They're having a little set-to over in England on Saturday, featuring homegrown heavyweight titleholder Anthony Joshua, who looks a lot like Frank Bruno from the neck down, and former heavyweight champ Wladimir Klitschko, who resembles his older brother Vitali, minus the mean streak.
One is green, the other a bit creaky, but expectations are high, maybe too high. Even so, Showtime and HBO were so set on airing the fight, they reached a rare agreement to share the broadcast rights. The winds of change are in the air and the rival subscription cable networks both want in on it.
The heavyweight division is in dire need of a reboot. Things became so painfully preordained during Klitschko's lengthy reign, all the fun was sucked out of it. Wladimir's European base remained strong, but damn near everybody else yearned for the days when watching a heavyweight title fight would get your pulse racing, not lull you into a state of catatonic indifference.
Could Joshua be the one to restore excitement to the heavyweight division? Maybe, but let's not put the result in front of the fight. With boxing you seldom get what you want when you want it, but if you hang around long enough, you'll eventually get what's coming to you.
I'm fairly certain that Jane Austen wasn't thinking about prizefighting when she wrote that to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect. But it pretty much sums up the mindset of boxing's faithful even if they prefer to think of themselves as hardened cynics.
The history of the sport is littered with frustrated desires and unfulfilled dreams. But among the ashes are flashes of brilliance so bright they temporarily blind you to the disappointments.
There have been more than enough of both kinds to keep us guessing -- and hoping. Let's look at some representative samples of both the sublime and ridiculous, starting with arguably boxing's most memorable boondoggle.
The Dempsey-Gibbons fiasco
Doc Kearns paid the engineer $500 to hook a caboose to his engine and take him out of town under the cover of night. Kearns was carrying two large canvas bag which, according to historian Randy Robert, held somewhere between $30,000 and $80,000, the gate receipts from the Jack Dempsey-Tommy Gibbons fight.
If William Muldoon, chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission, hadn't been a bigot, the Dempsey-Gibbons fight probably never would have taken place -- at least not in Shelby, Montana.
Muldoon did not want No. 1 contender Harry Wills to fight for the heavyweight title because Wills was a black man. To cover his misuse of power, Muldoon banned all heavyweight fights in New York laughably claiming he believed the moral integrity of boxing was being eroded by "cancerous commercialism."
Shut out of the major boxing state, Dempsey and Kearns agreed to fight Gibbons in Shelby, a Montana boomtown where oil was discovered in 1922.
Much in the same way Mobutu Sese Seko bankrolled "The Rumble in The Jungle" in Zaire, and Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos backed "The Thrilla in Manila," Sheby's leading citizens wanted a big fight to promote their town and make a bundle in the process.
Kearns' asking price was $300,000 to be paid in three installments of $100,000, the last of which was due 48 hours before the fight, which was to take place July 4, 1923. When the town grandees couldn't come up with the final payment, they agreed to allow Kearns to take it out of the gate.
The specially built wooden stadium could seat more than 40,000, but so few attended. High-ticket prices and the uncertainty over whether the fight would take place didn't help, nor did the railroad cars of excepted out-of-town punters that never materialized.
Then came the biggest sucker punch of all: The fight was a dud.
Gibbons, a skillful boxer, managed to thwart Dempsey's efforts to knock him out but lost the decision, anyway. It was an ill-conceived scheme from conception and ended up disastrously for everybody except Dempsey and Kearns. In the aftermath, four Montana banks were forced to close, their coffers looted to pay Dempsey's purse.
Twice is not always nice
Rocky Marciano's 13th-round knockout of Jersey Joe Walcott to win the heavyweight championship on Sept. 23, 1952 was nothing short of sensational. Walcott knocked down Marciano with a left hook in the first round and was leading on all three scorecards going into the 13th. Early in the round both threw right hands simultaneously. Marciano's landed first.
According to Jesse Abramson of the New York Herald Tribune, Walcott crumbled down "in sections like a slow-motion picture of a chimney stack that had been dynamited."
While everybody agreed that such a spectacular fight deserved a rematch, in retrospect, they should have quit when they were ahead. Marciano-Walcott II, held seven months later in Chicago, was a fiasco.
Marciano floored Walcott with a right hand to the jaw in the opening round and that was it. The ex-champ landed on his back and then pulled himself to a sitting position, where he stayed, his right hand holding the middle rope, while referee Frank Sikora counted him out.
Why Walcott didn't regain his feet until immediately after Sikora yelled "ten" remains a mystery. Jersey Joe claimed it was a quick count. Cynics thought he took a dive and former heavyweight champ Jim Braddock said, "The bum quit."
That Walcott's manager, Felix Bocchicchio, was reportedly associated with the mob might or might not have been a factor.
Walcott, his reputation in shreds, never fought again.
Greatness born of absurdity
When heavyweight champion Leon Spinks opted to give Muhammad Ali a rematch, the WBC threw a hissy fit and stripped "Neon Leon" of the title he'd taken from Ali in February 1978.
The organization based in Mexico wanted Spinks to fight Ken Norton instead, and awarded the title to Norton, retroactively making his victory over Jimmy Young the previous year a title fight.
Perhaps in an effort to restore a measure of credibility to its coronation of Norton, the WBC sanctioned a title fight between Larry Holmes and Norton on June 9 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
Despite the machinations that led to the match, the pairing was just about as good as it gets. After a ferocious struggle, the outcome was literally on the line going into the 15th round, which Bert Sugar called, "the most violent final round in heavyweight title history."
When only one of the three judges gave Norton the 15th, Holmes became the new WBC titleholder by the narrowest of split decisions. Although Ali-Spinks II was extraordinary in its own right, compared to Holmes-Norton it was a benign game of patty-cake.
The return of 'Big George'
It was relatively easy for a city slicker like Doc Kearns to put one over on a bunch of rich rubes, but another thing altogether to put on a major promotion that is both a financial and aesthetic success at the dawn of the PPV era. The Evander Holyfield-George Foreman heavyweight title fight on April 19, 1991 was such a fight.
The title bout with Holyfield was the 25th of Foreman's improbable comeback, following a 10-year hiatus. Only one of his 24 victims had lasted the distance, the rest biffed into oblivion with insouciant ease.
Foreman had rebranded himself as a fighting smiley face. A jovial giant who poked fun at himself and then went out and tried to knock the other guy's head off. It was an irresistible combination of schmaltz and mayhem, and by the time he stepped into the ring at Atlantic City's Convention Hall to face Holyfield, Foreman was the underdog with the oddsmakers but sentimental favorite with the fans.
It was a terrific fight. Foreman had his moments, stunning Holyfield on a few occasions, and generally faring significantly better than expected. Even so, it was Holyfield's quicker hands and feet, coupled with accurate combination punching that carried the day. Nobody, before or since, has stood in Foreman's wheelhouse and attacked the way Holyfield did.
The "Battle of the Ages" exceeded all expectation, not only in the ring but also at the box office. Approximately 1.42 million pay-per-views were sold, and when all the ancillary revenue was factored in, the overall take approached $70 million. Everybody, including Foreman and his fans, went home happy. Nobody snuck out of town with the gate receipts.
Bitter fruit
Holyfield's infamous rematch with Mike Tyson was in sharp contrast to the Foreman fight. Tyson was such a massive favorite the first time many simply couldn't come to grips with the fact Holyfield beat up boxing's bad boy and stopped him. Even knowledgeable fight people were so blinded by their preconceived notions that they picked Tyson to win the return bout held on June 28, 1997 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas.
Interest was phenomenal and the pay-per-view sales were close to two million. But no amount of money could wash away the gruesome Silence of the Lambs finish, complete with a grisly chunk of Evander's right ear lying on the MGM Grand's blue ring canvas.
Although the incident has become something of joke with the passage of time, the "Bite Fight" remains one of the most barbaric endings in the history of a barbaric sport.
Unexpected treat
The announcement that Lennox Lewis would defend the heavyweight title against Kirk Johnson on June 21, 2003 at Staples Center in Los Angeles was met with a collective groan. Johnson had already lost to John Ruiz via disqualification (low blows) in what The New York Times called "one of the ugliest heavyweight title fights in history."
However, when Johnson withdrew two weeks before the fight and was replaced by Vitali Klitschko, interest picked up considerably. You just knew they were going to generate a king-size dose of ultra-violence.
Watching these enormous men trade sledgehammer blows was an alarming sight. There was a Godzilla vs. King Kong component to it, a clash of otherworldly titans.
Klitschko wobbled the champ several times in the second. Then, just as it appeared that the title might change hands, a right hand sliced open a gruesome cut on Klitschko's left eyebrow. Lewis rallied in the fifth and sixth but was near exhaustion at the end of the round, only to be saved by a man with a pencil flashlight and a concerned face.
Dr. Paul Wallace stopped the fight before the start of the seventh round, which allowed Lewis to retained the title by technical knockout. It took 60 stitches to sew up Klitschko's face, and Lewis eight months to decide he didn't want a rematch, retiring in February 2004, still the heavyweight champion of the world. There hasn't been a major heavyweight fight that good since.
***
The last time there was a big fight at Wembley Stadium was May 31, 2014, when 80,000 fans saw super middleweight champ Carl Froch render George Groves senseless with a single right-hand blow to the head. If either Joshua or Klitschko can duplicate Froch's performance, it won't matter too much who wins. Such an emphatic conclusion at the top level is never a bad thing.