’d have been better off just taking that tenner and walking to the nearest McDonald’s. They’d still get eight ounces of beef, but it’d be in Double Quarter Pounder form—at least they wouldn’t go hungry.
For everyone else who put that tenner down and got a return on investment sufficient only to get an extra sauce packet for their Chicken McNuggets? Well, at least it’s money they didn’t have to spend out of their own prior funds.
The fight was, put simply, a joke. It took four rounds only because Lennox Lewis knew it would be his swan song and didn’t want to foolishly go out on his shield by upset loss, perhaps thinking of the first fight with Rahman as he went about chopping down the man in front of him.
So, with a title vacuum…
With Lennox Lewis out of the way and the Partnership For A Soviet-Free Lineage commanding four different threads of the heavyweight division, something had to give. Your encouraging sign came in 2004, when a certain Olympian from the Atlanta Games finally got his title shot, for the vacant WBC strap:
April 24, 2004: Joe Mesi KO7 Corrie Sanders
Joe Mesi, in the prime timeline, had his brain scrambled by Vassiliy Jirov, who inflicted a hematoma that effectively ended Baby Joe’s career and sent him home to Buffalo to be a low-rent-district George Foreman on late-night cable.
Here, Mesi, who won a gold medal at the 1996 Games in Atlanta, had been working his way up through the fringes of the heavyweight division, always a bridesmaid, never quite good enough to grab a title shot when the big money and the big men were elsewhere. Possibly he’d done something to tick off Lennox Lewis, and the big guy simply froze him out, refusing to make the mega-fight.
Whatever the insane troll logic behind Joe Mesi not getting a shot, he got one at the WBC’s behest upon Lewis’ retirement, and he capitalized in a big way. The WBC had its titlist.
Meanwhile, over in the IBF:
May 8, 2004: Chris Byrd UD12 Jameel McCline
Chris Byrd set himself up for a nice little title run of his own; he’d been part of the WBO Consolation Prize Sweepstakes, but here was his chance to at least make a decent show of himself on a better stage, fighting for a title that would potentially make him first among equals should the unification derby ever come again.
Byrd did what Byrd does—he outboxed McCline, keeping his opponent off him and scoring effectively at close range, putting on a fine show despite his being barely above a cruiser in terms of size. He won a solid 116-112 (twice), 117-111 decision to grab the belt.
May 15, 2004: John Ruiz UD12 Hasim Rahman, WBA World heavyweight title
Notice a pattern here? The four sanctioning bodies deliberately scheduled their title fights to be in close proximity but never on the same night. For the boxing press, this was the biggest thing to happen to the waxing of lyrical and the debating of meritorious since the WBA set up a tournament to crown a champion when Muhammad Ali ran into trouble with the draft board. SportsCenter got into it, all the major hometown newspapers had an opinion, and with no pesky Soviets around, it was entirely recognizable Western World names.
The trouble comes when the fights simply aren’t that good. Mesi brought the pain in his fight, giving the fans what they wanted, but Byrd-McCline was a technical fight that turned off the casuals, and John Ruiz…is John Ruiz, one of the most boring fighters ever to lace up the gloves. When he fought Rahman, the fans snoozed…and the real loser was the WBO, who instead of having a lead-in for their fight of the ages, instead got an apathetic audience that was totally not buying into their gimmick:
May 29, 2004: Danny Williams KO4 Mike Tyson, WBO World heavyweight title
Seriously. They made this fight for a world title. Tyson had fought Clifford Etienne after the loss to Lewis, knocking the oaf from Louisiana out in a single round, but nobody was fooled. Lennox Lewis had decisively put the lie to the idea that Iron Mike, nearly two decades removed from his pro debut and almost 38 years old, was ever going to be 1987 Mike Tyson again.
As for Danny Williams, well, to be fair, his fight with Tyson in the prime timeline did earn him a title shot—Vitali Klitschko bashed his brains in.
This fight went exactly the way it did in the prime timeline—Tyson, a shell of his former self, looked about as sad and pathetic as Ali in the Trevor Berbick fight. Game, set, match, a legend was done, and the WBO got more than its share of “for shame” from guys like Dan Rafael of USA Today.
So what happened ultimately to the heavyweight title lineage? It fizzled out, pretty much for good—nobody was able to hold enough of a lead for enough of the time to credibly establish themselves as undisputed champion and pick up the trail where Lennox Lewis had abandoned it.
What’s more…nobody seemed to care. Boxing got lighter, promotions got leaner, heavyweights got compared to the dinosaurs who went extinct when smaller, faster, more adaptable mammals got the better end of the exchange between the Earth and a giant space rock. It was natural selection. Why watch a heavyweight bout between guys who probably couldn’t beat the Russian amateurs when you could watch guys like Floyd Mayweather and Bernard Hopkins and Manny Pacquiao and Antonio Tarver and Jermain Taylor?
Boxing became about the best fights at all weights, losing once and for all the heavyweight division’s status as the glamour belt. The fights down weight were just too good, and without a dominant champion to galvanize the public into recognizing a name, there just wasn’t anything to sell. Knockouts are no fun when they happen in bum fights. Joe Mesi, who we mentioned earlier? He had his ups and his downs, never winning consistently enough to leverage the boyish good looks and the charm—his fight with Chris Byrd was supposed to be the next Great American Champion duel…and Byrd pasted Mesi to unify the IBF and WBC belts before getting flattened by Tony Thompson in his next fight. Thompson didn’t stay active enough to keep both belts; the WBC belt went back to England with David Haye soon enough.
Meanwhile, Floyd Mayweather fought a monster battle with Oscar De La Hoya that 3 million people paid money to watch. Heavyweight never stood a chance. All for want of a nail—had Mikhail Gorbachev lived, the Soviet Union would have collapsed under the strain of a hesitant attempt at openness and freedom, the Klitschko brothers would’ve been free to go pro, and heavyweight boxing would be propped up for long enough for the talent to come back after Lennox Lewis retired.
NEXT WEEK!
What If is off next week—after over eight months straight of writing this series weekly, I’m giving myself a brief respite. It is, however, only a brief one—I’m working on a total doorstopper (unlike most stuff of this nature that I write, this is going up in one giant mega-article) that you guys are going to love.
That’s right, in two weeks, on April 14, we look at the flip side of the Cold War coin and ask “What If Teofilo Stevenson Went Pro?” The greatest amateur of all time, coming of age and fighting against the greatest professionals who ever lived during the absolute zenith of the heavyweight division? Who’s he fighting? (spoiler alert: Everyone.) Who’s he beating? (spoiler alert: Oh, hell no, you’re not getting spoilers!)
Tune in for that, and thank you for reading!
Fox Doucette writes the weekly What If series for The Boxing Tribune and covers (what’s left of) ESPN Friday Night Fights for this publication. Fan mail, hate mail, and bets on Stevenson’s fights can be sent to beatcap@gmail.com.
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