By Joseph Hirsch: It used to be easier to become a legend. What do I mean? Think about it: a legend is someone who not only has supposedly accomplished great deeds but whose greatness has grown and altered in the retelling of those deeds. “You should have seen Ray in his prime,” one old head might say. “Sure there’s footage of him that shows how great he was, but his best fights were on the way up, before the Gillette Cavalcade of Sports was broadcasting his bouts.”
Or think about Muhammad Ali. Yes, he was a symphony of pure perfection, what with the grace of his balletic footwork contrasted against the fierceness of his attack against some of the baddest men of his day, but when you really get into the story of Ali, the Legend of the man, people who knew him well and followed his career will tell you that the years of his prime were the ones he spent sidelined and without a license due to his stance on the Vietnam War. Yes, he was great, but he could have been even greater, you see, if he hadn’t been punished for his bravery in refusing to fight (or even put on exhibitions for the USO) in Indochina.
A legend doesn’t just grow from what happened. It’s also born of what could have happened but didn’t. László Papp was the first boxer to win three gold medals at the Olympics and was undefeated as a pro after 29 bouts. He could have gone on to even greater heights in his career, but history got in the way, and when his native Hungary went communist his dreams of pursuing personal glory in the pro ranks got sidelined. But it’s that “what-if” factor that adds the extra frisson to the man’s legend, not what’s seen, but what we didn’t see.
You probably see my point already, but just to hammer it home, take a few more examples. Charley Burley is considered by many to be beau ideal, the greatest fighter to never win a world title, being relegated as he was by the prejudices of his time to the WCWC strap (the welterweight title for boxing’s equivalent of the Negro Leagues). There is scant footage of the late, great King of Murderer’s Row, limited only to one fight. I don’t know whether or not it’s true, but there’s a great anecdote that Burley, fed up with being ducked by Ray Robison, showed up at one of “Sugar’s” businesses (I’ve heard it as his barbershop at times, as his real estate office at others) and decked the champ in the street. If he couldn’t beat him in the ring, he’d settle for meting out an ass-whipping in front of a block of gawking spectators in Harlem who got to see the fireworks for free.
Other men said to be the greatest to ever lace up the gloves, like Harry “Pittsburgh Windmill” Greb or Joe Gans, have left behind very little celluloid to bolster the claims that they were best boxers of all time.
Their legends are also built on their handicaps (everyone likes an underdog) with Greb fighting minus one eye and Joe Gans soldiering on bravely in the squared circle despite suffering the vagaries of the “white death” (tuberculosis) in his final days as a pro. Remember that man not just fighting but winning with a fatal lung inflammation the next time you hear a boxer complaining about having the flu in camp.
So where, one might ask, have all the legends gone? To which one might answer, they’ve been killed, consumed in the mountains of footage (not to mention twitter feeds, Instagram updates, and YouTube videos) we all have at our disposal.
Understand, I’m not complaining about boxing’s ubiquity these days, since it’s nice for a hardcore fan to watch a card broadcast from Milan, Italy, or Manchester, England, or Belfast, Northern Ireland, without having to fiddle with a satellite or otherwise go out of my way. But the downside is that legends and myths, which grow in proportion to the mystery around them, end up being demystified by the constant access.
Years ago I remember reading a piece by a great boxing scribe who wondered why boxing had produced such great literature. Setting aside all the pathos and drama of fighting one’s way out of poverty, he noted that boxing, unlike baseball or basketball, didn’t have anything as comprehensive as box scores in its heyday. Sure there were cards and judges (sometimes), but as often as not, in order for a bout to be sanctioned at the state level, it had to be technically qualified as an exhibition. And that meant the only decisions came from newspapers, which in turn meant that figuring out who won or lost was mostly down to which boxing journo wrote the most convincing account of the fight.
In a post-Compubox world, the closest we have to the old timer’s tales and their ever-churning rumor mill is the grapevine gossip we get about spar wars: “Oh, I heard Spence worked Mayweather.” “Yeah, he could have made Money May look bad but he held back out of respect.” Of course these days, with the proliferation of cellphones, even “closed sessions” where cameras are forbidden can end up being uploaded to the internet before the sweat’s even dry on the turnbuckle (look at the bad faith job that Connor McGregor’s camp did on Pauli “Magic Man” Malignaggi, after inviting him into their camp to help the Irishman get ready for his super-fight with Floyd Mayweather).
And yet, despite having said all that, it would appear that, to paraphrase boxing scribe Jerry Izenberg, we are once again in the Land of Giants, in the fateful Realm of Legends.
For Tyson Fury is a legend.
Consider: He came from humble origins to face the longest-reigning heavyweight champion in the history of the sport, behaving in the runup to the fight like a cross between a mental patient and a court jester, dressing up as Batman, prattling on ad nauseam in press conferences. And he was fighting Wladimir Klitschko in Hamburg, Germany (which, for all intents and purposes, was Dr. Steel Hammer’s adopted home and thus his backyard).
The people who know boxing tipped Tyson to lose. And he not only won but derailed Wlad’s bid to supplant the great Joe Louis with the most consecutive title defenses in the history of heavyweight boxing (he ended with 23 defenses to Louis’s 25, so close and yet so far away).
Tyson Fury had made a monkey of the naysayers (myself included), but the fallback position of those who’d backed the wrong horse was to do what Max Kellerman essentially did (before he was sold on Fury): to shrug and say that sure, he won, but it was an absolute stinker. Teddy Atlas (also a Tyson believer now) was equally dismissive at the time, granting that the guy deserved credit for “moving around a bit,” but that otherwise, he wasn’t someone you could take seriously.
And who at that point (early in Tyson’s legend) could disagree with Teddy? As Tyson prepared for his rematch with Wlad, during a presser he made it a point to take his shirt off, slap the layers of flab that had accreted around his belly, and proceeded to go off on a tirade about how it was an embarrassment to even call him an athlete.
Things got progressively worse for Tyson from there, as he pulled out of the rematch, troughed into a deep abyss of depression, cocaine addiction, heavy drinking, and suicidal ideation. He ballooned up to roughly 400 lbs. (you Brits do the conversion to stone). When he spoke during interviews at this point, his usually-hoarse voice was reduced to a whisper, as if he were suffering from throat cancer or had destroyed the lining of his esophagus with the demon drink.
Very, very few fighters come back from such a brink to not only be competitive again but to remain dominant. Johnny Tapia was legally dead from drug overdoses between reigns; Roberto Duran would walk around with a massive potbelly between fights, letting hard liquor dribble from the corners of his beard-stubbled mouth. But Duran and Tapia were legends, and Tyson was just a loudmouth who somehow spoiled his way to a fluke win over the most dominant heavyweight of his era.
Or so we thought.
Tyson came back practically from the dead, shedding a massive amount of weight (a welterweight’s worth of weight, plus three pounds) under the tutelage of a little-known, untested and incredibly young trainer, a commodity named Ben Davison.
Fury had two tune-ups against subpar opposition, en route to his quest to add the WBC belt to his status as lineal champ against then-undefeated, absolutely anvil-handed monster puncher Deontay “the Bronze Bomber” Wilder.
Wilder was generally despised by boxing fans outside of America (especially the Brits) and he wasn’t especially popular with the boxing purists even here in the States who like to see a man win with the strategy of a sensible jab and steady reliance on the backfoot; and now that the smoke has cleared on the duology between Tyson and Wilder (which may, in fact, become a trilogy, if Wilder exercises his rematch clause and Matchroom doesn’t offer enough step-aside money to make Joshua-Fury domestically in the U.K.) some American fans have even soured on Deontay Wilder. A lot of this is understandable fallout in the wake of Wilder’s excuse-making after his blowout loss to Fury, but some of it is just bandwagon behavior. Or, as Ali’s trainer Angelo Dundee once put it: “Notice who is in the locker room after you lose, not after you win.”
Regardless of how you, the reader, feel about former WBC champion Deontay Wilder, let it be said (and conceded by even those who hate him) that Wilder has the single-hardest right hand in the history of the sport, and that when his quality of competition improved (going from the ungainly fellow late-bloomer Gerald Washington to the fine pedigreed Cuban Luis Ortiz), the results were still the same: Knockouts. Not just knockouts, either, but devastating, seismic, lightning-in-a-bottle blows that not only gave Wilder a solid number of title defenses (right behind Muhammad Ali) but the highest knockout percentage in the history of the sport.
Tyson Fury climbed into the ring with that man, looking, as commentator Mario Lopez said, “like a bag of milk.” He danced around Wilder, peppering him with jabs and halting his advance with straights, making him bite feints and mugging with his tongue out and his hands behind his back at times, taunting Wilder, until, as always seems to happen, Wilder got his man and Tyson went down.
It wasn’t just the one giant punch from Wilder that connected with Fury, either, but that shot followed up another shot that not only connected with Fury’s jaw on his way down but twisted his head so that anyone who had ever seen a boxing match before didn’t just think, but KNEW, Tyson was down and out for the count in the 12th round.
It was incredibly dramatic stuff, some nice pathos ending the great comeback that had started like a Rocky movie but now foundered on the rocks of reality.
Tyson had given it a sincere go and come very close to making good on his promise to best Deontay Wilder and prove himself the baddest man on the planet.
Except that Tyson did something no one who’s watched boxing has seen before (I don’t care how many fights you’ve seen), and which we’ll never probably see again. He got up from a Sunday punch delivered by the biggest puncher in the history of the sport (on the 9th second of a 10-second count, no less) and not only survived but dominated the remaining time left in the last stanza of the final round.
Most were speechless. Those who weren’t were reduced to pat answers, tepid similes that we’d hear repeated over the next few days until they achieved the effect of clichés. “He got up like The Undertaker.” “Tyson got up like he was late for work.”
Errol Spence joked about gypsy magic involving the manipulation of some voodoo doll by someone in the Fury camp at ringside. Andre Berto just shook his head and said, “That’s one tough white boy.”
Flash forward a bit, push the gears so that the rumor mill churns into action again and people start to talk once more of the Gypsy King, doubting him anew:
“Tyson’s switching trainers, which is never a good sign.”
“Tyson suffered a massive cut in his last fight and Deontay’s going to open it up again and Tyson’s going to be a gory mess.”
“He’s saying he’s going to try to knock Wilder out but we all know it’s mind games. Tyson will be Tyson and just try to jab the guy’s nut off, probably score all the rounds on the cards until the tenth, or the eleventh, or hell, the 12th, but Wilder will find him, and KO him. But the Gypsy King had a hell of a comeback as long as it lasted.”
Except said comeback is still going.
I still have a hard time believing it myself. Even after seeing it with my own eyes.
If that’s not a legend, it’s as close as we’re going to get in this era where even giants have Instagram accounts.