By Geoffrey Ciani: When Lennox Lewis beat Evander Holyfield in November 1999 to become the undisputed world heavyweight champion, American dominance over the heavyweight landscape came to an abrupt end.
Over the last 23+ years since, the heavyweight landscape has been dominated by boxers from the United Kingdom and also Ukraine, those boxers being Lennox himself, the brothers Wladimir and Vitali Klitschko, and today the two top heavyweights in the world are Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk. Not that America has not had any heavyweight champions during this stretch, they have. Deontay Wilder being the most notable one, where Wilder made 10 consecutive title defenses of the WBC belt between 2015 and 2019.
But even without American heavyweight dominance, for a long stretch this century, the United States has still often held claim to the best boxer in the world, with Floyd Mayweather Jr being the big standout as not only the top American boxer, but the top boxer in the entire world of professional boxing. But in the blink of an eye, Floyd Mayweather has effectively been retired since 2015, notwithstanding the fact he had a final professional bout in 2017.
Since Floyd’s retirement, a bunch of different boxers have been battling for position as a true heir to Floyd Mayweather Jr, and in recent years, guys like Oleksandr Usyk, Nayoa Inoue, and Canelo Alvarez have been a big part of this discussion. Americans Bud Crawford and Errol Spence Jr have both found themselves in the mix, but not quite at the very top of the mountain. But nobody has truly seized the title of P4P King for any definitive stretch since Floyd retired.
And with each passing year, Spence and Crawford get older and older, and the prospects of them fighting each other seem dimmer and dimmer, although hope runs eternal. But even if Spence and Crawford do eventually fight, time is not on their side in terms of having the opportunities to match the long standing universal recognition once celebrated by Mayweather as the undisputed pound for pound king in the world of professional boxing.
But America does still have some young talented boxers, and perhaps chief among them is Devin ‘The Dream’ Haney. The 24 year old Haney is the reigning undisputed world lightweight champion, the first such during the modern four belt era, and the first undisputed lightweight champion since the great Pernell Whitaker back in the early 1990s.
So the question becomes, is Devin ‘The Dream’ Haney the future of American Boxing?
This edition of Rummy’s Corner will attempt to answer that question while providing some quick thoughts and highlights of the 24 year old undisputed world lightweight champion, Devin ‘The Dream’ Haney.. Please watch and enjoy the video for one man’s opinion. This is Rummy’s Corner (produced and narrated by Geoffrey Ciani).