I know this will rub the boxing purists the wrong way, but personally I'm sick and tired of suffering through the lousiest division in boxing for well over two decades now. Long gone are the days of Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis, Vitali Klitschko, et al. Ever since the chloroform days of the Wlad reign, we haven't had a decent period of heavyweight boxing to speak of. The other divisions literally run rings around the heavyweights. And we keep paying attention to it, hoping for something good, only because by nature we like to see big guys duking it out.

Let's recap, shall we? Ever since the Wlad days, we had an endless procession of forgettable opponents climbing into the ring scared shitless of Wlad, who himself was scared shitless of getting his chin shattered, courtesy of several early career devastating KTFO losses. So we were treated to nothing but grappling, fouling, joyless fights, with hopeless tomato cans being paraded in front of Wlad and looking for a soft spot to land. THEN... along comes Fury who, in a HUGELY forgettable fight, at least has the gumption not to be scared of Wlad, which in turn terrified Wlad even MORE. The result was a lousy HW fight where at least the result was good. Someone finally unseated Wlad. Happy days were ahead.

HA! Happy days my ass. Tyson imploded for all to see... and there went the rematch nobody wanted to see anyway. People..... we don't see ANY of this crap in the lower weights, now do we. Now we're back to the "on again off again" shell game, with fights getting almost made and then cancelled, only to leave us with the same crappy, one-sided, boring affairs which have no bearing at all on who's the best HW in the world. It's enough to make any fan puke.

I stopped being a fan of the HW division a LOOOOOOONG time ago. I was never a Larry Holmes fight and hated his whining guts. But I long for the days of Holmes-Norton, Tyson-Ruddock, Bowe-Holyfield....... even Lewis-Vitali. Those are as extinct as the dinosaur.

I'm just having a major rant and of course the HW division will never get dumped. But whenever we boxing fans wonder why the sport has lost a lot of its popularity.... we need look no further than the crappy heavyweights and all the shenanigans that go on. And because the casual fan only cares about the big guys, the sport is pretty screwed.