Taking on the Myth of the Super-Heavyweight... Again!

I will never claim that size does not matter in boxing. A difference in weight class can make a huge difference for some fighters. Early in his career, at light heavyweight, a raw, rugged, brawling Bernard Hopkins did not have the punch to compete blow for blow with a natural light-heavy (though he has certainly gained the experience and polish to make up for that over the years) and so stepped down to middleweight... where his chin, physical and mental toughness, and ruggedness allowed him to compete very successfully before he became the most proficient technical boxer in any weight class (yes, I am ranking his fundamentals and intellectual boxing capacity above even a prime Floyd Mayweather Jr... Mayweather relies on athletic talent Hopkins does not share and that will not be there for him in a few more years, so the full limits of his technical precision cannot be ranked above Hopkins' until he must rely on it entirely against the best opponents in his own division) and a seemingly ageless wonder. He was not big enough to fight at light-heavy given his style and lack of one-punch thunder to lend it heft. At least three all time great fighters that I can think of off the top of my head (Jose 'Mantequilla' Napoles, Aaron 'Hawk' Pryor, and Marvelous Marvin Hagler) were exactly the right size for the division in which they enjoyed career success and either failed when they tried to move up (Napoles) or did not move up (Pryor and Hagler) because of their team's knowledge of their size, styles, and best fighting weight. Sure, Pryor wanted Sugar Ray Leonard, but I have a hard time seeing him win consistently at welter given his size and style despite the fact that I believe he had the style and athletic talent to give Saccharine Ray fits.

Likewise, size can be a very strong factor in the heavyweight division. Only two men have ever been both light heavyweight and heavyweight champion of the world and only one, Michael Spinks, stepped up to defeat the reigning heavyweight champ while light heavyweight champ. Fitzsimmons, a natural middleweight who had fought at welter (and is the only man to be both middleweight and heavyweight champion), stepped down to light heavyweight for the first time to win the championship after being dethroned as a heavyweight. Every other light heavyweight champion to contend at heavyweight (and every cruiserweight champion save Evander Holyfield) has either failed to find consistent success against the best big men or, worse, has found the step up in weight a transition from top fighter to journeyman. Only two more light heavies (Gene Tunney and Ezzard Charles) have held the heavyweight title, and the former was a very big light heavyweight for whom heavyweight was a more natural fit and the latter was one of the twenty or thirty best fighters, pound for pound, of all time. They also fought in eras in which the difference between a heavyweight and a light heavy was far smaller. So size does matter.

But how much does it matter?

Manny Pacquiao started his career as a flyweight, is a natural featherweight, and has won impressive knockouts at 136, 147 and 140... in the latter case stopping the undisputed 140 lb champ spectacularly. Joe Louis and Max Baer, both around 6'1, destroyed giant Primo Carnera (the precursor to Nikolai Valuev) and Louis destroyed Baer's brother Buddy, even bigger, harder hitting, and more skilled than Carnera. Big men like Jess Willard (widely regard by many experts as the worst heavyweight champ ever) and Ray 'The Giant' Impelltiere (who was bigger, but less skilled, than Carnera) were regarded as heavyweight jokes even during their own careers, at the height of their success, by many. Other big men (Buster Mathis Sr and former heavyweight prospect and Russian amateur star Yuri Vaulin) have had great potential and never, to varying degrees, fully realized it. It's worth noting that from the beginning of the heavyweight championship era to the beginning of the Lennox Lewis era, the biggest consistently successful heavyweight champions were Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali... who were both around 6'3. That's worth thinking about. George Foreman, who was a great puncher but incomplete fighter in his prime and a savvy tactician but far from his athletic best in his comeback, was one inch taller at 6'4. The prime Riddick Bowe, a great fighter who just missed being an all time great, was the same height as Foreman.

There have been exactly five great 'super-heavyweights' in the entire history of boxing: Foreman, Bowe, Lewis, and the Klitschko brothers. Only two other heavyweight champions, Willard and Carnera, fall into the category and both were regarded lightly and considered unworthy champions in their very best prime. The other great heavyweights have been the size of Ali and Johnson or smaller. The men considered the very best before Ali, Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey (who still have their partisans as 'greatest ever' today) were both 6'1 and scored one or more spectacular knockouts over MUCH bigger men. The two most feared 'bullies' in the history of the sport (though their degree of actual greatness is the subject of much debate), Sonny Liston and Mike Tyson, were small heavyweights whose professional opponents were all bigger men.

On Saturday, 'Fast' Eddie Chambers (6'1), completely defeated 6'7 Alexander Dimitrenko in every way. He outboxed him, outfought him, scored one technical knockdown and decked him once in winning a hugely lopsided decision on two of three cards. Once again, despite all talk about the 'huge' advantage the Klitschkos possess (or that Lennox Lewis possessed) because of their size, the myth of the super-heavyweight's superiority over the 'average' heavyweight has been exploded. As other boxing writers have noted, while Dimitrenko is not Wlad or Vasiliy, neither is Chambers Lewis, Tyson, or Frazier.

I advance two theses then. First, the Klitschko brothers do not win because they are just so much bigger than everyone else. For one thing, before they reached their peaks, they both lost to much smaller men. Ruslan Chagaev, whom Wlad recently completely dominated, defeated two men bigger than Wlad in his biggest wins. It's not about size. The Klitschkos are just better than all the other heavies out there today. Really.

Second, with this in mind, when discussing how the Klitschkos would fare against the greatest heavies of all time, their size must be considered merely one factor among all those considered and not an immediate guarantee of victory even against much better fighters. Size is an advantage, but size is not an insurmountable advantage when an opponent knows how to fight a bigger man and takes the necessary risks to do so anymore than power is an insurmountable advantage when an opponent knows how to fight a bigger puncher and does so.

Many fans and writers, even those whose baseline premise is that the Klitschkos are actually inferior to fighters of the past, posit the notion that such men belong in a separate division because size matters too much for even their best opponents to have a chance. I argue that not being as good as the Klitschkos matters more. No one created a separate division for Marvelous Marvin Hagler when there wasn't a single natural middleweight in the world in his class. Whether you credit their skills or blame their lack of competition, the Klitschko brothers are the best heavyweights in the world and are not enjoying some kind of unfair advantage because of their size. They are just better than everyone, plain and simple. The flawed thinking processes behind raising the cruiswerweight limit to 200 (and, arguably, behind creating it in the first place) must not be allowed to create ANOTHER new division in a sport that can already be argued to have too many.