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no this is not one of my hate brittley threads, it's a good article about what draws boxers to the ring and how they can't retire.
The un-retiring of Vitali Klitschko
Sep. 18, 2007
By Bart Barry
Special to CBSSports.com
A couple of Sundays ago, in the throes of a remarkably disappointing September, Vitali Klitschko, the WBC's heavyweight Champion Emeritus, experienced back pain enough to cancel his fight with Jameel McCline. While this fight, and Klitschko's career, were never terribly relevant to the sport of boxing, the forces that made Klitschko unretire certainly are.
Casting about for someone to lead the heavyweight division, boxing mistakenly anointed Klitschko a few years back. To do this required enough experts to suspend disbelief long enough that when reality happened and Klitschko postponed, postponed and then cancelled his title defense with Hasim Rahman, there was resentment.
How unfortunate. Despite his natural gifts, Klitschko was never going to be great. His fighting style was, at once, cautious and sloppy. His stance said it all: Chin kept well back of his lead foot, hands held low. Still, any professional puncher who stood 6-foot-7 and weighed more than 250 pounds was going to capture the public's imagination, and Klitschko did for a while.
He ran through 27 nobodies, knocking out every one of them, and came to Chris Byrd -- the lightest-hitting heavyweight champ of this era. Somewhere in that fight, Klitschko got injured and quit. To rehabilitate his shoulder and fight fans' perception of him, Klitschko went back to the nobodies circuit for five more meaningless victories. Then it was career-definition time.
Klitschko staggered an out of shape Lennox Lewis, got his left eyelid sliced clean through and protested when the title bout was halted. After that, he walked through an overweight former Canadian Olympian, stopped a future golf pro and knocked out a guy who knocked out Mike Tyson's shadow. Then he postponed and cancelled fights till retiring -- when he won the WBC's risible "emeritus" title.
Recently Klitschko decided to come back. To be relevant. And now he is relevant, though not as a future or former champion but as a means of understanding what pernicious logic makes prizefighters return and return again.
The first reason boxers unretire is because they can. Whereas a tryout and conversation with a coach immediately afterwards would convince an unretiring football player he was incapable of still competing, prizefighting has no such order. If a former boxer can pass a physical, he can pass from retirement in fewer than 24 hours. And if he fails that physical he can still ply his craft on an Indian reservation.
What makes him think he can still compete? Here's a reason not often covered. The nature of boxing defense dictates a fighter should make a punch miss by the slightest possible margin because if slipping a punch puts a fighter off-balance, the punch might as well land. So as a fighter's reflexes slow and his opponents' near-misses become partial hits, it's easy for that fighter to attribute the new dynamic to bad luck.
Then there's money. For the most part, boxing's hourly wage is proportional to a fighter's weight. Most prizefighters, especially in lower weight classes, do not earn close to what a fiscally responsible individual would need to retire with an annuity. And prizefighters aren't fiscally responsible individuals.
Klitschko appears to be an exception. He made plenty of money and has so far resisted temptations to acquire a fleet of automobiles or a mine's worth of ***elry.
But if Klitschko has been exceptionally prudent with money, he has also been exceptionally desirous of glory. There is a catharsis that belongs to entering a gladiatorial arena filled with blood-lusting fanatics. It is a catharsis not easily replaced. Political rallies can approach it, though.
And so Klitschko approached political rallies. He tried and failed to win a 2006 gubernatorial election in his native city of Kiev, Ukraine. And as it later turned out, the post of People's Deputy to the Kiev City Council wasn't glorious enough to sate him. Accompanying his brother, Wladimir, on vicarious ring walks also proved inadequate.
Without a rigorous training regimen or public platform on which to be adored, Klitschko then confronted the perils of spare time. Such is the plight of the professional athlete. At an age when most other professionals find their strides and begin to make significant contributions, professional athletes begin to look at a half century with nothing on their calendars.
The un-retiring of Vitali Klitschko
Sep. 18, 2007
By Bart Barry
Special to CBSSports.com
A couple of Sundays ago, in the throes of a remarkably disappointing September, Vitali Klitschko, the WBC's heavyweight Champion Emeritus, experienced back pain enough to cancel his fight with Jameel McCline. While this fight, and Klitschko's career, were never terribly relevant to the sport of boxing, the forces that made Klitschko unretire certainly are.
Casting about for someone to lead the heavyweight division, boxing mistakenly anointed Klitschko a few years back. To do this required enough experts to suspend disbelief long enough that when reality happened and Klitschko postponed, postponed and then cancelled his title defense with Hasim Rahman, there was resentment.
How unfortunate. Despite his natural gifts, Klitschko was never going to be great. His fighting style was, at once, cautious and sloppy. His stance said it all: Chin kept well back of his lead foot, hands held low. Still, any professional puncher who stood 6-foot-7 and weighed more than 250 pounds was going to capture the public's imagination, and Klitschko did for a while.
He ran through 27 nobodies, knocking out every one of them, and came to Chris Byrd -- the lightest-hitting heavyweight champ of this era. Somewhere in that fight, Klitschko got injured and quit. To rehabilitate his shoulder and fight fans' perception of him, Klitschko went back to the nobodies circuit for five more meaningless victories. Then it was career-definition time.
Klitschko staggered an out of shape Lennox Lewis, got his left eyelid sliced clean through and protested when the title bout was halted. After that, he walked through an overweight former Canadian Olympian, stopped a future golf pro and knocked out a guy who knocked out Mike Tyson's shadow. Then he postponed and cancelled fights till retiring -- when he won the WBC's risible "emeritus" title.
Recently Klitschko decided to come back. To be relevant. And now he is relevant, though not as a future or former champion but as a means of understanding what pernicious logic makes prizefighters return and return again.
The first reason boxers unretire is because they can. Whereas a tryout and conversation with a coach immediately afterwards would convince an unretiring football player he was incapable of still competing, prizefighting has no such order. If a former boxer can pass a physical, he can pass from retirement in fewer than 24 hours. And if he fails that physical he can still ply his craft on an Indian reservation.
What makes him think he can still compete? Here's a reason not often covered. The nature of boxing defense dictates a fighter should make a punch miss by the slightest possible margin because if slipping a punch puts a fighter off-balance, the punch might as well land. So as a fighter's reflexes slow and his opponents' near-misses become partial hits, it's easy for that fighter to attribute the new dynamic to bad luck.
Then there's money. For the most part, boxing's hourly wage is proportional to a fighter's weight. Most prizefighters, especially in lower weight classes, do not earn close to what a fiscally responsible individual would need to retire with an annuity. And prizefighters aren't fiscally responsible individuals.
Klitschko appears to be an exception. He made plenty of money and has so far resisted temptations to acquire a fleet of automobiles or a mine's worth of ***elry.
But if Klitschko has been exceptionally prudent with money, he has also been exceptionally desirous of glory. There is a catharsis that belongs to entering a gladiatorial arena filled with blood-lusting fanatics. It is a catharsis not easily replaced. Political rallies can approach it, though.
And so Klitschko approached political rallies. He tried and failed to win a 2006 gubernatorial election in his native city of Kiev, Ukraine. And as it later turned out, the post of People's Deputy to the Kiev City Council wasn't glorious enough to sate him. Accompanying his brother, Wladimir, on vicarious ring walks also proved inadequate.
Without a rigorous training regimen or public platform on which to be adored, Klitschko then confronted the perils of spare time. Such is the plight of the professional athlete. At an age when most other professionals find their strides and begin to make significant contributions, professional athletes begin to look at a half century with nothing on their calendars.
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