I've been a boxing fan for long time, long enough to suffer through a sorry succession of unsuccesful white hopes. Quarry, Bobick, Cooney, Morrison. While they all had their moments, in the really big fights they all went down, quite often spectacularly.
Of course photographers were there to immortalize those moments of failure. I was an avid reader of boxing magazines, and it seemed every issue had one of those photos somewhere in it. Quarry protesting after being stopped again. Bobick grimacing as Norton blitzes him in thirty-eight seconds. A beaten Gerry Cooney being rescued by his trainer. Morrison unconscious against the ropes at the end of his fight with Mercer. They've become classics, the kind of pictures Spike Lee would hang on the walls of his pizzeria.
After years of this I was beat down as a white boxing fan. I still respected, and enjoyed watching, the Holmes's and Tysons doing what they did. Still, I thought, man, can't we get some more white guys in there? Can't we compete at the top level? It didn't seem so. For a while I just became resigned to the fact that the Europeans race simply wasn't producing top heavyweight boxers
Then one night in the mid nineties I watched a guy named Andrew Golota knock out Donnel Nicholson. The big white guy's talent was obvious, and it was time for him to step up. So in his next fight they put him in with Riddick Bowe, an elite heavyweight, who I'm sure expected an easy night. Then the bell rang and Bowe was caught completely by surprise as Golota slapped him around like a freshman in gym class. Bowe was outpunched, outboxed and out manuevered, until the Pole's fouling saved him.
After the fight, I wondered whether Golota was just some sort of freak, or if there were more like him out there. In the next few years names began to trickle in from across the pond. First the Klitchkos. Then Maskeav. Then more names ending in eav, ev, ich, and so forth. Now the trickle is turning into a flood, and these guys are proving me wrong. They're big and white, and they can really fight.
Years ago Ken Norton said something about the upper half of the heavyweight top ten being the ghetto. It was the preserve of black men, and no white man was tough enough to live there. Meaning the top echelon of the heavyweights was reserved for blacks. I'm sure Norton was gloating a bit when he said this, but at the time he was right. Well, no longer. The worm has turned. I'm sure the brothers will be heard from again, but they might have to get a passport first. The ghetto has moved across the Atlantic.
Edited by: Hockaday
