By Jason Kim: The January 22nd pay-per-view card featuring former heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield (43-10-2, 28 KO’s) vs. little known 38-year-old Sherman Williams (34-11-2, 19 KO’s) is filled with a lot of aging heavyweights that have seen better days. The Holyfield-Williams fight is bad enough, as Holyfield has lost two out of his last three fights and hasn’t been a serious contender in the heavyweight division since 2000.
At 48, Holyfield looks awful and is nothing like what he used to be, yet he still has the now hopeless dream of winning and unifying the heavyweight titles. It’s now impossible none of the heavyweight champions are going to give Holyfield the chance, and of course he would have zero chance of beating any of them. Besides the fight between older timers Holyfield and Williams, there’s 39-year-old Monte Barrett (34-9, 20 KO’s) vs. 39-year-old Charles Davis (19-21-2, 4 KO’s), and 41-year-old Cedric Boswell (32-1, 25 KO’s) vs. Dominque Alexander (19-9, 9 KO’s), and Travis Kauffman (21-1, 16 KO’s) and Julius Long (15-14, 13 KO’s). Long and Kauffman aren’t actually old, but they’re not exactly top five caliber heavyweights.
Holyfield wants a shot against the Klitschko brothers and WBA heavyweight champion David Haye in the worst way. Unfortunately, the only way humanly possible for Holyfield to get that shot is to force the issue by fighting top contenders and working his way to a mandatory position where he can then force the issue with the help from the sanctioning bodies. However, Holyfield seems resistant to doing that, and instead is wasting his time fighting older heavyweights like Williams, Francois Botha and Brian Nielsen for some reason. Beating those people won’t get Holyfield pushed to number #1 in the heavyweight rankings, although I’ve seen that kind of thing having been done before in the past with heavyweights facing terrible opposition and still getting ranked at number #1. I don’t see it happening here with Holyfield.
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