The demise of the American heavyweight

Mike Tyson on his podcast and youtube channel pulls in more consistant income with less effort then AJ or Fury We aren't even counting his farm yet. why should it be stickied and closed......it’s a fair question and what has happened to the American heavyweight division and people making up excuses about NFL just do t cut it. The fool who boxed last night pulls in more interest in America than what deontay wilder did even with him holding the WBC title for years......why isnt jake Paul doing NFL then ?

So why was A.J able to sell out MSG in his U.S debut ? That excuse that U.S don’t care about boxing is laughable. I would put money on Mike on mushrooms to still knock out Wilder . :lol1: Mike Tyson on his podcast and youtube channel pulls in more consistant income with less effort then AJ or Fury We aren't even counting his farm yet.

Bro just say you want to rub American noses in UK ruling the heavyweight division and call it a thread. And no it's not just the NFL, it's the NBA and baseball too. If you make it to a high level you can get a college education to fall back on or play in the minor leagues. There's also the popularity of UFC in across North America to contend with. Benchwarmers in the Big 3 American Leagues probably make the same or more money than world champion boxers And yes people take up boxing for the glory and not money, I guess that's why it's called prizefighting after all This should be stickied and thread closed.

Yea basically this in a nutshell. I think the US amateur program has gone downhill in recent decades as other programs have caught up as well. I think big guys in the US got far less risky options with far more chances of success in non-combat sports than big guys in other countries got. If you are the 20th best HW in the world you probably are making 6 digits a year, but if you are the 20th best guy in the NFL or NBA you are making 7 or 8 digits a year & potentially have a college degree to fall back on if things go south. Only if you are #1 or maybe top 3 does boxing start looking better money-wise. And the risk in boxing is always gonna look nasty compared to other sports which is likely a key component of parents pushing their kids into other more acceptable sports with easier access. Football & Basketball are supported from summer leagues to elementary school to high school to college to the paid ranks. Boxing is some weird sport off to the side that poor people with no options compete in to most parents who have no previous connection to boxing I imagine. I think boxing was coasting for a few generations based on it's popularity in the old days up til like the 80's, but now these other sporting roads seem much more visible with the knowledge parents have. And generally it's the parents pushing kids into or out of a sport more than a kid is just gonna do what he wants to do. Plus I think there has been a pussification going on that has made the toughness needed to train boxing, to spar, to endure what one has to endure in boxing & the grind to the top that has all kinds of pitfalls beyond you losing a fight leans kids into not going into the sport. Boxing as a sport & business is a cesspool of fookery & bs most have no desire to enter unless there are literally no other options. This is why there are so many talented lil guys cuz lil guys generally have few sporting options in any country. So the lil guy who hates school & has any ambition beyond a 9 to 5 job can either compete in combat sports or become a horse jockey. Agreed to everything you've said here. The Big 3 American sports accommodate the bigger athletes and there are more accessible pathways into the major leagues if you're talented enough to make it. That's why I mentioned AJ previously. He entered boxing late but when he was younger he had promising potential as a sprinter. Rugby or Rugby League are the only major big man sports in the UK unless you want throw a shot put or javelin or some shh. Rugby as I said is elitist, played predominantly by upper middle class and privately educated kids. Rugby League is a different code of rugby, popular in Northern England. His opportunities despite being athletic are limited because he had less avenues into pro sports growing up in Britain and being his size too. Your last point is what I think OP was trying to get at in between bashing PBC supporters. You need a special type of mentality or toughness to make it inside a boxing ring that's lacking in other non-combat sports. A lot of kids don't want to take those lumps you need to endure to be great. And who can blame them, I'm here talking about boxing behind a screen, that's not me getting punched for a living. No sir

The sports argument is a red herring. People from the US don't seem to realise that other countries have professional sports leagues. I would have thought it's pretty simple. Boxing isn't popular in the US. Who are the parents putting their kids into boxing? It's not a red herring and posters in this thread have done a good job explaining why.

The sports argument is a red herring. People from the US don't seem to realise that other countries have professional sports leagues. I would have thought it's pretty simple. Boxing isn't popular in the US. Who are the parents putting their kids into boxing?

Who you got for Joshua vs Fury? I gotta go with Fury because of his skill set. He can touch you from like a mile away (no homo) and is very elusive. Fury UD.

if your a skilled heavyweight and you have rose from the amateur ranks with winning all amateur titles they don’t look at NFL and that goes for any heavyweight in the world as they want to become the best at the pro ranks so no It’s not true.....why is UFC still attracting the big guys then ? UFC best at Heavyweight was a 5'10 Daniel Cromeir who was a wrestler, a 6'3 Stipe who was a firefighter and Brock Lesnar who was a wrestler. Two went to college for wrestling which boxing wouldn't have given them and the other was a firefighter in his late thirties. And yet Ngannou is not from America, lastly Cain Velasquez was a wrestler who went to college and learned to wrestle

The real reason is because only the champs and top contenders make any money, while even an average NFL, NBA, MLB player get's contracts in the millions, and minimum salaries in these sports dwarf what an average boxer earns. Simple math. if your a skilled heavyweight and you have rose from the amateur ranks with winning all amateur titles they don’t look at NFL and that goes for any heavyweight in the world as they want to become the best at the pro ranks so no It’s not true.....why is UFC still attracting the big guys then ?

The American talent goes into other sports, that's why most American HWs are failed football players. The same happened to the West Indies in cricket after the 80s, the top talent was poached away. Red - You meant test cricket? We still bringing it in 20/20. How was our talent poached by the way?

The demise of the HW div as a whole.

I don’t doubt it’s not physically exhausting and tough but we have rugby over here as well and we know them boys are one tough sons of bs and it’s the same for NFL.......not every big guy over here go’s into rugby and you have to be talented at it and I just do buy the NFL excuse because ufc has a huge following ....nothing beats being the the heavyweight champion of the world and it’s still the coveted title in the world. look up jon jones' net worth...now look up his brother chandler who plays in the nfl lol....chandler is good player too but not great

As I have been saying ad nauseam, nothing is going to change until boxing gets a Super Heavyweight division. Some people may not like to hear this but it's what boxing needs right now. Times have changed and boxing needs a new weight class to accommodate the bigger Heavyweights that outweigh the smaller ones by 50 - 70 lbs.

The point is, nobody else prioritizes HW boxing either. Like I said before the UK has 42 active professional HWs, for comparison heres a sample of the roster of the current English Premiership rugby union champions the Exeter Chiefs.. Jonny Gray - 6'6, 267lbs Tom Price 6'8 258lbs Richard Capstick 6'6 242lbs Sam Skinner 6'5 249lbs Jonny Hill - 6'7 249lbs Sean Lonsdale 6'5 242lbs Will Witty 6'5 260lbs Don Armand 6'3 254lbs Lewis Pearson 6¨4 242lbs Jack Yeandle 6'1 251lbs Dave Ewers 6'4 275lbs Alex Cuthbert 6'6 234lbs Luke Cowan Dickie - 6'0 247lbs Tomas Francis 6'1 298lbs Alec Hepburn 6'1 238lbs Billy Keast 6'0 240lbs Ben Moon 5'11 240lbs Marcus Street 6'1 258lbs Matt Johnson 6'3 295lbs James Kenny 6¨0 255lbs Alfie Petch 5'11 273lbs Danny Southworth 5'10 246lbs Jack Innard 5'11 227lbs Max Norey 5'10 229lbs Jordan Poole 5'10 233lbs Ollie Devoto 6'3 227lbs Ian Whitten 6'2 224lbs Thats one team, in the English league system which has 3 fully pro leagues, then the Scottish, Irish and Welsh teams play in their own separate league system. In addition theres also an entirely different sport called rugby league which also has 3 fully pro leagues in England. 99% of the UKs HW talent pool are going into rugby union or rugby league. AJ and Fury are drawn from the other 1%. If you look outside of the UK - rugby also gets the lions share of HWs in Australia (with AFL also being a major factor there), New Zealand, South Africa, France, Italy, Argentina etc. Then depending on where you are in Europe basketball or ice hockey are getting most of the HWs, with boxing being far behind both. Russia puts more HWs into basketball, hockey, wrestling and at the moment actually have slightly more active HWs in MMA than boxing. There are a few other countries like Poland and Sweden where MMA is taking a good chunk of the HW fighter pool from boxing too. America has over 5x the population of the UK so that's why they have more heavyweights obviously. If you are asking why the American heavyweights have declined the reason is that boxing used to be the number 1 sport in the USA and now it's no where close. Football, college football, basketball, college basketball, baseball, MMA are all bigger. This and the increase in foreign countries like the UK and Eastern European countries getting more into boxing has changed the landscape of heavyweight boxing.

I don't know much about other countries but I know about America cause I live here. The point is, nobody else prioritizes HW boxing either. Like I said before the UK has 42 active professional HWs, for comparison heres a sample of the roster of the current English Premiership rugby union champions the Exeter Chiefs.. Jonny Gray - 6'6, 267lbs Tom Price 6'8 258lbs Richard Capstick 6'6 242lbs Sam Skinner 6'5 249lbs Jonny Hill - 6'7 249lbs Sean Lonsdale 6'5 242lbs Will Witty 6'5 260lbs Don Armand 6'3 254lbs Lewis Pearson 6¨4 242lbs Jack Yeandle 6'1 251lbs Dave Ewers 6'4 275lbs Alex Cuthbert 6'6 234lbs Luke Cowan Dickie - 6'0 247lbs Tomas Francis 6'1 298lbs Alec Hepburn 6'1 238lbs Billy Keast 6'0 240lbs Ben Moon 5'11 240lbs Marcus Street 6'1 258lbs Matt Johnson 6'3 295lbs James Kenny 6¨0 255lbs Alfie Petch 5'11 273lbs Danny Southworth 5'10 246lbs Jack Innard 5'11 227lbs Max Norey 5'10 229lbs Jordan Poole 5'10 233lbs Ollie Devoto 6'3 227lbs Ian Whitten 6'2 224lbs Thats one team, in the English league system which has 3 fully pro leagues, then the Scottish, Irish and Welsh teams play in their own separate league system. In addition theres also an entirely different sport called rugby league which also has 3 fully pro leagues in England. 99% of the UKs HW talent pool are going into rugby union or rugby league. AJ and Fury are drawn from the other 1%. If you look outside of the UK - rugby also gets the lions share of HWs in Australia (with AFL also being a major factor there), New Zealand, South Africa, France, Italy, Argentina etc. Then depending on where you are in Europe basketball or ice hockey are getting most of the HWs, with boxing being far behind both. Russia puts more HWs into basketball, hockey, wrestling and at the moment actually have slightly more active HWs in MMA than boxing. There are a few other countries like Poland and Sweden where MMA is taking a good chunk of the HW fighter pool from boxing too.

Okay and where do the top athletes over 200lbs outside of America go? I don't know much about other countries but I know about America cause I live here.

The top American athletes that are over 200 pounds go into other sports. Okay and where do the top athletes over 200lbs outside of America go?

You're talking out of your ass. AJ walked into a boxing gym as an adult, and him and Fury are drawn from a British HW talent pool thats about as big as the roster of a typical ****ing rugby team, i'm not even exaggerating that btw. Active US HWs: 285 Active UK HWs: 42 Active HWs in all or Europe + Russia: 415 Active HWs on the planet: 1130 The US has almost 7 times as many active HWs as the UK and account for like a quarter of HWs on the planet. As for the NFL and the NBA, combined they have a little over 2000 players in them at any one time. Take away the none HW sized players and the foreign players and its probably more like half that. Then that pool gets even smaller when you filter out all the 300+lb fatties who are not built for boxing at all. Then take into account that plenty of NFL players actually arent making the huge money people keep talking about, its not spread out evenly. https://work.chron.com/much-money-baseball-players-make-14452.html "The median salary for all NFL players is $860,000. Not a shabby income, but still far below the $2 million that gets more publicity. For perspective, a starting one-year rookie has a minimum income of $435,000. Most of the attention from the press is on the stunningly high incomes of top quarterbacks. A few of them have contracts paying upward of $25 to $30 million per year. The average salary for all quarterbacks is $5,766,000, but the median income is $1,100,000. Defensive ends come in after the quarterbacks with high salary contracts. Defensive ends have an average income of $2,625,000 and a median salary of $847,300. At the low end of the pay scale are the running backs. They get banged up during every game and only last about three years in the league. The average wage for a running back is $1,012,000, while the median salary is $630,0002" This is for a 16 game regular season with an extremely low average career length. Meanwhile Deontay Wilder made around $25m for the rematch with Fury. Charles ****ing Martin made $8.5m vs AJ, Ruiz likely close to 20 million for his two fights with AJ. Even in the UFC (which everyone says has ****ty pay) Stipe just got paid $790k for the Ngannou fight, Derrick Lewis earned over a million from 3 fights in the last year. So in conclusion we are talking about roughly a thousand viable HW sized Americans between the NBA and NFL, not all of them even making big money, who may or may not be good at boxing if they tried. This is the crutch America, a nation of 330 million people, ie the largest first world country by a factor of more than double, stands on to excuse any sporting failures. Its ****ing pathetic. Americans dont dominate the UFC anymore either now that its grown internationally. They have 2 of 12 available belts right now. One champ won his belt by DQ in a fight he was getting his ass kicked in and the other moved to America when he was 8. The US holds 20 of 64 available major belts at LHW and below. Its a good number but lets not pretend its "domination", and hey....every other countries best athletes of that size are playing soccer....right? Jarryd Hayne was a rugby LEAGUE player, rugby league is a spin off sport of rugby union (the sport generally referred to as "rugby") and has probably less than 1/10th of the talent pool. He spent like a year learning about the NFL from ****ing Madden games at the age of like 27 before getting into the NFL, being put at RB even though it didnt suit his attributes at all, and playing alongside what was literally the worst O line in the league at the time, and he was still a roughly mid level RB in terms of rushing yards. Then he quit of his own accord because he wanted to play for the Fiji sevens team in the upcoming olympics, but failed to make it. Rugby likely has a much larger talent pool than American football because its an actual international sport, if the talent pool and resources was redirected to American football instead we'd probably be hearing "Americans dont care about football anymore, our best athletes are in the WWE" in 20 years. The top American athletes that are over 200 pounds go into other sports. If it doesn't work out they box. Why do you think American boxers dominate the lower divisions but not at Heavyweight?. Look at the Welterweight division. Crawford, Spence, Thurman, Porter, Danny Garcia, Mikey Garcia, Jesse Vargas etc Or how about the Junior Middleweight division. With Julian Williams, Jermell Charlo, Tony Harrison, Jarret Hurd, Lubin etc Or how about the lightweight division. With Teofimo Lopez, Devin Haney, Ryan Garcia, Gervonta Davis (If you count him at lw) etc Or super feather. With Shakur Stevenson, Herring, Diaz, Farmer, Colbert. You see a pattern here? Seems like Americans do dominate in boxing just not at the Heavyweight division (and the very small divisions too. Because few Americans are even that size) after years of dominating. Why would that be? Coincidence? I think not. The reason is cause people in America don't care about boxing and the top athletes who are heavyweight size can make a lot of money in the NBA, NFL and MLB. Back in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s these leagues didn't pay players neither as much money as top boxers. You can try to ignore all logic but this is pretty obvious if you live in the US and understand the culture

Don't know where you pulled these figures from but they seem horribly inaccurate, theres zero chance theres only 42 uk hws & 285 US hws unless you count complete bums in the US & only count the REAL pros in the UK. ​​​​​ I can name probably 10 at most who are heavyweight boxers in the U.K. and I from the U.K. and I follow boxing a lot so yes I doubt very much there are more than the numbers of 42....plus boxec is linked up with the BBBC and every heavyweight is registered with them so your wrong

Basketball is where the American HW's are. And where are the HWs in the rest of the world?