“As goes the heavyweight division, so goes boxing.”
Those words were said to m, e by legendary trainer/cornerman Angelo Dundee. He said them to me at breakfast a few days before the rematch between Heavyweight Champion Leon Spinks and Dundee’s fighter Muhammad Ali in September 1978.
Seven months earlier, Spinks had pulled off one of the greatest upsets in boxing history, when he took his 6-0-1 record into the ring in the Superdome in New Orleans and won a 15-round split decision against the 36-year-old Ali to capture the heavyweight crown.
That morning of the rematch, at breakfast, Dundee was pointing out just how much the heavyweight crown meant to boxing.
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By Randy “The Commish” Gordon
In the nearly 12 years Gerry Cooney and I have been doing our SiriusXM show “At the Fights” (also known as “Cooney & The Commish”) we have received countless letters, e-mails, texts, tweets and Instagram messages asking us an array of questions. Many of those questions have been of the “Who do you think would have won between…” One of those letters a few weeks ago asked “Who do you think was the best Middleweight Champion
Of all time?” The question gave birth to our show’s first “Fantasy Dream Middleweight Tournament.”
We call it that because it is a Fantasy. It is a Dream. The best of different eras can only face each other inside our minds. Yet, this only happens in boxing. We don’t ask each other, “I wonder how Jack Nicklaus would do in a one-on-one against Dustin Johnson?” We don’t ask “Who would have won between “Billie Jean King and Serena Williams?” We never ponder how a Michael Jordan-led team would h