The heavyweight division in actuality was once BOXING!....There was the HW title then everything else...pretty much the rest of the sport only existed to die hard fans....At one time even your average housewife that never seen a boxing match could name the HW champion....When Ali retired in the early 80's for good it left the division with a dull Larry Holmes...Dull does not mean bad BTW just boring in the appeal effect.....Boxing focused to the smaller guys...EG Leonard Duran Hearns etc...as Trainer Monkey mentioned....Then when they started to fade after the series of superfights between the lot ended...Mike Tyson burst on the scene....His KO power was easy to market so once again other divisions were provided less attention.....Things like that happen for 2 reasons....1 people love to see knockouts and in the HW division you are almost guarenteed to see them more then then smaller guys...or I should say people love to see two big guys knocking each other out would be a more appropriate way to say it.....Focus stays on the HWTS because when you get a good HW that people follow even his opponent will be marketable for at least 1 fight......It almost does the promoters job for them.....this is why the HWT division has always been so popular....There has always been the good big fights at the lower weights just not as promoted by the powers that be.....

When guys like Leonard who if he did not come along after his olympic gold medal win and all american smile the attraction to the WW and MW divisions during the mid 80s would not have been so big I can promise....He was an olympian so again the promoters job was half done for them...they just jumped on the wagon.....Same for DLH when he arrived......he was marketable......


You can get one guy in the HW division that is marketable....EG another Tyson type or a guy who gets into wars but has a great camera presence during interviews......then get yourself 100 fat slobs who shovel S*** for a living...line them up as oppnents then the HW division would once again be the crown jewel of boxing.....all the other fights would still take place but they would not recieve the attention.....


In truth the HW division has not died...it just does not have the personality to make it fan friendly.....There have been worse eras for HW boxing then this one....much worse but they always had the name to make it seem as though it wasn't