Greatest Prize in sports – or a curse?

[Ezzard]

The Heavyweight Championship – Greatest Prize in sports – or a curse?

For most their lives seemed to have ended tragically one way or another...

[HomicideHenry]

Life is what you make it to be, not what you win or lose.

[gilgamesh]

Greatest Prize in Sports.

[Ezzard]

Didn't do much good for...

Louis
Marciano
Baer
Liston
Johnson
Charles
Frazier
Foreman
Ali
Tyson

[SNG]

Didn't do much good for...

Louis
Marciano
Baer
Liston
Johnson
Charles
Frazier
Foreman
Ali
Tyson

In what respect? It did quite a bit of good for those people too.

[gilgamesh]

Didn't do much good for...

Louis
Marciano
Baer
Liston
Johnson
Charles
Frazier
Foreman
Ali
Tyson

Most all of those guys are legends and will be remembered through the ages. Foreman is doing quite well so I don't know what you mean by that. Tyson is doing pretty damn well for himself these days.

Boxing period isn't usually the kindest of sports in the long haul of life, but it's certainly great to be THE MAN. If only for a short while, it's one of the highest and most revered positions in all of sports.

People will still be talking about most of those guys long after you and I are dead. That's pretty significant stuff in my eyes.

[Ezzard]

I mean 'curse' in the theatrical or dramatic sense...

Foreman may have turned things around but he had a hard few years after Zaire and ended up dropping out of the sport and seeing visions...

Tyson raped a woman and went to jail.

[SNG]

I mean 'curse' in the theatrical or dramatic sense...

Foreman may have turned things around but he had a hard few years after Zaire and ended up dropping out of the sport and seeing visions...

Tyson raped a woman and went to jail.

Who's to say he wouldn't have raped anyone if he had never been the HW champ?

[gilgamesh]

I mean 'curse' in the theatrical or dramatic sense...

Foreman may have turned things around but he had a hard few years after Zaire and ended up dropping out of the sport and seeing visions...

Tyson raped a woman and went to jail.

Who's to say he wouldn't have raped anyone if he had never been the HW champ?

Plus he would've almost certainly done more time if that were the case.

[yancey]

Once the greatest prize, but I'm not so sure anymore.

When I was a kid a heavyweight championship fight was headline news on the first page of the sports page in my hometown newspaper. Middleweights, too. Topic #1 when my Dad and Uncle discussed sports.

Not anymore.

I think boxing really declined with too many weight classes, organizations, and "champs."

I could tell you the lineage of the heavyweight champs through Tyson, but it really got watered down after that.

[Giancarlo]

The Heavyweight Championship – Greatest Prize in sports – or a curse?

For most their lives seemed to have ended tragically one way or another...

Greatest prize in sports.

Plenty heavyweights who never got the title also encountered great tragedy so I doubt it is the title that is responsible.

[SamWise72]

Most boxers come from poor backgrounds, and many of those listed came from the ghetto. They weren't going to have long, cosy middle class lives if they hadn't been boxers. Joe Louis would still have been paranoid, but he would have been greeting at Walmart not Caesar's Palace. Liston most likely would have been murdered over a street corner drug deal by lower level people in the same organisation. Foreman wouldn't have a grill franchise or be able to raise millions for his church. Ali, perhaps of all of those mentioned, had the best chance to make a career a different way, and the current sad state of him really might be connected to boxing.

[Adamj1987]

Didn't do much good for...

Louis
Marciano
Baer
Liston
Johnson
Charles
Frazier
Foreman
Ali
Tyson

berbick?

[HomicideHenry]

Didn't do much good for...

Louis
Marciano
Baer
Liston
Johnson
Charles
Frazier
Foreman
Ali
Tyson

How didn't it? Marciano had money, lots of it, til the day he died and his family is still searching for the money he kept hid.