For the first time in, mumble a real period of time mumble The men holding all the heavyweight boxing titles are ethnic 'Ex-Soviets, I belive. For a while such titles were held by black men and there was a lot of palaver about ‘racial’ advantages. The same sort of thing you hear about many other sports. My own view is that the real reasons for ethnic over-representation are poverty and opportunity.
What do you think will come of the new ‘racial’ profile of professional boxing?
I have been watching boxing fairly regularly for the past year or two, mostly the ESPN2 Wednesday and Friday fights and whatever non-pay-per-view offerings HBO has.
I believe the Heavyweight division is an anomaly. All the really big guys seem to have gone to other sports (American football maybe) for their money.
In the other divisions the nationalities and ethnic backgrounds are fairly evenly split. If I had to make a non-scientific guess as to which race/nationality to place “most” non-heavyweight boxers in these days, it would be along the lines of:
USA Blacks: 25%
USA Whites: 10%
USA Hispanics: 25%
Non-USA Hispanics: 20%
Non-USA Whites: 5%
Asians: 10%
Non-USA Blacks: 5%
Each of these groups could be as much as twice (or half) of my ballpark guesses, but there’s a great deal of diversity.
As long as they’re white guys there won’t be any profiling the way there was with black men. Nobody will ascribe racial advantages to Russians because they don’t look different.
Of course, they used to ascribe racial advantages to the Irish; at the turn of the last century it was quite common for people to say exactly the same things about the Irish and sports as it is now about blacks and sports. So I could be wrong.
I wouldn’t ascribe any racial advantage one way or the other, but if you wanted to do so you could turn the argument around and say the only reason whites are currently dominating the heavyweight classes is because the current heavywieght scene is bo-ooooorrrrring. There’s a huge slump in the heavyweight division right now; all the real action is at middleweight and lower. The current heavyweights are guys like Byrd who probably should be fighting at a lower weight class but bulked up, or the Klitschos who dominate mostly because there’s nobody else around.
It’s not a completely new phenomenon, either. Marciano probably wouldn’t have been undefeated in another era. He was a legend, but part of the reason he dominated was because the heavyweight scene at the time was lousy, except for him. Writers referred to his talent up against other heavyweights of his time as a “rose in a garbage dump.” We’ve had a couple of decades of Liston, Ali, Foreman, Frazier, but now we’re kind of in the same sort of slump now except without even a Marciano. We need a real heavyweight champion.