Boxing Fans Should Savor This Remarkable Heavyweight Run

Saturday’s Daniel Dubois five-round drubbing of Anthony Joshua was not a modern day classic by any stretch of the imagination. Joshua, the former three-belt heavyweight champ, was game and he kept getting up from the knockdowns for as long as he could, but he was never really “in” the fight, except for one or two brief moments where he seemed to stiffen the defending IBF champ, Dubois.

The fight WAS exciting and entertaining, though. That’s really all most of us ask from our boxing.

However, if you’re the thoughtful, future-minded type of fan (a boxing poet at heart or, as some media dipshit used to say– a warrior poet), the reality should start setting in that we’re now firmly in the last stages of this era’s main heavyweight run.

By this writer’s very unofficial calculations, there are maybe seven or eight bouts left in this run of the big men.

We have:

Oleksandr Usyk-Tyson Fury 2 coming in December
An Usyk-Fury 3 if Fury beats Usyk in the upcoming rematch
Anthony Joshua vs. Tyson Fury will still be huge, even if both fighters are coming off losses
Daniel Dubois, of course, deserves a shot at the winner of Usyk-Fury
Allow Dubois at least one or two other main stage bouts following his AJ KO
Factor in a big bout or two featuring Joseph Parker, Martin Bakole, and/or Zhilei Zhang

Then, it’s done.

And, while it may not have been the most talented run of big men, this recent one (and there must be a mention of Deontay Wilder, who was pushed from the scene before these last stages) certainly rates among the most entertaining, at least since the Tyson-Holyfield-Bowe-Lewis era and, before that, the Ali-Frazier-Foreman legends run.

The current reigning big men will mostly carry on after the big, meaningful bouts, but the rivalries will be played out and, by then, we may be down to one remaining dominant heavyweight beating the stuffing out of significantly non-elite contenders/pretenders.

The reality is that after the last gasps of Usyk-Fury-Joshua-etc. are let out, this modern heavyweight era moves on to complete uncertainty.

Mind you, there will always be prospects on the horizon– although none really stand out at the moment. There will also always be rugged second-tier fighters and recycled former top-tier contenders. But the star power, competing in star-power events, will be gone, maybe for a few years, maybe for an entire generation.

After the close of the Tyson-Holyfield-Bowe-Lewis run, for example, boxing got stuck with the Klitschko era– which was only an “era” because Emanuel Steward showed Wladimir Klitschko how to be negative as a big man and Wlad turned out to be a supremely adept student and practitioner of the “big man gunking up a fight” style of negative combat.

The heavyweight division wouldn’t be “right” against until almost fourteen years later.

For now, though, we still have some excellent fights coming up and, of course, the recent-past memories of some very good heavyweight moments still fresh in our minds (before the lame step-brother of memory, nostalgia, sets in).

There was Anthony Joshua’s war with Wladmir Klitschko. Two really good Tyson Fury-Deontay Wilder wars (and a third, somewhat sad one-sided battle). Oleksandr Usyk-Fury was a modern classic. Andy Ruiz’s upset of Joshua will always have a special place in fight fans’ hearts. Usyk’s two schoolings of Joshua were solid. Fury-Klitschko was a dullish, but important changing of the guard bout. Martin Bakole’s shocking beatdown of Jared Anderson was good fun. And then there was Dubois’ four-knockdown thrashing of Joshua this past Saturday.

There’ve been other great-to-good moments, too.

So, the moral of this story is to savor what we have left of this heavyweight era. From this American’s perspective, it would’ve been nice to see more American names having prominent moments, but what can you do?

Let’s just enjoy the remainder of this heavyweight run…because there may be some lean years ahead.