By Cliff Rold
Boxing has great events.
Boxing has great fights.
Too often in recent memory, those two things haven’t aligned. Saturday they did, and it happened in the weight class that needed it the most.
It happened in the division that matters the most.
Boxing can survive when interest in heavyweights declines but it’s never as vibrant as it in when the big men deliver. Every sport needs to be able to point to the very top of its food chain and get the masses excited. Football has Tom Brady. Basketball has LeBron James.
The top of the boxing food chain is its leading heavyweight. That’s the literal peak of the profession. It’s the class that gave us Dempsey, Louis, Marciano, Ali, and Tyson. Saturday night, for now at least, it gave us Anthony Joshua.
It also gave us perhaps the finest hour for Wladimir Klitschko.
And, for the first time since the 1990s, it might have given us the fight of the year. Considering the magnitude of the event and the thrills in the ring, it’s going to be hard to top this one in 2017.
Let’s go the report card.
Grades
Pre-Fight: Speed – Joshua B+; Klitschko B/Post: B+; B+
Pre-Fight: Power – Joshua A+; Klitschko A+/Post: Same
Pre-Fight: Defense – Joshua B; Klitschko B/Post: Same
Pre-Fight: Intangibles – Joshua B+; Klitschko A/Post: A+; A
It was a good fight from the start. Joshua, a little quicker, got off to the better start as Klitschko bided his time. There were few clinches and the tension built. Then a classic emerged.
The fifth round is where all hell broke loose. Joshua hurt and dropped Klitschko early, sending him down for the first time since 2005. He got up and by the end of the round had turned the tide. For years, questions about Klitschko’s ability to endure under fire, to fight back, had lingered. His performance against Samuel Peter in 2005 answered some questions but he’d rarely been in trouble since.
Here he was, at 41, fighting for his fistic life. His heart, his character, his conditioning, all the things that mattered and were overlooked in his prime were on display. He refused to fold in the fifth round and early in the sixth it was Joshua who was down and almost out.
Two mammoth men were landing mammoth shots and neither would stay down. Joshua used his legs, the clinch, and Klitschko’s natural inclinations against him to survive. Klitschko probably lost all the first five rounds but he was racking them up in six, seven, and eight. What he wasn’t doing is taking a drowning young man and pushing him under the tide. Klitschko’s peak was marked by a methodical, steady approach. He’d paid the price for aggression early in his career.
On Saturday, he fought his way out of the hole but it wasn’t in his nature to take over and destroy. When he had the advantage, he settled into his preferred pace. It cost him. His window closed.
Before the fight, the questions lingered on Klitschko’s ability at 41 and whether Joshua was truly ready for this. He’d never fought anyone as good as Klitschko; he’d arguably never beaten a real contender. Coming off the floor, and having never been past seven, he was being asked to learn on the job.
He did. While losing the seventh round, Joshua showed maturity and poise. He didn’t get hurt again, caught his breath, and found his legs. He had survived a gut check and by the ninth he was starting to open up again. In the eleventh, he found the bombs he needed with two more knockdowns before a finishing salvo on the ropes.
It was a marvelous fight, rich with skill, power, and adjustments. Rarely if ever have we seen two men this size compete quite like this. Lennox Lewis-Vitali Klitschko was a gem, but devolved into an alley fight. This saw two giants bouncing on their toes, working fluidly off the jab. It wasn’t just a great fight; it was excellent technical boxing.
For Klitschko, the defeat surely stung but it was a night where he showed that he could hold up his end of a classic. It wasn’t an accident that he won 22 fights in a row and took over heavyweight for a decade. He was never the upper echelon great his biggest supporters saw but he was a great heavyweight, something detractors never gave him full credit for. If he had no chin, the fight is over in the fifth. If he had no heart, he’d have stayed down after either of the knockdowns in the eleventh.
In this defeat, the first time he’s ever lost two in a row, he validated that it was more than just the luck of an era’s draw all these years.
Joshua proved a ton as well. Faced with his first elite opponent, he battled through nerves in spots and near unconsciousness in the middle of the fight. His heart, and the ability to endure the power of one of the great punchers in heavyweight history, bodes well for his future. There was a little bit of the first Rocky Marciano-Jersey Joe Walcott fight on display Saturday, with the younger man having to come off the floor to stop an aging man who still had his A game.
Joshua got the best of Klitschko. He was ready enough to win against a great fighter who was far from done. His first reward is adding the vacant WBA strap to the IBF belt he won last year from Charles Martin.
A bigger reward in the long run could be just having been in this fight. Joshua had relatively few amateur fights and less than fifty professional rounds before Saturday. He added the eleven most important rounds of his life and now stands ready to fulfill the grand promise he holds.
At 19-0, with 19 knockouts, he’s already capable of filling a stadium. He brought the sporting world to him this weekend and lived up to its hope for a shot of adrenaline at heavyweight. Now he has a division to clear out.
Tyson Fury allegedly will return to the ring this year. He was the man who took Klitschko’s title. A showdown with Joshua would clear up the matter of history’s crown. Fights with undefeated Luis Ortiz, Deontay Wilder, and Joseph Parker stand as the biggest threats after Fury. A Klitschko rematch would also be welcome, though it says here that Klitschko’s best chance just passed him by. All of them have to be both concerned and thrilled by Saturday’s outcome.
The Klitschko win was Joshua still learning his craft. He’s not done becoming what he will be. He’s going to get better. His offense, outside and in, is excellent but there is room to grow defensively. Klitschko took advantage of a lack of head movement that a more aggressive foe might be able to exploit. His peers will have to match his development curve to have hopes of supplanting the place he took this weekend as the face of the division. With a few more big wins, it will grow beyond the division.
Joshua is now positioned to be the face of boxing, moving the capitol of the sport from the US to London. If fighters want to get paid, they’re going to have to meet Joshua on his terms and it will intriguing to see how that shakes out.
For now, it’s enough to say we got the best marriage of heavyweight fight and event in well over a decade. The kings of boxing are back.
How fun is that?
Report Card and Staff Picks 2017: 11-7
Cliff Rold is the Managing Editor of BoxingScene, a founding member of the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board, and a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be reached at roldboxing@hotmail.com
