Fury and Five historic Heavyweight title rematches

Article first appeared at BigFightWeekend.com

Tyson Fury’s attempt to recapture the heavyweight crown from Oleksander Usyk on Saturday is the latest in a series of rematches that have illuminated the legend of the title the two will contest.

He isn’t the first to seek redemption through a rematch but if he is successful, he will join an exclusive band of fighters.

Applying metrics to determine the best of more than a century of heavyweight title rematches is a complex endeavour. Is it the entertainment value of the fight? The historic significance? Or the quality of the two fighters? An amalgam of all?

In short, conjuring a top five is a merely opinion and the following selections could be largely interchanged and there were many worthy contenders not included too:

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December 20, 2024 0

Stay in your lane. Rademacher, Ngannou and the opportunity in turbulence.

_{First published on BigFightWeekend.com}

In retirement, Pete Rademacher, a pioneering spirit who boxed for the heavyweight title in his first professional bout, helped to invent a divider for swimming pools that reduced turbulence between lanes. The idea being that each competitor could optimise their own performance unhindered by the wake created by a rival carving through the water in an adjacent lane.

Tyson Fury, boxing’s number one big man, fights Francis Ngannou, the once preeminent heavyweight in Mixed Martial Arts, on Saturday in Saudi Arabia. A curiosity solicited on the turbulence the latter’s ‘crossing of lanes’ proposes to create and reliant on the resulting voyeurism of the lucrative mainstream market.

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October 28, 2023 0

Fury, Wilder and Joshua; the normality of avoiding risk

Patterson finally agrees to Liston defence

Coincidences can prove jarring, awakening us from the mundanity of our rituals, sometimes they’re not evident without the spectacles of hindsight and occasionally the happenchance of concurrent events or unexpected meetings of people, things, occurrences pass by unnoticed. Just such serendipity brought together two different eras in the heavyweight division for me today and in doing so offered a salve to my throbbing suspicion that Tyson Fury’s alignment with Top Rank and ESPN will steal away a heavyweight era barely rediscovered beneath a layer of Ukrainian dust. Continue reading “Fury, Wilder and Joshua; the normality of avoiding risk” →

February 20, 2019 1

Most avoided fighter of the past 10 years? Poll

The forthcoming middleweight clash between veteran southpaw Winky Wright and Paul Williams, the former Welterweight champion stirred me to contemplate which fighter of the past decade had been the most avoided. Winky Wright makes a strong claim for this unwanted acknowledgement, particularly given his recent enforced inactivity, but ultimately he has secured bouts with Shane Mosley and Bernard Hopkins to name but two. His advocates would remind me he had to chase Hopkins all the way up to Light-Heavyweight when they spent years side by side in the Middleweight division, both in desperate need of a big payday. Williams too, wouldn’t be without his supporters, but now he has Wright, following victory over Margarito, himself a contender for the tag. Continue reading “Most avoided fighter of the past 10 years? Poll” →