Quote:
Originally Posted by TKDhasBin
Let's look at some of Lennox's opponents:
Holyfield ?........ Past his prime when they met and Lennox struggled with him.
Tyson ?........Three years in prison took him off the top shelf.
Bruno ?.........A decent fighter who could'nt clear the bar at it's highest point.
Morrison ?.......An over rated left hooker with little else in his bag.
Klitschko ?......Don't get me started.
Mercer ?.......Mercer's best days were behind him when he hooked with Lennox.
Botha ?.......A fun guy to watch, but he's no modern day Billy Conn.
Golota ?........Nuff Said.
Briggs ?........Bang Bang Briggs used to gas out during the National Anthem.
Tua ?...... A decent and dangerous challenger. I give Lennox credit there.
There's a few decent fighters there. The great ones were well past their prime when they hooked with Lennox, and even then, they took Lennox to the limit (and Holyfield may have been jobbed in one of those fights).
Greatness ?..........I'm just not seeing it.
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I wouldn't have taken you for a glass half empty kind of guy.
I ever tell the story within an earshot of you about the time about 32 years ago of my having a column published detailing the underbelly of Muhammad Ali’s career (“The Greatest con job”)?
It detailed his careful weaving through the gate keeper ranks, avoiding Mike DeJohn, being decked by Sonny Banks sidestepping Machen, and later Chuvalo (in 63’), “loosing” to Doug Jones, getting his glove ripped by Dundee to “save him” against Cooper, winning the title due to a legitimate injury to the aging Liston, the phantom punch conspiracy, being “utterly beguiled” by Mildenberger, beating well past their prime Folley & Williams in his finest efforts, thumbing Terrell, loosing his acid test against Frazier in his first “real test”, getting gift decisions late against Norton, Young and Shavers……anything I could conjure up I put in there, building a somewhat compelling case.
Not too long after I realized what a steaming pile of shit I’d written, a complete misdirection from the facts, and incredulously wondered why the sports editor had not more firmly come to rescue me if he knew I was insane, as he must have.
I realized too late that you can play that game with any fighter, or public figure at all for that matter, simply by backing facts (or quasi facts) into your hypothesis, like filling a paper bag with dung.
An epiphany for a foolish young man.
I don’t even remember why I’d wrote it.
The bottom line with these champions, even those not so well remembered, is that every human on earth is both welcome and encouraged to vie for the championship, and all but a couple thousand can honestly say they can’t use the money they’d get if they were successful, so by that process, the champion at any given moment is the best fighter under the time-honored rules that lives and breathes.
Lennox Lewis was the guy at the top of the pyramid, and his estate reflects his measure of success. The guys he beat along the way represent the best of the rest, and the names he didn’t beat during his busy tenure live only in comic books.
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world”.
- Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States and Boxer, "The Man In The Arena"
Speech at the Sorbonne
Paris, France
April 23, 1910
That said, Dempsey, Louis, Ali and probably Holmes would take his lunch money and his girl.
But on a Lennox good day, most likely only them, and only maybe.
