American Heavyweights Search for a Ring Master

Dating back to John L. Sullivan's defeat of Joe Collins in 1882, Madison Square Garden has hosted 22 fights for the world heavyweight boxing championship, and every one of those matches featured at least one American. That string will be broken Saturday night when Wladimir Klitschko and Sultan Ibragimov step into the Garden ring to unify the International Boxing Federation and World Boxing Organization heavyweight titles.

Nothing could paint a starker portrait of the decline of U.S. heavyweight boxing than a Ukrainian squaring off against a Russian in New York City for a title once emblematic of American dominance of world boxing. From Sullivan, the "Boston Strongboy," the lineage of majestic heavyweight U.S. champions continued through Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Larry Holmes, Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield.

A look at the heavyweight rankings today shows how much has changed. The leading names are Klitschko, Ibragimov, Ruslan Chagaev, Nicolay Valuev, Alexander Povetkin, Alexander Dimitrenko and Serguei Liakhovich. World Boxing Council heavyweight champion Oleg Maskaev, born in Russia, gained U.S. citizenship two years ago, but his skills were honed long ago in the former Soviet Union.

The lone bright prospect from the United States in the division may be Tony Thompson of Fort Washington, and he's 36. The rest are mostly aged and recycled, such as Hasim Rahman and John Ruiz, who trudge on with careers long after their stardom has faded. Clearly, the bottom has fallen out of American heavyweight boxing.

"The fighters are coming out of Russia, Germany, and you've got Latinos," said Hall of Fame trainer Lou Duva, 85, who helped develop 19 world champions including Holyfield. ". . . What have you got? You've got Oscar De La Hoya and you've got Oscar De La Hoya. I mean, what have you got?"

The demise of the great American heavyweight has multiple origins, according to many deeply involved in the sport. The lack of free television exposure for boxing in recent years and the attraction of young athletes to big-salary sports such as football and basketball have hurt. The one-two punch of a dysfunctional amateur system and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later, however, likely rank higher.

"The U.S. amateur program in the past 10 or 12 years is totally gone," said Emmanuel Steward, a leading American trainer, who works with Klitschko. "That's why you're seeing old guys like [Shane] Mosley and De La Hoya hanging on. There aren't any younger fighters coming up."

U.S. amateur boxing used to produce one superstar after another. The pinnacle came in 1976 with the U.S. "Gold Rush" team that featured Sugar Ray Leonard, Michael and Leon Spinks, Howard Davis and Leo Randolph. When the Soviet Union boycotted the 1984 Olympics, the United States, with a remarkably gifted group of fighters, won nine gold medals.

"Every Games went down from there," said Michael King, former president of King World Productions, who made a fortune syndicating television shows such as "Wheel of Fortune" and invested heavily several years ago in an attempt to revive U.S. amateur boxing. "I don't think it takes a real expert to look at the sport and say it's hanging on by its fingernails. It's because the farm system is choking to death. It's been death by a thousand cuts: lack of resources, organization, funding."

In fall 2005, King raised $60 million to try to infuse life into the faltering U.S. amateur boxing program, promising powerful marketing muscle and to rebuild gyms and Boys and Girls clubs in troubled neighborhoods that are the backbone of the amateur sport. In 2003, he signed a 21-year contract with USA Boxing, the national governing body of amateur boxing in the country, and gave the organization more than a million dollars a year. In December 2006, he canceled the contract.

"I gave these people $4 million and I never got one thing except yelled at," King said.

"He had no desire to run USA Boxing, but some board members were suspicious they would lose control of the organization," said Robert Voy, USA Boxing president from 2000 to 2004. "They gave him a very difficult time trying to start a marketing program, and there's probably not a better marketing person in the country. It was very short-sighted on the part of the organization."