Gary Lee Moser
Both as sport and spectacle, boxing is in a state of deterioration. There have been other recessionary periods in the last century, but they tended to be short-lived: the decade between heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey’s second loss to Gene Tunney in 1927 and the young Joe Louis winning the crown in 1937, for example. The sport’s preeminent writer A. J. Liebling lamented the state of the game at midcentury when he wrote, “Nineteen-fifty was no Golden Age of boxing, but, compared to 1960, it was at least gold-plated.” Despite such down periods, however, boxing has a track record of rallying back from them to the forefront of the American sports scene. There may be another boom for the sport in the years to come; never say never. It has proven to be remarkably resilient in era after era, despite all of the long-anticipated showdowns that aren’t worth the wait or never happen at all, not to mention the mismatches that border on criminal.
The current extended drought doesn’t bode well, however, both in terms of the quality and quantity of ring performances. Although boxing’s perceived corruptibility and unstructured nature have always been barriers to its gaining the acceptance and respectability of other major athletic endeavors, what now puts boxing most in peril of becoming irredeemable is the culture of risk aversion that has emerged in the last quarter century among almost all of the sport’s top names. George Foreman was right when he declared boxing to be the sport that all others aspire to; its lifeblood is the primal passion of fans who value the directness of the contact and the possibility that a bout could end by knockout at any moment. But as those elements leach away from the sport’s core values, its permanent impotence becomes a more realistic probability.
The most important aspect of boxing that has been lost in the recent period is the cultivation of rivalries; today’s so-called greats hardly ever avenge a defeat. Three of the most-celebrated champions of the last thirty years, Oscar De La Hoya, Roy Jones Jr., and Mike Tyson, have incurred twenty-one aggregate career losses. Only one was ever avenged, when Jones knocked out Montell Griffin in their rematch after having snatched defeat from the jaws of victory via a senseless foul at the end of their first bout. In the last couple of decades, there have been fewer trilogies than ever before. Recent classics like Arturo Gatti–Micky Ward and Rafael Marquez–Israel Vazquez featured second-tier champions but nonetheless sparked oversized interest among boxing fans. Without such rivalries at the top, notwithstanding the laudable stubbornness of Juan Manuel Marquez against Manny Pacquiao, the sport will remain doomed to the shadows. Great fighters making great fights is what drives boxing, and both have been in short supply since the late 1980s. Julio Cesar Chavez beat Frankie Randall twice after “The Surgeon” ended his ninety-bout unbeaten streak, but it’s the rare recent case of a great fighter avenging a loss.
What does it mean to call a fighter great? How does one score a career? My own four-point system addresses superior technical and/or physical ability that translates into successful results achieved over high-quality opposition for a long period of time. These four elements are what make boxing special and ensure its preservation despite all the factors it has working against it. The current unwillingness by most fighters to avenge losses, the refusal by winners of close and controversial bouts to grant rematches, and the fact that most fighters produce next to nothing after age thirty, all fly in the face of what produces great boxing. Thus the new culture of risk aversion among boxing’s top fighters threatens the sport in ways that even the worst scandals have not. The fractured economics and politics of the sport, which have taken hold over boxing in the last fifty years and produce far too many titleholders, also contribute to this decline. Undisputed world champions have gotten much harder to come by with each passing year, and the importance of the so-called lineal succession has largely disappeared.
Many people regard Sugar Ray Robinson as the greatest fighter of all time because of his comprehensive abilities, dazzling style, quality of opposition, and sheer number of wins. But what truly sets him apart from the other influential achievers in the sport is his knack for emphatically avenging defeat while courting outsized risk. Robinson’s ability to beat those who initially beat him makes him boxing’s all-time pound-for-pound king over the other masters who had in excess of 150 lifetime bouts, like Archie Moore, Henry Armstrong, Willie Pep, Sandy Saddler, Harry Greb, and Benny Leonard. Some of Robinson’s most dramatic moments were in late-career return matches, like the feverish barrage that stopped Randy Turpin and the perfect left hook that paralyzed the iron-chinned Gene Fullmer. Perhaps topping the list would be Robinson’s winning his first middleweight championship by stopping Jake LaMotta in their brutal 1951 bout, the sixth and final time they would meet.
The first five bouts he had with LaMotta, when Ray was not yet in his welterweight prime and Jake was a middleweight on the rise, represent an unfathomable degree of risk-taking by a fighter with such a bright future, especially given the details. Sugar Ray thumbed his nose at a great aphorism that has been attributed to old-time fight manager Leo P. Flynn: “A guy who goes into the lion’s den and comes out . . . doesn’t deserve to come out if he goes in again.” But within his first fifty-nine fights, all contested before he was more than half a year past his twenty-fifth birthday, Sugar Ray Robinson went in again and came out again four more times. Their first bout was in October 1942 when Robinson was only twenty-one, with a record of 35–0, including wins over Hall of Famers Sammy Angott and Fritzie Zivic. It was on LaMotta’s home turf at Madison Square Garden with the “Bronx Bull” sporting a thirteen-pound weight advantage, but after ten rugged rounds Robinson emerged with the decision. Four months later they met again, with Robinson 40–0 and giving away sixteen pounds. Sugar Ray was winning the bout until he was knocked through the ropes at the end of the eighth round, which resulted in his losing the narrowest of decisions: five rounds to four, with one even, per all three judges. So long, perfect record.
After such a loss you would think a fighter in Robinson’s position might want a bit of a break before thinking about reengaging LaMotta in a rubber match, but their third bout took place only three weeks after Ray had lost their second. And in between those fights, Sugar Ray took on “California” Jackie Wilson, a veteran of fifty-four bouts who had won twenty of his last twenty-one, with the only loss being to LaMotta. After scraping out a majority decision over Wilson in ten rounds, Sugar Ray then met Jake and was again floored, but this time took the decision. Almost one year later, after chalking up eleven more wins in as many bouts against opponents that must have seemed downright tame in comparison, Robinson returned to the Garden for a fourth meeting with the Bull, who by this time outweighed him by about ten pounds. No knockdowns or other scares this time; Robinson won by unanimous decision, although one of the judges had LaMotta winning four of the ten rounds. Seven months later, still marking time for a welterweight title opportunity that seemingly would never come, they met for the fifth time, with Robinson taking a split decision after twelve torrid rounds—“the toughest fight I’ve ever had with LaMotta,” averred Ray, which is certainly saying something.
Going through this gauntlet at such an early stage of his career enabled Robinson to achieve so much for so long thereafter. When he finally was granted his way-overdue welterweight title shot, against Tommy Bell on December 20, 1946, it was a scant forty-four days after he had survived another close call in yet another bout he didn’t really need to take: giving away nine pounds to a hard-punching fifty-nine-bout veteran named Artie Levine who had never been stopped, Ray KO’d him in the tenth and final round after being down and almost out himself in round four. In retrospect, maybe he had such a tough time with Levine because five days earlier he was busy taking out Cecil Hudson, who had only been stopped twice in seventy-five previous fights. When some years later Robinson lost the middleweight title to Turpin in his first defense, he reclaimed it a mere sixty-four days later. Even six years after that, it was only a four-month interval between his loss of the title to Fullmer and the night he landed that perfect thunderbolt of a left hook to get it back. And on, and on, and on. By his thirtieth birthday Robinson had already engaged in 126 fights—no fewer than fourteen of them against future Hall of Famers—and had only that sole loss to LaMotta. Yet he is most often celebrated for what he achieved in his remaining seventy-four bouts. Is there any doubt this man was the greatest fighter who ever lived?
Having an impressive roster of opponents, of course, does not in itself make you an all-time great, as evidenced by the example of Oscar De La Hoya. If one looks only at the names on the Golden Boy’s record, it appears at first glance to be a veritable who’s who of modern-day boxing. Without question, his conquerors—Felix Trinidad, Shane Mosley (twice), Bernard Hopkins, Floyd Mayweather, and Pacquiao—have all been top performers in the sport over an extended period of time, which cannot be said about many of the fighters who defeated Tyson and Jones. But Oscar might very well be the biggest disappointment of this troika, because in addition to only once attempting to avenge a loss, and not granting rematches after narrow wins over fighters such as Ike Quartey and Felix Sturm, he appeared to fight “scared” in his biggest bout, against Felix Trinidad, even when victory seemed at hand. Risk aversion was for the most part the guiding philosophy of his championship years.
Unlike most highly touted prodigies, Oscar did not have his pro career launched against a succession of hopeless bums and stiffs; on the contrary, not one of his early opponents came in with a losing record. But everyone he faced was carefully selected, just the same, and after notching eleven straight wins De La Hoya was deemed ready to annex his first world title. Despite having never fought at a weight lower than 131 pounds, he received a title shot against WBO 130-pound champion Jimmi Bredahl, who had barely more experience than De La Hoya himself and didn’t win a single round before Oscar stopped him. The bout established the model that almost all De La Hoya title fights would follow: the careful selection of opponents who were ripe for the taking. Oscar shortly thereafter won the lightweight title by stopping Jorge “El Maromero” Paez in two rounds. Paez was a clowning crowd-pleaser with some underrated boxing chops but had started to show serious wear and tear; having lost only six of sixty-three bouts before facing Oscar, thereafter he would lose three in a row. Over the ensuing five years, De La Hoya would stretch his professional unbeaten streak to thirty-one bouts as he moved up to the junior-welterweight class before eventually settling in as a welterweight. At first glance, it is a very impressive list of opponents he vanquished during this middle phase of his career. The majority of them sported glossy records featuring thirty or more wins against two or fewer defeats. But some were smaller fighters—John John Molina, Genaro Hernandez, Jesse James Leija—who had stepped up in weight for the lucrative payday, which is certainly understandable given the major attraction that Oscar had become. And a fair number of others were even bigger names—Chavez (twice), Pernell Whitaker, Hector Camacho—who were all in their mid-thirties with their best days behind them. Of the nineteen world title bouts that De La Hoya had engaged in up to that point, over a spectrum of four weight divisions, only his victory over Rafael Ruelas involved more than one organization’s title belt. It was not a bad body of work for a twenty-six-year-old fighter in the modern era, but it was without a definitive victory over a top rival.
De La Hoya’s 1999 unification bout versus 35–0 welterweight champion Trinidad, who was only twenty-five days older than Oscar, would be the most disappointing of his career. That night boxing fans bore witness to the increasingly rare spectacle of two young superstars squaring off against each other for the highest stakes in the sport, with all the essential elements in place: both unbeaten, each several months shy of his twenty-seventh birthday, both legitimate 147-pounders, and the classic stylistic pairing of a boxer who can punch a little versus a puncher who can box a little. On paper, it was the most perfect match imaginable. One would’ve had to look back to 1981’s classic Sugar Ray Leonard–Thomas Hearns showdown for such a mouthwatering collision of young welterweight titans. Except these two didn’t collide. Because both were wary of the other’s power and perhaps overawed by his reputation, the bout was from the start a metaphorical chess match, with Trinidad winning a boring majority decision after De La Hoya largely disengaged over the final three rounds.
So the monster showdown, poised to be a true classic, ended with a resounding thud. While it was bad enough that such a long-awaited and eagerly anticipated mega-fight turned out to be such a tepid, safety-first affair, it got worse. Despite their young ages, the closeness of the decision, and the lack of physical damage to either fighter, there was no rematch. Moreover, Oscar would engage in only thirteen bouts over the next eleven years, losing five of them, before deciding to work on the other side of the ropes, making even easier money by promoting the superior risk-taking of others. The victorious Felix ended up campaigning even less, notching only six more wins in nine bouts before hanging up his gloves. For this very odd couple, that’s a combined record of fourteen wins and eight losses from age twenty-seven to career end—and not a single one of those losses avenged. Thud, indeed.
The paucity of those remaining wins is compounded by the lack of a single victory that could be rightfully regarded as historic. It’s easy to overlook or even dismiss Leonard having only eight more bouts after that 1981 epic with Hearns at age twenty-five because one of them was a landmark upset of the truly all-time-great middleweight champion Marvelous Marvin Hagler—even if it was by a razor-thin margin in what proved to be the loser’s swan song. And Hearns went on to more than double his total number of bouts, including a savage punch-out of Roberto Duran and a sensational loss to Hagler, as well as decision wins over fellow Hall of Famers Wilfred Benitez and Virgil Hill. In contrast, Oscar and Felix both had only moderate success once they moved beyond welterweight. How in the hell could any fan awaiting the first bell on that evening in 1999 have had even the slightest inkling that these two careers would ultimately yield so little in the way of true all-time greatness?
Disappointing in a different way is Roy Jones Jr., for his lack of durability and a sudden collapse that is atypical in the extreme for an all-time-great fighter. Practically untouchable for his first fifty fights and fifteen years, Jones double-shocked the boxing world in an unprecedented manner in consecutive 2004 outings, being stopped in the second round by a single left-cross counterpunch by southpaw Antonio Tarver and then being dominated for eight rounds by the veteran Glengoffe Johnson before a right cross knocked him out cold. What makes it all the more stunning is that both opponents were slightly older than Jones himself, and that Jones had just gone twelve close-but-victorious rounds with Tarver while Johnson, as good a professional as he was, had never scored a knockout past the sixth round in any of his fifty-one previous fights.
Jones was tabbed as an almost surefire all-time great from the moment he turned pro after an extensive amateur career. His first five years were at middleweight, a 26–0 run that included winning the vacant International Boxing Federation (IBF) belt via decision over the less-experienced Bernard Hopkins in May 1993 and then defending it once. Jones then beat the 168-pound IBF champion, twenty-six-year-old James “Lights Out” Toney, a very strong and multitalented fighter who sported a record of 44–0–2 that included a good eighteen-month run as IBF middleweight champion before vacating that title to campaign in the higher division. But after winning the IBF 168-pound belt from Iran Barkley, Toney had engaged in seven over-the-weight outings as compared to only three defenses; he came in as heavy as 181 pounds for one of them. This perhaps presaged the outcome of his showdown with Jones: Toney was sluggish from the start, and Jones, despite scoring a flash knockdown in round three with a quick left hook, was content to outbox his dangerous opponent the rest of the way, winning at least nine rounds on each scorecard. Six defenses against nondescript challengers followed before Jones moved up to the light heavyweight division. Against the great Mike McCallum, who was fifteen days shy of his fortieth birthday—and, as it turned out, two bouts shy of retirement—Jones won all twelve rounds to cop the “interim” WBC 175-pound title.
In 1997, Jones suffered his first setback and won a rematch, but it was a somewhat dubious feat given that he never should have lost to begin with. The opponent, the five-feet-seven Griffin, had won twenty-six consecutive bouts, including eighteen by knockout. Twelve of those eighteen victims did not come in with a winning record, though, and the six who did each had a minimum of six losses with at least two of those by stoppage. The strength of Griffin’s challenge lay in the modified bob-and-weave pressuring style he employed, which had been effective enough to carve out a pair of twelve-round decisions over the inconsistent Toney after his Jones disappointment. The unorthodoxy of the challenger did indeed prove to be a puzzle for the favored Jones, but, perhaps emboldened by the flash knockdown he scored in the final minute of round seven, he became more aggressive thereafter. Two minutes into round nine, Roy caught Griffin with a quick straight right that sent him skittering backward; an extended sequence of individual lefts and rights soon had Montell wobbling even worse. When Griffin went down voluntarily on his right knee to buy some time, Jones stepped forward and stood over him, hesitating momentarily before throwing a tentative right hook that barely clipped him, then pausing before launching an only moderately harder left hook. This resulted in Griffin toppling headfirst onto the canvas—genuinely finished or opportunistically faking it—and left referee Tony Perez with no alternative but to disqualify Jones for flagrant fouling. It was an abrupt and stunning end to what had been a competitive and entertaining championship bout. Five months later, Jones avenged his “defeat” with a first-round knockout that was equally startling.
Over the next five years, Jones would win twelve more bouts in the 175-pound class, defending his WBC title along with whatever other ones he appropriated along the way from vanquished opponents. There were a couple of recycled former champions to be found—Hill, who was coming off a punishing twelve-round loss at the hands of the 33–0 WBO champ Dariusz Michalczewski, who Jones would never fight, and Reggie Johnson, whose best days had been in the middleweight division. Eight opponents had fought fewer than thirty bouts, with no signature wins to recommend them. In 2003, Jones took on WBA heavyweight champion John Ruiz, whose moniker “The Quiet Man” some found highly ironic given the nineteen-second coldcocking he had suffered seven years earlier at the hands of the Samoan New Zealander David Tua, not to mention that Ruiz had emerged with only one disputed points victory in a desultory trilogy with the aging-by-the-minute Evander Holyfield. Jones came in at 193 pounds to Ruiz’s 226, but was still much too quick-handed for the Puerto Rican and won an easy decision. Eight months later, it was back down to light heavyweight, where Roy faced Antonio Tarver for the first time and won a majority decision over twelve rounds; by the reckoning of most observers that night, Tarver won his rounds more conclusively, just not enough of them. But for Jones, it was all good: 49–1, with world championships in four divisions.
And then at age thirty-five came the fateful rematch with Tarver and the loss to Johnson, and suddenly Jones was easy pickings. He lost an emphatic decision to Tarver in their rubber match, and then engaged in eighteen more bouts over the decade that followed, which included losing a long-delayed rematch to Hopkins by wide decision, an equally lopsided loss to Joe Calzaghe in what was the final bout for “The Pride of Wales,” and ignominious stoppages by unheralded foes like Danny Green and Denis Lebedev. There was an illusory eight-fight winning streak at one point; not one of those opponents came in with more than eighteen career wins. Finally—at least one fervently hopes that it’s finally—there was yet another brutal knockout loss, this time at the hands of Enzo Maccarinelli in December 2015 as Jones neared his forty-seventh birthday.
Before his fall, it was conventional wisdom in many sports media circles to regard Roy Jones Jr. as a short-list candidate for pound-for-pound GOAT (Greatest of All Time) along with the likes of Robinson and Muhammad Ali. On ESPN, it was common to hear announcer Brian Kenny say that Jones was the greatest fighter he had ever personally seen. His colleague Max Kellerman did him one better: he stated flatly that if it were possible for Jones and Ali to meet when both were at their respective physical peaks, the only reason Ali would win was because of his greater size. What may not have been apparent then, but is perfectly clear now, is that Robinson and Ali were both undeniably the best of the best because they had, in addition to an insatiable appetite for risk, three assets in abundance: great athleticism, great boxing talent, and the ability to take big punches. To have a realistic chance of winding up a true all-time great, you need at least two of the three, but Jones had only one. Because no matter how much a fighter might have been blessed by the gods with lightning-fast hand speed and cat-like reflexes and legs that never seem to tire, those physical attributes don’t last forever, and need to be backed up by either a superior chin or the mastery of techniques for protecting an ordinary or inferior one (i.e., blocking punches, slipping punches, rolling with punches). Ali fought numerous big punchers in his thirties despite no longer having the blazing speed and boundless energy of his youth: his famous battles with Frazier and Foreman and Norton instantly come to mind, but there were also rigorous bouts against hard-hitting contenders like Ron Lyle and Mac Foster that most of the top names in the division studiously avoided. A thirty-five-year-old Ali held off a life-taker like Earnie Shavers for fifteen rounds to secure victory in a thrilling bout; Robinson was thirty-six when he fought a pair of back-to-back fifteen-round wars with Carmen Basilio that The Ring magazine voted fights of the year for 1957 and 1958.
Roy Jones was unable to produce anything like that after he turned thirty. An essential part of being a great older fighter is learning to cope with the loss of your speed, as Robinson and Ali did. Dominant in two weight divisions over a full decade, Roy Jones was a very compelling spectacle in the ring. But the best boxers ever have a considerably longer shelf life than he did, and against stronger opposition. As the tandem of Tarver and Johnson demonstrated to us in no uncertain terms, having “the look” of this generation’s Robinson or Ali is not synonymous with truly being it.
The same holds true for Mike Tyson. Although he has been the most compelling figure of the current down era in boxing, Tyson is not an all-time heavyweight great. He suffered defeat at the hands of five different opponents and never got payback for any of them, which is somewhat of an anomaly in modern boxing history, as heavyweight champions have been surprisingly good at avenging the losses they incurred in the early and/or middle periods of their careers. Years before winning the title against the giant Jess Willard, Jack Dempsey was KO’d in the first round by a very tough former two-time title challenger named “Fireman” Jim Flynn; he returned the favor a year later. An undefeated but prechampionship Joe Louis was taken apart over twelve punishing rounds by former champion Max Schmeling. After winning the title a year later over so-called Cinderella Man James J. Braddock, Louis largely rebuffed the accolades that came his way by proclaiming, in effect, “I won’t feel like the champ ’til I whup that Schmeling,” a vow he made good on a year later with a first-round blitz of the German in what was the third of Joe’s record twenty-five consecutive successful title defenses. When a broken jaw caused Sonny Liston to lose his eighth career bout by decision to tough journeyman Marty Marshall, he responded in two subsequent meetings with decisive wins—the same way Ali would later against the man who broke his jaw, Ken Norton. Well, except for the decisive part. But the second Ali-Norton bout was less than six months after the first, which should earn just about anybody’s respect. Tyson never joined this very select group of avengers, however, despite having a career that was quite impressive in other ways.
Having won a share of the heavyweight title less than five full months past his twentieth birthday, Tyson seemed poised to join the pantheon of all-time great heavyweight destroyers that fans and experts alike rattle off: Dempsey, Louis, Marciano, Liston, and Foreman. He started well enough; in 1987, he had four successful title defenses in the form of two brutal middle-round TKOs and two dominant twelve-round decisions. He was even more impressive the following year, when none of his three opponents made it out of the fourth round; for one of them, the comebacking Larry Holmes, it was to be his only stoppage loss in a seventy-five-bout career. Another, the undefeated Michael Spinks, was blasted out in ninety-one seconds despite having never before been dropped.
So, as Tyson celebrated his twenty-second birthday three days after the Spinks victory, his career prospects could hardly have looked any brighter. His record was 35–0 at that point, with no major threats on the immediate horizon, although the 18–0 cruiserweight champion Evander Holyfield loomed down the line. Perhaps for that reason he fought only twice in the ensuing nineteen months, battering British visitor Frank Bruno for a fifth-round TKO after a slow start and then crushing American Carl “The Truth” Williams in half a round. But in his next bout, on February 11, 1990, in Tokyo, he lost to the big and talented but theretofore underachieving James “Buster” Douglas, despite being a reported 42-to-1 betting favorite.
Sadly, the rest of Iron Mike’s career reads like a mere pugilistic postscript: four comeback wins over fringe contenders or worse, followed by a four-year boxing hiatus after a rape conviction, followed by four more comeback wins over fringe contenders or worse, followed by a one-sided TKO loss to Holyfield, followed by a disgraceful ear-bite disqualification in the rematch two days before Tyson’s thirty-first birthday. After that, he had only ten more bouts, which yielded five inconsequential wins, an eight-round pounding at the hands of a slightly older Lennox Lewis, two other middle-round stoppages by the relatively unknown Danny Williams and Kevin McBride, and two no contests against Andrew Golota and Orlin Norris.
The incurring of six losses in a fifty-eight-bout career, in and of itself, is not problematic. It’s the fact that all six losses were inside the distance, and none were avenged. No other heavyweight champion regarded as one of the true all-time greats comes anywhere close to this: Dempsey had just one in seventy-five bouts, Louis two in sixty-nine, Liston three in fifty-four, Ali one in sixty-one, Foreman one in eighty-one, and Holmes one in seventy-five. Even the contemporaries Tyson faced, Lewis and Holyfield, as well as the ones he didn’t for one reason or another—Ray Mercer, Tim Witherspoon, Riddick Bowe, and Michael Moorer—each had no more than four.
During his regrettably foreshortened prime, Mike Tyson was undeniably one of the most dangerous fighters that the heavyweight division has ever seen, and was correlatively one of the most exciting. But when someone who revels in the nickname “The Baddest Man on the Planet” is deposited on the canvas in five different bouts by five fellow planeteers and is unable to finish a single one of those bouts—let alone win one of them—and all of those losses go unavenged, then, no, he’s not a short-list candidate for greatest heavyweight ever.
Assessing greatness in boxing is inordinately tricky; oftentimes people make top-ten-all-time lists in various categories without having any particular methodology. On the surface, it may appear that fighters like De La Hoya, Jones, and Tyson deserve consideration for inclusion in such rankings, but in the crucial areas that separate fighters like Robinson and Ali from other celebrated champions, they go lacking. De La Hoya took few risks, both in his selection of opponents and his big-fight game plans. Jones and Tyson both lacked meaningful longevity once the bloom was off the rose: the former could not take a punch, and the latter could not fight his way out of trouble. The rarity of risk-taking by big-name fighters in the current era is of great concern. The perpetuation of it, more than anything else, will prevent the fight game from making any kind of real comeback impression on American popular culture. As noted before, the lineal-champion concept has become largely passé. But the sport can no longer afford to have its young aspirants embrace a mindset of “Not only don’t I have to beat ‘the man who beat the man’ . . . I won’t even have to beat any man who beats me.”