Here’s a list of names for you to absorb: Floyd Patterson, Ingemar Johansson, Patterson again, Sonny Liston, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Ali a second time, Leon Spinks, Ali a third time, Larry Holmes, Michael Spinks, Mike Tyson, Buster Douglas, Evander Holyfield, Riddick Bowe, Holyfield again, Michael Moorer, Foreman a second time 20 years later, Shannon Briggs, Lennox Lewis, Hasim Rahman, Lewis again, Wladimir Klitschko, and Tyson Fury.
Here's another list of names you may find interesting: Ernie Terrell, Mike Weaver, Gerrie Coetzee, Tony Tubbs, Francesco Damiani, Tommy Morrison, Michael Bentt, Herbie Hide, Oliver McCall, Bruce Seldon, Henry Akinwande, John Ruiz, Corrie Sanders, Lamon Brewster, Nikolai Valuev, Siarhei Liakhovich, Oleg Maskaev, Ruslan Chagaev, Sultan Ibragimov, Sam Peter, Bermane Stiverne, Charles Martin, Lucas Browne, Manuel Charr, and Trevor Bryan.
The first list is the full heavyweight championship lineage, broken just once, from Rocky Marciano’s retirement to present.
The second list is a very partial list, with dozens more forgettable fighters left off because even on the internet some editing for readability’s sake is warranted, of boxers over that same time period who have held one alphabet belt or another and have been introduced in some circles as “heavyweight champion of the world.”
Any opinions on which list does a better job promoting the sport of boxing to the masses?
Admittedly, there are a couple of duds or one-hit wonders on the first list. And to the men on the second list, all of whom were brave and noble fighters, I mean no disrespect.
But the man-who-beat-the-man lineage portrays a championship that means something, and has meant something for generations. It stands in sharp contrast to what the list of ABC beltholders communicates. The lineal list’s recitation achieves the opposite of trying to explain to a casual observer that there are often three or four “world heavyweight champions” at once and that all of these not-so-iconic names have been among them.
This is one of the reasons Fury’s fight with Oleksandr Usyk on Saturday is so significant.
The lineal title is at stake, and that matters, but that’s been true of every bout Fury has had since he outpointed Klitschko in 2015. This one is different. This one puts an end to all reasonable disparate lines of thinking. Ever since Fury “retired” for 31 months after defeating Klitschko, his lineal claim has not been unanimously recognized. Assorted strap-snaggers emerged in his wake. Fury was always one of three, one of four — but now he’s just one of two.
Again, we need to agree to be reasonable, to ignore the ludicrous, before we go any further. We need to recognize Joseph Parker merely as a fine contender and not as the “interim” champion some for-profit sanctioning body says he is, and to recognize Charr as the well-outside-the-title-picture journeyman that he is and not as a “regular” champ in a world of “super” champs that one merry band of fee-collectors may prop him up as.
If we can be reasonable and agree on those details, then it’s just Fury and Usyk. The former has his lineal claim and one alphabet belt. The latter has three alphabet belts. By the final bell on Saturday, barring a draw, there will be one, undisputed, unified, lineal, unmistakable heavyweight champion of the world.
Either Fury’s name remains the last one on that prestigious list that opened this column, or Usyk’s name gets gloriously tacked on to the end of it.
And that matters because the mainstream media and the casual fan, who rightly should roll their eyes at a sport that tries to tell them Trevor Bryan was a recognized heavyweight champion, can easily latch on to the simplicity and sensibility of “undisputed.”
When you invite your buddy over for the pay-per-view, you can tell him Fury and Usyk are fighting for the heavyweight championship, the one Ali held, the one Tyson held — also the one Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey held if those names mean anything to him. He’ll instantly grasp the significance. So will the ESPN SportsCenter anchors who don’t watch many fights but will welcome the opportunity to frame this one in the most rudimentary of terms.
And they’ll all wake up Sunday morning knowing who the heavyweight champion of the world is.
Imagine if the Super Bowl ended, and you’re not a football fan but, just to make conversation, you asked your friend who won, and he answered, “Well, the Chiefs won, so they’re the champs. But the Cowboys are playing the Packers next week, and whoever wins that will also be the champs. And then the week after that, the Dolphins are playing the Browns, and that’s for another championship.” You’d be done asking questions about football forever, right?
Fury and Usyk facing each other brings sanity to the boxing world. You won’t often see those men’s names and “sanity” in the same sentence, but here we are. In a sport in which one boxer’s 59-year-old father is kicking off fight week by headbutting a member of the other boxer’s camp and proudly strutting around with blood streaming down his face, we need every vague hint of sanity we can get.
The “unified” bit won’t last, of course. Get out your stack of one-dollar bills, because the alphabet groups are poised to start stripping. Some of them are already lining up contenders to fill anticipated vacancies. If the Fury-Usyk winner makes it past Labor Day with four alphabet belts, it’ll be a miracle.
The alphabet bodies have been up to their nonsense for some time. It was almost a full 25 years ago that Lewis unified against Holyfield to merge his lineal championship and one alphabet strap with Holyfield’s pair of belts. That was in November 1999. By August 2000, Holyfield was fighting for a title ripped unceremoniously off the waist of the man who’d just bested him, because John Ruiz in high-profile title fights was apparently something someone thought the world needed.
By the time he retired as champ, Lennox was down to one major alphabet group recognizing him.
It was nonsense like this that led my then-boss Nigel Collins to reintroduce The Ring magazine championships in 2001. These were titles that could only be won and lost inside the ropes. No champions would be stripped. You were champ until another fighter defeated you, you left the weight class in which you reigned, or you retired.
It wasn’t a perfect system. Without the threat of being stripped, a champ could duck a top contender — and occasionally some did. I’ll take that over mandatory mismatches of interest to nobody and new vacancies popping up every 15 minutes, but, again, not a perfect policy.
There were also, very occasionally, disputes over when new lineages would or should begin, and the most notable occurred in the heavyweight division.
The one gap in the lineage between Patterson and Fury arose when Lewis retired. We on The Ring’s editorial team felt that a fight between No. 1 contender Vitali Klitschko and No. 3 contender Corrie Sanders satisfied the criteria for filling a vacancy and that you didn’t need No. 2 contender Chris Byrd involved to crown a new champion. A fair few readers and fellow media members disagreed. Vitali beat Sanders, and his accumulation of injuries forced him to (temporarily) retire one fight later anyway.
What followed were several years without a clear king of the division. Brother Wladimir gradually piled up alphabet belts and eventually claimed The Ring title by beating Chagaev in another 1-vs.-3 fight (but one generally viewed as more palatable for filling a vacancy because the unretired Vitali was No. 2 and there was no chance of the brothers facing each other). Even though Wlad never had all the belts at once, he achieved universal recognition as The Man — if it wasn’t quite unanimous when he beat Chagaev, it was after he defeated Alexander Povetkin — and that was transferred to Fury at the end of 12 desultory rounds in Dusseldorf, Germany in 2015.
Fury vs. Usyk is a beautiful thing. Whatever ends have become frayed due to Fury’s lengthy hiatus or due to trinkets being distributed to the Brownes, Bryans, and Charrs, they all get tied into one tight knot on Saturday.
Enjoy it while you can. The true lineage is easy to keep track of and will remain intact until the next time the heavyweight champion retires, but “undisputed” is rare and fleeting.
The politics of boxing constantly conspire to dispute — and to dilute.
So savor this rare moment of purity. Of sanity. Of singularity. Of history.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for outlets such as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, Ringside Seat, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory and currently co-hosts . He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of and the author of 2014’s . He can be reached on or , or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.