LITTLE HEAVYWEIGHTS:
WELCOME BACK

By William Dettloff

A couple of truths were made evident during Alexander Povetkin’s win Saturday night over Eddie Chambers. One is that you can add Chambers, apparently, to that long list of maddening American heavyweights whose baffling reluctance to punch causes defeats their talent never should permit them to suffer.

Chambers thus joins Dominick Guinn, Lamon Brewster, Shannon Briggs, Michael Moorer, and, hell, Mike Weaver if you want to go back far enough.

The other is that the era of the giant heavyweight is over. That’s right. Povetkin, whom The Ring rates the 10th best heavyweight in the world, went in against Chambers at a mere 219 pounds. Chambers was a slightly pudgy 227. Nothing huge about either guy.

Check out the rest of the ratings: Sam Peter is as thick around as a Volkswagen but only 6'1"—shorter than Larry Holmes. Ruslan Chagaev, Oleg Maskaev, Sergei Liakhovich, Vladimir Virchis? None of them bigger than 6'4". Hell, the young George Foreman, with his Afro still intact, was easily that. And that was 30 years ago.

The only huge heavyweights in the top 10 are Wladimir Klitschko and the freakish Nicolay Valuev, and one of them can’t fight. The other one is facing Sultan Ibragimov in a few weeks—who, by the way, goes 6'2" and about 220. (Tony Thompson is 6'5", but he’s a skinny southpaw, so he doesn’t really count.)

What happened to all those giant heavyweights who were ushering in this new era of enormous but athletically gifted giants whose size supposedly conferred on them superiority over such luminaries as Joe Louis, Muhammad Ali, and Jack Dempsey?

Lennox Lewis is retired. So is Lance Whitaker. Vitali Klitschko hasn’t made it through a successful training camp in about nine years, though apparently he’s trying again. Jameel McCline had more title shots than Chuck Norris has wigs, and he still couldn’t pull it off. Riddick Bowe is finished, whether or not he knows it. Michael Grant too.

And eight of the world’s top 10 heavyweights are just slightly bigger than your average NFL quarterback. That’s sorry news to the contingent out there that thinks bigger automatically equals better.

Hate to break it to you, size queens: Your hopes rest on Tye Fields.

Speaking of little heavyweights, I suspect Chris Byrd is going to be sorely disappointed when he discovers he can do no better against good cruiserweights anymore than he can against good heavyweights.

At his best, Byrd excelled against much bigger guys because he was so much quicker than they were. He won’t be outsized against cruiserweights, but his speed advantage vanishes. It’s not going to be pretty.

Some random thoughts from last week:

If 500,000 people ordered the Roy Jones-Felix Trinidad fight, half of them e-mailed me afterward to chastise me for comparing Jones’ weight loss to Ricky Hatton’s. A surprisingly large number of Jones fans hold advanced degrees in physiology I’ve learned, though it’s apparently a field that doesn’t prize accurate spelling or a good understanding of e-mail etiquette.

At any rate, the point is made that Hatton’s famous weight reductions involve cutting back on the beer and, er, beer, and Jones’ involved stopping whatever he was doing that added 30 pounds of muscle to his frame prior to his fight with John Ruiz. I get it.

I maintain that it doesn’t take three years to recover from cutting 30 pounds of muscle, as Jones claims. Three years after having cancer in his brain and lungs, Lance Armstrong won the Tour De France, for cripes’ sake. Now, I don’t have the fancy degrees many Jones fans do, but I’m thinking if the recovery time for chemotherapy and radiation is three years, then for simply permitting your body to return to its normal state and size, the time should be what, a weekend or two? Maybe three?

I’m not surprised Zab Judah priced himself out of a fight with Antonio Margarito. I am surprised Kermit Cintron did not. Good for him.

Alfonso Gomez is such a likable little guy it’s going to be uncomfortable watching what Miguel Cotto does to him. I applaud Gomez for taking the fight, but … ouch.

Bill can be contacted at dettloff@ptd.net.

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