What do Oleksandr Usyk, Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua and Deontay Wilder have in common with the Macintosh computer, Chicken McNuggets, MTV and the crane kick?
They were all born in the 1980s.
And if you’re a professional athlete in the year 2025, being born in the 1980s makes you, well, kinda old.
Among that quartet of boxers, the 38-year-old Usyk is the only one anyone might declare to be still in his physical prime. And after this Saturday, we may not be declaring that anymore, if 27-year-old Daniel Dubois has anything to say about it.
The reality is that everyone’s time at the top ends eventually, and the Usyk-Fury-Joshua-Wilder heavyweight era is bound to end soon.
Is that end coming this weekend? Not necessarily — the oddsmakers say there’s somewhere around a 75 percent chance Usyk retains his title.
But that means there’s about a 25 percent chance Dubois beats him, and if that happens, it likely goes down as a transitional fight in heavyweight history. The era of the great heavyweights born in the ‘80s will be effectively over. If Dubois becomes the first Gen Z lineal heavyweight champ, regardless of whether he goes on to rule for an extended period of time, this Wembley Stadium showdown could well be one that future boxing historians point to as the moment the torch was passed from one era to the next.
As we brace for that possibility, here’s a reverse-chronological look back at what I consider to be the last half-dozen times that happened — taking us all the way back to the last year in which Baby Boomers were born.
Tyson Fury W 12 Wladimir Klitschko, November 28, 2015
The Fury-AJ-Wilder-Usyk era began not with a bang, but with a whimper and a cringe-tastic a cappella performance of Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” — a moment that made our ears wish Bruce Willis had just let the damned asteroid destroy our planet.
Aesthetic critiques aside, Fury halted Wladimir’s long lineal reign and ended what is succinctly referred to as the Klitschko era, when Wlad and older brother Vitali ruled the world, sometimes separately, sometime simultaneously.
Some may see Joshua ending Klitschko’s career a year-and-a-half later as the pivot point between eras, but, while it may be more satisfying to say that because Joshua vs. Klitschko was an all-time classic, it’s just not accurate. The Klitschko era ended when Fury snapped his 11-year winning streak. The era of the big men born in the ‘80s began when the first of them claimed the throne. It simply took another year or two to get good.
Lennox Lewis KO 6 Vitali Klitschko, June 21, 2003
It’s rare for a torch to be passed from winner to loser, but that’s what ended up happening after underdog Klitschko pushed Lewis to the brink and lost on cuts, followed early the following year by Lennox announcing his retirement.
There were starts and stops to the Klitschko era, as initially Wladimir couldn’t stay off the canvas and Vitali couldn’t stay healthy, but eventually they found their footing and shared rulership of the division for a dozen years.
The era co-headlined by Lewis is more complicated to define. For my money, he, Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson collectively presided over a single era — albeit a long era with some massive plot twists mixed in. But what we refer to as “the ‘90s heavyweights” really started a couple of years before the ‘90s (more on that in the next section) and ended a few years after the ‘90s.
It included George Foreman becoming the oldest heavyweight champ ever, the Bite Fight, the Riddick Bowe-Holyfield trilogy, Tyson going to jail and Tyson returning from jail, with Lewis the last man standing (ill-advised comebacks and career continuations of his colleagues aside).
It was one of the best, deepest and most entertaining eras in heavyweight history, and it finally ended when Vitali, in defeat, convinced Lewis his wisest move would be to step away.
Mike Tyson KO 1 Michael Spinks, June 27, 1988
There’s some room for debate over when the era of Tyson and friends begins — particularly if you’re inclined to subdivide that into mini-eras of “Tyson pre-jail,” “Tyson in jail” and “Tyson post-jail.”
You can make a case that it began on November 22, 1986, when Tyson knocked out Trevor Berbick to win his first heavyweight title. Or you could propose that the transitional point was January 22, 1988, when Tyson obliterated the remains of the previous long-reigning champion, Larry Holmes.
But I think the ‘80s era known for Holmes and the so-called “lost heavyweights” truly ended when Holmes’ conqueror, Spinks, crumbled at Tyson’s feet in the most seismic event of the early Tyson run.
Also, ’88 is a more appropriate starting point than ’86 if you consider the other elites of the era ahead. 1988 was the year in which Lewis and Bowe fought each other for the Olympic gold medal. By ’88, Foreman’s comeback was underway. And two weeks after Tyson-Spinks, unified cruiserweight champ Holyfield made his heavyweight debut.
It’s perhaps a bit ironic to begin the Tyson-Holyfield-Lewis era with what turned out to be the final fight of “Iron Mike’s” absolute prime, but Tyson’s presence in that era is defined more by his star power and by the circus that surrounded him than by his in-ring achievements anyway.
Larry Holmes KO 10 Muhammad Ali, October 2, 1980
This one is as straight-forward as they come.
Holmes would enjoy a heavyweight reign that put him within sniffing distance of records and history made by the likes of Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano. The first half of the ‘80s fully belonged to him.
And Ali was freakin’ Ali, and his depressing corner stoppage in the fight that announced to everyone that he was finished was as “end of an era” as it gets.
Throw in the transfer of the lineal title too — Holmes became the man who beat the man — and there’s really not much to debate here. It was 276 days into 1980 that, effectively, for heavyweight boxing, the ‘70s ended and the ‘80s began.
Joe Frazier W 15 Muhammad Ali, March 8, 1971
Ali’s career is often divided into two halves, and so too should his time at and around the top of the heavyweight division be split into two eras. Certainly, the ‘70s heavyweights are their own era — widely viewed as the greatest the sport has known.
The transfer of power from Ali to Frazier on this particular night was incomplete and temporary, but using “The Fight of the Century” as the starting point of this era isn’t about who won or who lost. That 15-round classic kicked off the best rivalry of the decade and an extraordinary multi-way rivalry that also prominently featured Foreman and Ken Norton (and to a lesser extent Holmes). And it was the first world-stops-spinning-on-its-axis heavyweight superfight of a decade that would host several such affairs.
On top of this being recognized as the latter of the two Ali eras, and as the Ali-Frazier-Foreman-Norton era, this was the era of Frazier-Ali I at Madison Square Garden, of the Rumble in the Jungle, of the Thrilla in Manila, of Kingston, Jamaica and Caracas, Venezuela.
Ali was slightly past his prime at the start of it and far past it by the end, but he was at the center of all of it.
Muhammad Ali KO 6 Sonny Liston, February 25, 1964
I suppose a case could be made that the Ali era truly began soon after this fight, when he changed his name to Muhammad Ali — but it’s a weak case, especially in an article on a boxing website identifying transitional fights. So, no, even if he was still technically Cassius Clay at the time, the era began when he “shook up the world.”
In pulling off probably the greatest upset in heavyweight title history to that point, Ali ended what was something of a transitional era following Marciano’s retirement. There was Floyd Patterson beating Archie Moore to claim the vacant title, Ingemar Johansson stepping in ever briefly and Liston twice beating Patterson in blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fashion only to end up with a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reign.
Ali put an end to that and ruled the rest of the ‘60s — whether by dominating most of his challengers in the ring until 1967, or by dominating many of the conversations taking place in America and around the world while inactive for the remaining years of the decade.
1964 was the last year in which Baby Boomers were born. Then Generation X began. It wasn’t so dubbed after the “Cassius X” placeholder name that Ali used for a few days. But it may as well have been. Ali was a defining figure of his time, a man who, as he said, shook up the world — not just his sport.
Usyk and Dubois will never approach that level of impact, and we don’t need them to. We just need them to tell us on Saturday at Wembley Stadium whether it’s time to welcome a new era in heavyweight boxing.
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.