Michael Ezra
Key information about many boxers rests in their post-primes: how they fought, and perhaps even how they lived, after their peak periods in the ring ended. Few fighters finish their careers on the high side; those that exit with both their finances and health in strong shape are miracle workers. Many of the greatest ever, from Sugar Ray Robinson to Muhammad Ali, left the sport broke and unwell. The trope of the pathetic post-prime prizefighter, penniless and punch drunk, has always served up nicely as part of a moral argument against boxing and for a long time was sports’ most reliable cautionary tale, although it has recently been replaced by the suicidal ex-footballer or prematurely deceased professional wrestler.
Arguments about all-time greatness in boxing fixate on two subjective criteria, talent and achievement. How good was the fighter in his prime? What did the fighter accomplish overall? Both questions deserve discrete exploration, although the latter usually holds more weight than the former. When both were near their primes in 1993, for example, Roy Jones Jr. clearly beat Bernard Hopkins at middleweight. Hopkins, however, receives higher consideration as an all-time middleweight than Jones, with his career record making the difference. Both Hopkins and Jones exemplify how post-prime accomplishments and failures can define pugilistic legacies more than prime ones. In their 2010 rematch, Hopkins won as expected in a fight that had minimal effect on either man’s historical value.
Post-prime bouts can have great significance. Boxing’s biggest-money contest of all time featured two post-prime fighters, Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao. It was a long-delayed matchup, with the eventual victor, Mayweather, refusing to make it happen until years after his smaller rival had demonstrated definitively crippling ring wear, and even then only at a weight that would afford the larger man a major advantage. Career-defining prime-versus-prime matches are rare these days because fighters would rather stay undefeated. Zero losses in boxing is like zero miles on a car; market value evaporates once the number changes.
Aging gracefully in boxing is quite an achievement, a measure of character beyond mere ring accomplishments. The post-prime period, as much as any other aspect of a fighter’s career, can define his essence; some of the greatest greats have had remarkably impressive post-primes, and some, like Hopkins, only became recognizable during their post-primes as the professors of boxing they had always been. Post-prime accomplishments sometimes corroborate prime ones, like Ali’s wins over Sonny Liston gaining increased credibility after he beat George Foreman a decade later.
By a fighter’s prime, I mean his speed and weight. A fighter is in his prime at the weight and time when he executes at his fastest without any significant loss of defensive technique, endurance, relative hitting power, footwork, or durability. The most definitive change that takes place during a fighter’s post-prime is that he gets slower. A loss of speed characterizes the post-prime more than anything else. Speed is the most important quality in boxing. Speed is to boxing as youth is to beauty; it can hide a boxer’s every flaw and make him look great. You can win with just speed. Once you lose your speed in the ring, though, the other qualities that make you a great fighter, or not, become all the more important. Weight often influences speed, but not always. Many of the greatest fighters in history have fought in multiple weight classes, and understanding how to value the bouts they had outside their prime weights is key to appreciating their significance.
Speed goes first and dissolves quickly, never to be regained or relearned or improved. Whatever the Rocky franchise might say about chasing chickens or running on the beach, a fighter cannot increase his speed, and he certainly cannot recapture what he has lost over time. Age, training, lifestyle, weight class, and ring damage all can influence how long a fighter retains peak speed. Boxers who rely solely upon speed have the toughest road to long-term post-prime success. Even the fastest speed merchants can wind up like Jones, knocked out and discredited, or Hector Camacho, who early on became obsessed with safety. Ali is the rare and extreme example of an all-time great whose most impressive post-prime accomplishments depended upon significantly different skills than the hand and foot speed that won him earlier bouts.
Ali’s case illustrates how speed can make weaknesses appear as strengths, but also indicates the unsustainability of relying primarily upon speed. Nearly unhittable during his first championship run despite significant defensive limitations, including not holding his hands high enough and the reluctance to slip punches via side-to-side movement, Ali was more easily tagged in his post-prime, the longstanding defensive flaws later embodied by Parkinson’s disease. Although it was Ali who beat up Foreman for eight straight rounds and not the other way around, the Rumble in the Jungle and the myth of the rope-a-dope still pay proper homage to the toughness that rests at the heart of Ali’s consensus standing as the all-time-greatest heavyweight champion. The belief now taken for granted that Ali could convert his prime talent into wins against the division’s all-time best solidified only after the full extent of his resourcefulness and will were revealed in his post-prime.
The sudden exposure of the post-prime moment can result in catastrophe for those who employ speed as the sole route to success; in the case of Jones, it struck seemingly out of nowhere. Before Antonio Tarver landed that decisive blow, Jones was considered by many to be one of the greatest fighters of all time. Afterward he became known as someone who couldn’t take a punch. Jones’s spectacular rise and fall reveals the illusory lure of speed and how it gets mistaken for greatness. Jones in his prime was perceived to be as close to Robinson as you could get these days. Unquestioned for nearly a decade as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the sport as a middleweight and then a light heavyweight, Jones controlled most every round he fought for nearly fifteen years, culminating with a victory over heavyweight champion John Ruiz, pitching shutouts in many of the title defenses he didn’t win by knockout.
Despite this run, in nearly all aspects of the sport other than speed, and perhaps conditioning, Jones was not great. He had above-average power, but rarely took the risks to apply it, he didn’t jab, and most importantly he had a glass jaw. However, because he had maybe the quickest hands, pound for pound, of any fighter in history, Jones never really got hit until his rematch with Tarver. Only in retrospect can most of us see the shortcomings that were hidden by Jones’s transcendent reflexes; he probably ducked Nigel Benn, Gerald McClellan, and Dariusz Michalczewski over the years, knowing these fighters had a chance to overcome his major asset.
No moment in boxing ever had the credibility-destroying effect of Jones’s knockout loss to Tarver, when an all-time-legendary fighter’s pugilistic worth was so radically recalibrated by so many so quickly. Roberto Duran’s No Mas versus Sugar Ray Leonard, or Liston’s quitting in the corner against Ali, or Liston’s rolling on the floor in their rematch, doesn’t even come close. The odds were 9–1, and longer shots have come in, but Jones-Tarver 2 may well be the greatest upset in boxing history when we consider its shock value and almost-instantaneous effect on Jones’s perceived historical value. Little credit is due Tarver, by the way, who proved to be no great shakes when shortly thereafter he lost the championship to Hopkins, who was still winning the big ones thirteen years after Jones took their middleweight title bout. Tarver was simply a man in his prime at his best weight, in the right place at the right time, against an overrated champion whose post-prime day of reckoning had finally come. The assertion that Jones’s demise resulted from his losing too much weight too quickly after beating Ruiz is easily refuted. It was only eighteen pounds he had to shed; an older Archie Moore lost more in less time prior to a light heavyweight championship defense that came right after a nontitle match. Other light heavyweight kings have also moved up for heavyweight bouts and then have gone back down to successfully defend the crown; if Jones was so depleted by the process, he would have tired rather than finished strongly in his victory over Tarver in their first fight.
Hopkins enjoys a rarified status as one of the few pugilists whose post-prime accomplishments far outstrip his prime ones, and who truly got better over time, at an age when almost every fighter becomes irrelevant. Jones-Hopkins is the uncommon post-prime-versus-post-prime rematch that more accurately reflects the reality over a prime-versus-prime first bout. Most post-prime rematches either reinforce or fail to influence how fighters get remembered. It is significant that Jones no longer receives credit as Hopkins’s superior, even though it was once a given because Jones had bested him in a prime-weight, no-excuses, at-their-seeming-physical-peaks, clear-cut decision. Even in his pre-prime Jones got recognition as an all-time great, but his post-prime proved him to be just another good champion. Hopkins went the other way, having been known as just another good champion in his prime, at last getting recognition as an all-time great deep into his post-prime run. Hopkins is in the most fundamental ways the ultimate post-prime fighter, and in this manner also unlike Jones, in that he left the sport with both his health and finances in fantastic shape, fit as a fiddle and rich as hell, with a bright future. His style—never reliant on speed but rather on slowing down the pace and even, if need be, on turning the bout into a grappling contest—served him well over the long haul.
Besides bounteous speed, the other variable that most often creates a false sense of a fighter’s historical value is his career arc: when he fought, who he fought, and who he could or should have fought. When does he make his definitive fights, against whom, and in what weight classes? At what age and stage of his career does he leave the sport for the first time, and does he come back? Fighting on too long rarely influences the historical standing of an all-time great; of course we forgive Robinson’s losing to Joey Archer and Ali for the Larry Holmes disaster. All-time worth gets boosted, however, when a fighter quits at or near his prime, even if he returns unsuccessfully years later. Not coming back, as in the case of Rocky Marciano, is a bonus, but rare is the boxer who retires with big fights ahead of him.
Leonard’s career arc reveals the importance of quitting while ahead. Leonard’s prime lasted only five years from debut to retirement, his peak potential seemingly gone when he returned to the ring after taking two years off as a result of a detached retina and looked lackluster against fringe contender Kevin Howard. Leonard then was inactive for three more years before beating Marvelous Marvin Hagler in one of the most celebrated post-prime-versus-prime victories in boxing history. The win was a narrow one with the result likely influenced by the critical advantages that Hagler stupidly gave away to Leonard in exchange for the lion’s share of the purse, namely, a bigger ring, bigger gloves, and twelve rounds instead of fifteen. It nevertheless has cemented Leonard’s bona fides as not only one of the best few welterweights of any era, but also one of history’s best pound-for-pound fighters, having defeated the great middleweight champion Hagler, at the bigger man’s prime weight and when the bigger man seemed near his peak. To most people, the win evidences Leonard’s all-time superiority over Hagler, who was also one of the best-ever pound-for-pound fighters. Such thinking endures even though Leonard’s margin of victory was thin at best and the bout was difficult to score. One of the most hotly disputed big-fight decisions in boxing history, the contest was so close that the reputation of the judge who tabbed Leonard the decisive winner was forever sullied.
Leonard’s triumph against Hagler is overvalued as a post-prime-versus-prime win. People ignore Hagler’s career arc, assuming him to have been near his prime when he faced Leonard, and they overestimate the negative impact that a five-year layoff had on the challenger. What made Hagler a bogus 3–1 favorite was not only the misinterpretation of his recent performances, which seemed impressive but were subpar, but most importantly that he appeared much closer to his prime than Sugar Ray. Looking back, though, Leonard was nearer his peak speed and skill than Hagler when they met. The bout was more a prime Leonard versus a post-prime Hagler, albeit at middleweight, than vice versa.
Hagler was in steeper decline than Leonard for their match, even though most observers perceived it the other way around. Leonard was thirty years old; Hagler claimed to be thirty-two, although there is talk that he fudged his age downward by as much as two years. Leonard had thirty-four bouts; Hagler had sixty-six. Hagler had been a pro about fourteen years, with no layoff. Leonard fought five years, retired, then had one bout in five more years. Leonard went on long after their encounter, but Hagler retired immediately. Also taking into account that both fighters partied in the years leading up to their meeting, the sabbatical did Leonard better than Hagler’s activity against the division’s best did him, ducking nobody in nearly seven years as champion. During Leonard’s rest period, Hagler defended the title eight times against tough opposition. Hagler’s post-prime title reign, which includes his definitive victory against Thomas Hearns in one of the sport’s most-admired fights ever, nonetheless reveals that he struggled in the years leading up to Leonard, against Duran and John Mugabi. We should also not forget that Hagler was rocked and cut severely by the smaller Hearns, who broke his right hand in the first round and had a below-average chin. Hearns was an all-time-great pound-for-pound fighter on a level similar to Leonard and Hagler.
Career arc can have a drastic effect on a fighter’s meaning. Foreman, like Leonard, benefited from a self-imposed layoff, taking ten years off while still near his prime. Had Foreman not retired initially, he would have likely become fodder for the next era’s contenders, from Gerry Cooney (whom he would later destroy) to Tim Witherspoon to Mike Tyson. He would have taken a pounding, piled up brutal losses, and might even be dead by now: no recaptured heavyweight title, in one of the most celebrated post-prime victories ever, no grilling machine, no lucrative second life as a jolly pitchman. Had they quit while they were ahead, some fighters would enjoy a reverence that now eludes them. If Donald Curry left the sport for good following his blowout of Milton McCrory, we’d still be wondering how it would’ve turned out between him and Leonard. If Jones had decided to hang it up rather than give Tarver a rematch, there would be plenty of people ranking him the very best middleweight of all time. Marciano retired undefeated and never had a post-prime period—never helplessly sprawled, dangling on the ring apron, in the way he left his predecessor Joe Louis that sad night in Madison Square Garden. Louis in his prime was far superior to Marciano, and it is worth stating the obvious here—the result itself sometimes fails to provide the information and perspective necessary to deconstruct what happened in a given bout.
Boxing enjoyed a post-prime renaissance during the 1980s due to the immense surplus of talent between 140 and 160 pounds, when unusual quality percolated through the middle ranks, led by Leonard. Normally, it is a charismatic heavyweight champion who carries the sport, as when Ali single-handedly resuscitated mass public interest in boxing in the United States during the 1960s and tapped emerging worldwide markets during the 1970s. During the reign of Holmes, however, smaller men became the sport’s biggest draws. High-level fighters Aaron Pryor (at 140 pounds), Wilfred Benitez, and Curry were not even their era’s best welterweights, even though at their peaks all might beat the best welterweight of the past decade, Mayweather.
Popularly regarded as the current era’s greatest pound-for-pound fighter, Mayweather is no such thing. Ricardo Lopez, Guillermo Rigondeaux, and Pacquiao all deserve higher consideration than Mayweather, whose undefeated record has hoodwinked people into vastly overestimating his value. Although possessed of considerable speed, ring intelligence, and old-school defensive generalship, Mayweather would be hard-pressed to last the distance against Leonard or Hearns at welterweight or Duran at lightweight. Pacquiao was so far past his fastest and best when they met—not to mention twenty-plus pounds above his optimal weight—as to render the result unusable as a measure of supremacy. Pacquiao’s devastating victories against much larger opponents across an unprecedented span—no fighter has romped through weight classes like him—favorably contrast Mayweather’s lackluster performances against bigger men like Oscar De La Hoya. Mayweather’s split-decision victory over a faded ODLH contrasts the work done to him by more complete fighters, whether Hopkins’s left-hook-to-the-liver knockout over the Golden Boy or Pacquiao’s beating Oscar into retirement.
Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, and Duran resonated most deeply with the public during the post-Ali, pre-Mike-Tyson period. One fought against another nine times. Only Leonard beat the other three; only Duran lost to the other three. Their win-loss-draw records during this series reveal the following order of dominance, if, as many people do, you let the record book tell the story: Leonard 4–1–1, Hagler 2–1, Hearns 1–2–1, Duran 1–4. Duran’s ledger looks much the worst. Not only did he suffer a devastating knockout loss to Hearns, the most one-sided of all the nine fights, but he was also the man who quit during his rematch with Leonard, who simply walked away without a mark on him, in the middle of a round, no less, without injury, and said “no mas.” A failure to understand career arc would prevent the casual fan from accepting that Duran is the greatest fighter of these four all-time legends, if not of the last fifty years altogether. Those who did not see him at his peak, before boxing’s comeback in the 1980s, probably require an explanation of how Duran could be the pound-for-pound best of these immortals. Three factors establish Duran’s superiority: the quality of his prime wins, his definitive post-prime bouts, and his overall career accomplishments.
Duran won the lightweight title twenty-nine fights into his career at twenty-one years of age. When he beat Leonard for the welterweight crown eight years later, he had defended the lightweight championship thirteen times, against stiff competition. By the time Duran entered into the series with Leonard, Hagler, and Hearns, he was a veteran of seventy-two fights, weighing twenty-five pounds more than in his debut twelve years earlier, and twelve pounds more than as lightweight champion. Duran, in other words, at age twenty-nine was past his prime when he bested the bigger, faster, prime Leonard in their first bout. Duran, past his prime and well over his peak weight, fought Leonard, Hagler, and Hearns when all three were nearer to their primes and at optimal weights. Thus his losing record against them is not in itself any indicator of his inferior quality. An observer trying to make sense of Duran’s historical value must take this into account.
The savagery of Duran’s prime wins while lightweight champion sets him apart from the other three great champions, all of whom could decimate a man. Each had their impressive knockouts, sometimes against very good fighters, whether Hagler’s win over Hearns or Hearns’s over Duran. Of all the devastation, however, only Leonard’s one-punch starching of Dave Green came close to the heights of scariness that Duran’s title defenses regularly reached, when you feared for the well-being of his opponent and after turning off the television were left wondering about the extent of the damage he had suffered. Would Ken Buchanan be able to procreate? Would Ray Lampkin live through the night? In the early and mid-1970s, the sport’s most memorably harrowing moments happened in Duran’s fights. His definitive post-prime victories also reinforce his superiority over the other three. The only man to defeat the prime Leonard, Duran also had late-career wins against Davey Moore and Iran Barkley that considerably outstrip anything Leonard, Hearns, or Hagler accomplished during the twilights of their careers. While Hearns’s victory over undefeated light heavyweight champion Virgil Hill might seem the most impressive post-prime victory by any of the big four, Hill was vulnerable to a smaller and faster man, as demonstrated by his knockout loss to Jones, who dispatched him with a single body shot. The lifetime records tell much about their career accomplishments: Duran 103–16, Hagler 62–3–2, Hearns 61–5–1, Leonard 36–3–1.
Quitting against Leonard in their rematch hardly blemishes Duran’s record because what he did was not all that out of the ordinary. Considering Duran’s fearsome reputation and macho persona, the decision to fold in such a crucial bout was surprising and disappointing and significant at the time, but over the long haul it barely matters. Duran has never revealed his reasons for quitting in that match, even as Leonard continues to obsess over them. It wasn’t because he was taking a bad beating, like Ali when his corner stopped the fight against Holmes with five rounds to go, or Alexis Arguello when he willingly took the ten count in his rematch against Pryor. Duran received a battering from Hearns, but he didn’t quit. Even when hopelessly outgunned, he kept coming forward before being blasted into unconsciousness. It wasn’t because he claimed an arm injury, as Liston did versus Ali, or Julio Cesar Chavez did in his bout against Grover Wiley. Fighters quit in all kinds of ways. Tyson and Bonecrusher Smith mutually agreed to stop fighting during their heavyweight title bout, both of them holding and clinching their way through twelve insufferable rounds, neither man trying his best. Besides, Duran’s mettle figured significantly into his win over Barkley, not to mention other late-career matches, some of them losses.
Only a fool thinks that the most honorable way to lose a fight is to be carried out half-dead, never able to compete again. It’s not heroic being Jess Willard—who had to quit anyway—against Jack Dempsey. One of the most-heralded examples of ring courage, the Thrilla in Manila featured a winner who admittedly almost quit and a loser whose trainer would not let him answer the bell for the fifteenth round. We do not hold it against Ali and Joe Frazier that it went this way, even though if it were up to him, had his trainer not forced him to continue, Ali would also have quit after being blinded in his first fight with Liston. Fighters as valued for their toughness as Duran, like Ali and Chavez, knew that it was sometimes appropriate to say no mas. Duran quit once, but he was no quitter. He lacked good reason to keep going against Leonard that night, just to be clowned. The prime Sugar Ray was too sharp for the smaller man, and Duran was astute enough to realize it long before most observers could. His going the distance would not have changed the outcome, except to make him look increasingly foolish, perhaps the one thing he could not stand to happen in the ring. Duran also assumed wrongly that he would soon get a rubber match, as he had granted Leonard a chance for redemption shortly after their first fight.
Boxing fans afford great respect to fighters who get needlessly hurt and criticize referees who stop matches too early. Nearly all MMA fans, on the other hand, understand that a fighter needs to tap out when necessary. MMA referees intervene quickly, before considerable damage can be done. Relatedly, MMA losses don’t necessarily dull market value—fighters are expected to lose, unlike in boxing, where no less than a figure as big as Mayweather feared losing more than anything else.
While strong post-primes characterize the careers of many legends, there are those true greats who scale heights so monumental as to excuse their relatively short periods at the top, in boxing and other sports as well. Baseball has Sandy Koufax, good for six seasons only, but of unquestioned all-time quality. At twenty-five years old, John McEnroe had won seven grand slams, the same number he had to his credit upon retirement. Gale Sayers played only five full years but set the NFL season record for touchdowns as a rookie and racked up astonishing prime numbers. Leonard is boxing’s avatar in this category, having established legendary status in the fewest number of fights. Only 32–1 when he first retired, Leonard by then had beaten formidable opposition: Benitez, Duran, and Hearns. Other notable such achievers are Pryor (36–0 before his drug-induced retirement), Frazier (29–0 before being crushed by Foreman), and James J. Jeffries (19–0–2 before his fight against Jack Johnson)—all recognized among their division’s all-time best despite short peaks and ignominious comeback attempts that showcased dramatically their inability to sustain prime momentum.
Ali was one of the indispensable post-prime fighters, as already stated, not just because his loss of speed forced him to radically shift his style, and notwithstanding his debacle against Holmes, one of the most pathetic of all the post-prime-versus-prime spectacles in the sport’s history, on a par with Louis-Marciano. Ali’s true post-prime significance may very well rest beyond the ring, as someone who lived with Parkinson’s disease. Although he no doubt touched millions as a race man and athlete, Ali’s biggest impact on society might be that if ever there is a cure for Parkinson’s, he could rightfully be credited as the person singly most responsible for it. Nobody raised awareness of this common and deadly affliction, and money to combat it, more than Ali did. Such a contribution would surely resonate with humankind as much as his draft resistance, racial consciousness, or in-ring artistry. Whereas the prime Ali was divisive, the post-prime Ali was perhaps the most beloved and respected figure in the entire world.
Boxing fans invest a lot of energy in comparing fighters from different eras and speculating about their relative worth. The wrangling over these fantasy rankings, mostly within a given weight class but also pound for pound across the divisions, figures prominently into how people make meaning of the sport. Explanations of who would win various what-if matches and who are the best fighters of all time hold great significance for the many fans who get more riled up talking about the top three heavyweights ever than talking about the top three heavyweights now. These conversations about all-time quality, which are ultimately exercises of the fictional imagination even when they have a veneer of analytical precision, nonetheless matter to the culture of boxing. They not only compel fans, but boxers, too, who agonize publicly over their supposed place in history and whether they would beat comparable fighters from bygone eras. Unlike other sports, boxing has proven resistant to statistical analysis. In this void, its observers devote considerable passion, sometimes even great knowledge and artistry, in cultivating a case for why, for instance, Louis would beat Liston.
That Ali was favored against Holmes even though he had no chance of winning illustrates just how woefully misinformed the public is about boxing, how sentiment trumps analytical clarity, and how important post-primes are in the marketing of the sport. No fan base knows less about its chosen pastime; even the most rabid consumers are mostly clueless. Thus bouts like Mayweather-Pacquiao, or Ali-Holmes, or any number of matches that should have been easily recognizable as rotten way past their expiration dates, instead become the sport’s biggest blockbusters. The many resurrections of Tyson represent boxing’s tendency to recycle its stars and the public’s willingness to be conned into accepting an inferior product. In basketball, football, and baseball, talent is cycled out ruthlessly. With the exception of canny role players and aging stars, there is hardly such a thing as a post-prime. Even sedentary sports like golf recognize the need to segregate older players from younger ones in order to preserve the quality of the product. But in boxing, one’s faded glory can linger for decades, just a few rigged fights and a promotional campaign away from another title bout.
Boxing itself seems mired in an eternal post-prime, never quite off the radar screen, but ever decreasingly of use, creating little interest beyond the core fan base, rarely covered except on specialized websites, and—as with all blood sports—always of questionable morality and purpose. Scary new data about head injuries and concussions make known to laypeople what boxing insiders have always accepted, that those who step into the prize ring will get damaged. In a sense, you enter the post-prime of your life the minute you get involved with the sport. Boxing, perhaps best characterized by its cockroach ability to survive any crisis, will one day have company in the sports gutter, joined by the NFL and WWE, both of which now tower economically and culturally over the fight game but are no less toxic. Boxing will never die, even as it remains permanently in its post-prime. The post-prime ethos in many ways is emblematic of the sport and its greatest fighters, representing the ability to survive under duress, and the character to press on—and produce revenue—in hard times. To those who love the bittersweet science, these qualities prove irresistible.
The author would like to thank Charles Farrell, Kurt Noltimier, and Gary Moser, whose unique ideas about boxing have influenced this essay.