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.
It's not just the NBA, it's Euroleague basketball that pays 100k on the low end and up to 4 million while having your income taxes paid or China where you can earn 1m a year on the low end. Look at salaries from top basketball leagues worldwide
Not everyone makes it to the NBA ( where the boxers are Damien Lillard or David West) they can make life changing money overseas. So to act like parents born before 1980 don't see the greats with severe brain damage and are pushing thier children in a different direction isn't honest. Not to mention college scholarships.
It's not worth the risk. American Football is next on the chopping block. Few more years of CTE propaganda (CTE is real) and watch the numbers start to drop.