by Tom Matlack
If you aren’t at least in your mid 40s you won’t remember what heavyweight boxing once was–the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and March Madness all rolled into one. When I was in kindergarten my best friend and I would retreat to my family’s unfurnished attic on South Hill in Ithaca, New York (my dad taught English at Cornell and was a leader in the anti-war movement there ironically enough) to act out the great Ali fights of the era, against Frazier and then Foreman. Howard Cossell didn’t become the first superstar sports announcer on Monday Night Football but the man who called heavyweight fights.
As my college friend, and great writer, Carlo Rotella has chronicles in his book “Fight Time” and pieces like “Shannon Briggs Says Nyet” in the NYT Magazine the heavyweight category has moved on since the demise of Mike Tyson (it really already had but Tyson was the last great hope to revitalize what had already been lost). Mike is doing Animal Planet shows about his birds and the sport has been taken over by Russians since great American athletes who in prior generations would have become fighters now become NFL linemen. Or NBA power forwards.
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