Vernon Forrest is responsible for the loudest gasp I’ve ever heard.
Live sporting events regularly produce deafening roars and stunned silences, but this particular audio response found an unusual frequency somewhere in between those two.
I was seated ringside in The Theater at Madison Square Garden on January 26, 2002, and I’ll never forget the sound that followed Forrest freezing/flooring “Sugar” Shane Mosley in the second round with a right uppercut. That punch sucked the air out of 5,323 sets of lungs all at once.
If you weren’t following boxing at the time, you couldn’t possibly understand the regard in which Mosley was held coming into that fight and the resulting shock in seeing him all of a sudden barely conscious.
Coming off an all-time dominant lightweight title reign, a spectacular upset win over a prime Oscar De La Hoya to win a welterweight belt and three subsequent essentially perfect performances in a row (albeit against B-level opposition), the Mosley who was preparing to enter the ring against Forrest would have fit right in with the present-day Terence Crawford, Oleksandr Usyk and Naoya Inoue in a pound-for-pound discussion.
And for a brief spell leading into the beginning of 2002, there was no discussion.
Even with Roy Jones still in his prime, Floyd Mayweather just starting to hit his prime and Bernard Hopkins fresh off knocking out Felix Trinidad, Mosley was – if only for a few months – the king of the mountain without any reasonable dispute. He seemed the perfect fighting machine.
So when Forrest clocked him with that uppercut, we gasped.
All of us.
Something unfathomable was happening right in front of our eyes.
Forrest went on to win that night, repeating the success he’d had against Mosley as an amateur a full decade earlier. He knocked Sugar Shane down twice in that second round and captured a wide unanimous decision after 12, without a doubt the crowning moment of his boxing career.
It was a moment he was made to wait quite a while for, but when it arrived, so did he.
Friends and fans of Forrest were also made to wait quite a while for a different sort of crowning moment – a wait that finally ended last week.
In the summer of 2009, at just 38 years of age and still an active, championship-level junior middleweight at the time, Forrest was murdered near a gas station in Atlanta. A man’s International Boxing Hall of Fame candidacy is hardly the most important consideration in the wake of such a tragedy, but eventually, attention turns to such things. And Forrest has been qualified to appear on the IBHOF ballot every fall since 2013.
Twelve times – once each year from 2013 to 2024 – a new ballot was issued and Forrest’s name was nowhere to be found.
But when ballots to determine the induction class of 2026 were mailed out last Wednesday, his name was, at last, on there.
As on the night of January 26, 2002, Vernon Forrest is getting his overdue opportunity.
And there shouldn’t be any gasping either way when the results come in. No outcome could be surprising. If he goes in on the first ballot, we’ll nod knowingly. And if he doesn’t, we’ll also nod knowingly. The case for Forrest straddles the Hall of Fame fence as unsteadily as anyone’s.
For what it’s worth, though, if ex-fighters who now work in the boxing media are any indication, Forrest is a shoo-in.
On the first episode of BoxingScene Today that followed the ballot release, Chris Algieri expressed the opinion that Forrest should be a first-ballot Hall of Famer.
“I was at that first Shane Mosley fight,” Algieri said, “and he was phenomenal. He hurt Shane. And Shane was unbeatable at that point. … Who knows what heights [Forrest] could have reached if those guys had given him a shot earlier?”
Paulie Malignaggi shared Algieri’s position, calling Forrest’s Hall of Fame case “a solid one. I think Vernon would have had an even better career had he not been avoided for a bit of time.”
And DAZN’s Sergio Mora, who shared the ring with Forrest twice – and thus may not be impartial, but his opinion still counts – posted on social media last week, “Vernon Forrest, like Donald Curry before him, deserves and EARNED his spot in the HOF!”
So that’s three for three from guys who used to box and now get paid to talk about the sport.
But they don’t necessarily represent the whole voting body. From where I sit, Forrest’s resume is quite uneven, and the arguments both for and against his induction are compelling.
Forrest’s final record was 41-3 (29 KOs) with one no-contest. He held belts at 147 and 154 pounds. On the plus side, beating Mosley made him the lineal champion of the world at welterweight. On the minus side, the first title he claimed in each weight class was of the vacant variety, and he made a grand total of three successful defenses across the two divisions.
Working in Forrest’s favor: He twice defeated Mosley, who eventually became a slam-dunk Hall of Famer, and both of those victories were clear-cut.
Working against Forrest: He twice lost to Ricardo Mayorga, once by knockout and once by narrow decision, and Mayorga is mostly a punchline now, a fighter who never achieved much aside from cutting down Forrest.
Forrest suffered an upset loss to Mora but avenged it in the rematch three months later (in what would be Forrest’s final fight), so those results even out.
“The Viper” won all the rest of his fights, other than a head-clash no-contest against Raul Frank, but the opposition was generally middling. Among the more noteworthy affairs: a 1997 decision win over high-output veteran Ray Oliveira; a 2000 decision over fading former champ Vince Phillips; a controversial (although, to my eyes, correct) 10-round decision win in 2006 over a comebacking Ike Quartey; and a lopsided 2007 decision over recently dethroned welterweight champ Carlos Baldomir.
It’s certainly not a bad resume. But other than Mosley, there are no other foes on his record sniffing a Hall of Fame nomination, never mind an induction.
And that, as Algieri and Malignaggi pointed out, is not necessarily Forrest’s fault.
Forrest fought on the same 1992 U.S. Olympic team as De La Hoya, and whereas the gold medalist was challenging for belts two years into his pro career and taking part in superfights a year or two after that, nobody on top in the welterweight division in the ’90s saw the risk of facing Forrest as being worth the reward. De La Hoya, Trinidad, Pernell Whitaker, a prime Quartey, even Jose Luis Lopez, Oba Carr – Forrest couldn’t persuade any of them to fight him.
Forrest was 29 by the time he finally got a shot at a vacant alphabet belt against Frank – which ended in the aforementioned no-contest. He was 30 by the time he won that belt in their rematch. And he’d been competing as a pro for nearly 10 full years by the time he got that fight with Mosley that he’d been waiting his whole professional career for.
You might use the following words to describe Forrest as a pugilist: Workmanlike. Proficient. Efficient.
Words you would not use: Thrilling. Spectacular. Mesmerizing.
That partially explains why he had such a tough time convincing superstars to face him, and probably played some small role in keeping him off the Hall of Fame ballot for so long. In those regards, Forrest was the exact opposite of Arturo Gatti, who died under his own horrific circumstances the same year as Forrest, went straight onto the ballot five years after his final fight and gained induction in 2013.
In the end, Forrest is perhaps the perfect distillation of the argument over how much having one great fighter’s number is worth. Not to minimize Forrest’s other accomplishments, but take away the Mosley fights and he’d be waiting another hundred years for ballot consideration.
Sometimes boxers with that sort of resume get in – see Ken Norton and Randy Turpin. Of course, their defining wins came against Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Robinson, respectively. There’s beating a Hall of Famer, and then there’s beating a Mount Rushmore guy.
Sometimes boxers with that sort of resume don’t come very close – see Iran Barkley (who proved to be Tommy Hearns’ kryptonite) and Junior Jones (who twice befuddled and bested Marco Antonio Barrera).
For my money, though, the closest comparison is Antonio Tarver – someone with whom Forrest will be directly competing for induction. Tarver last fought in 2015 and has now been on the IBHOF ballot for several years.
Tarver, like Forrest, was a U.S. Olympian whose pro career got off to a slow start, who posted his share of meaningful wins and frustrating losses, but who is mostly known for what he did against one opponent: officially going 2-1 against Roy Jones, with one iconic upset knockout win and one disputed decision loss.
We don’t need to go line by line through Tarver’s resume, but the bottom line is I don’t see a whole lot separating his accomplishments from Forrest’s.
The Hall of Fame does not make voting totals public, so we don’t know whether Tarver has ever fallen one vote shy of induction or had years where he didn’t receive a single vote. All we can say for certain is he’s been on the ballot but hasn’t received enough votes to get off the ballot.
If Tarver had gotten in by now, I might be a little more confident in Forrest’s chances. But he hasn’t, and we don’t know how close he’s come, so I’m not sure what to expect for Forrest.
There are three additional factors to consider with Forrest:
First, he is remembered as a wonderful person, having devoted much of his non-boxing life to his work with Destiny’s Child, a group home for people with mental disabilities. That can only help.
Second, the tragedy of him dying young meant the boxing world never saw him get old in the ring, helping to keep the memories fond. I don’t mean to trivialize his death or spin it as any sort of a positive, of course, but the reality is that Hall of Fame voting does not take place in an emotionless vacuum. And tying into the previous point about his strengths as a human, he didn’t just die young; Forrest died as a hero, standing up for himself and his 11-year-old godson and chasing down the criminals who had just robbed them.
And third – and this may not swing a single Hall of Fame vote, but you never know – Forrest represented Al Haymon’s entry point into boxing. That may go down as Forrest’s most significant lasting impact on the sport.
In the end, though, the key to Forrest’s Hall of Fame case, in either direction, is how much stock you put in the singular night on which he made an entire arena gasp.
I don’t know if I’d call Forrest a “great” fighter. I don’t know if I’d say he had a “great” career. But I do know that, for at least one night, he beat up a great fighter and looked great doing it.
Forrest tended toward understatement, as evidenced by what he said that night in New York City after he defeated Mosley.
“I beat him before because I was a better fighter,” Forrest said, referring to his win over Mosley in the Olympic trials. “I beat him tonight because I was the better fighter. It was nothing more, nothing less. There was no top-secret stuff, just basic boxing.”
One spot in Canastota’s class of ’26 is spoken for – Gennadiy Golovkin will be told by the electorate that he was indeed a good boy, and there will be no big drama show over his IBHOF entry.
But beyond that, the competition in the “modern” fighter category is wide open. Forrest is one of dozens who could conceivably go either way this year.
How could a guy who defeated Sugar Shane Mosley twice not be a first-ballot Hall of Famer?
How could a guy who lost to Ricardo Mayorga twice possibly be a first-ballot Hall of Famer?
One of those questions will soon be answered in a way that defies the seemingly rhetorical nature of the question being asked.
As always, Hall of Fame voters have some challenging decisions to make.
For now, all I can say is it’s about damn time we get the opportunity to make that challenging decision about Vernon Forrest.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.
