What happened to heavy weight boxing?

It’s as good now as it’s been in a while. Fury is legit, Wilder is a 1 trick pony but that 1 trick is devastating & Joshua is pretty dam good as well. It just doesn’t have the “must see” aspect that the Tyson era had

Need a charismatic, dominant American.

Klitschko brothers happened

Boxing is actually really good right now.

The heavyweight division has suffered for a long time with a lack of big fights and marketable (in the US) champions. But the problem with boxing is not so much the quality of fighting. It’s that it’s hard to televise boxing matches on TV, when the sport is not conducive to TV commercials and there’s so much competition for attention. Boxing is not just competing with MMA right now, it’s also competing with every other program on 160 channels and every streaming service every Saturday night. So you don’t have the universal attention that the sport used to get back in the 70’s and 80’s. So it’s harder to build a star fighter.

When it comes to the heavyweights, their title fights are rare because there isn’t a lot of fighting up and fighting down in weight classes among champions in adjacent weight classes. So that’s even fewer opportunities to build a star fighter. Add that to the fact that boxing is more global than ever before, and you have Americans feeling like the heavyweight division is down.

But don’t sleep on the lighter weight classes. There is a TON of good boxing going on there. There’s a damn good fight almost on a weekly basis right now.

I agree with your last statement as a whole but if we go back to 86-87, no heavyweight fighting wanted any part of Tyson. That includes the guys like Lewis and Holyfield that got him post Douglas. He would've walked them all down. For my money 19-20 year old Tyson is the betting favorite against anyone. He was as powerful as Wilder but astronomically more compact, agile and quick. He would crush the bodies of these tall heavyweights now.

In my opinion boxing has failed because of many reasons. Greed, too many belts, the cards are usually boring outside of the main event and are filled with no names, judging has been horrible.

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Need a charismatic, dominant American.

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Fury is more American than half the soy boy's in the current state of the U.S.

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Seems like MMA has replaced boxing by becoming a somewhat underground version of the sport.

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The UFC isn't underground at all. It's on almost every Saturday on ESPN, ESPN+ and PPV.

They all became LBs, DE and RBs in the NFL.

Fury has good personality but is less talented and sloppy compared to previous champions.

Super heavy weights took over after Tyson and Holyfield. Lewis was the beginning, then many less athletic and much less exciting super heavy weights that just wear opponents out instead of fast heavy hitters.

It’s as good as it has been in a long time right now, though.