by Craig Dowd: The Summer of 2007 – that was when an American was last the Heavyweight Champion of the World. Or at least when one owned a percentage of what was once considered the most coveted distinction in all of sports, anyway.
Brooklynite Shannon “The Cannon” Briggs, the man to whom Hollywood turns when in need of a six-foot four gangster with dreadlocks and a faux Caribbean accent, won the WBO Heavyweight title in a purely American fashion on November 4, 2006 at Chase Field in Phoenix, Arizona.
After eleven sluggish rounds that inflicted more physical damage upon the spectators than the combatants themselves, Briggs literally knocked Sergei Liakhovich out of the ring and onto a ringside table with just one second remaining in the twelfth and final round, dramatically obtaining the crown which he had failed to earn against Lennox Lewis in their 1998 WBC championship bout in Atlantic City, in which he was stopped in the fifth round.
Briggs’ belated ascendancy was as befuddling as it was electric.
Notorious for bum-rushing his opponents early and fizzling late (Briggs has 30 first round KOs to his name), the charismatic New Yorker who could bang as hard as the Brooklyn blocks from which he hailed contradicted his entire career in mere seconds. Eleven rounds of procrastination, laziness and asthma-induced fatigue were forgiven for thirty seconds of awesome power. It was as if the imminence of destruction had to rear its ugly head before the talented fighter would even consider exercising that which brought him to Phoenix, and the upper echelon of the sport, in the first place – a motif, it seems, amongst many American fighters today.
Just one month shy of his thirty-fifth birthday, Briggs was already well past his prime when he won the WBO title. The severity of his asthma seemed to have only worsened with age, or perhaps his ability to endure through months of preparation its fierce chokehold was not what it once was. Time had diminished the suffusion of devastating power and cobra-quick hand speed that, when wielded by his sculpted, top heavy torso and administered in heavy doses, had once made fighting Briggs about as safe as your bank’s cash when John Dillinger is in town. His talents now emerged with the intermittency of heat flashes in a cloudy sky.
Outside of his appearances in action films “Bad Boys II” and “The Transporter II,” Briggs was virtually unknown to the public. The Americans whom he succeeded – Chris Byrd, Hasim Rahman, Lamon Brewster and John Ruiz – were even lesser known than Briggs and, though each possessed a certain skill that helped them capture alphabet titles, they all failed to recall the mystical mixture of size, savagery, heart, intelligence, concussive power and unaccountable grace that our beloved champions of prizefighting past had so effortlessly embodied.
Much to his credit, Briggs was the closest thing America had at the time to an archetype heavyweight champ. In his prime, he was a legitimate contender in boxing’s most important division when it was still worthy of major ink. He successfully ended George Foreman’s comeback in 1997, winning a highly controversial majority decision for what was widely considered the lineal championship of the world, or the distinction of “the man who beat the man.”
Briggs was personable, highly skilled, explosive, heavyweight big and city hard. That he picked up a title belt so late in his career speaks more however about the division’s deterioration than the depths to which he plumbed on that wild, obscure November night in Phoenix.
The reign of Shannon Briggs lasted just seven months. New Jersey, it seems, was never kind to the New Yorker when the stakes were at their highest.
Briggs relinquished his title in the summer of 2007 in Atlantic City to Russia’s Sultan Ibragimov by way of unanimous decision. Following the fight, Briggs announced his retirement. But as we all know, a fighter’s retirement is as definite as a superhero’s death – no matter the circumstances, a revival is never out of the question.
Briggs was last seen four months ago in Hamburg, Germany, on the receiving end of a thorough drubbing dished out by WBC champion, Vitali “Dr. Iron Fist” Klitschko. Briggs, who displayed an enormous amount of heart in the bout, suffered a broken left orbital bone, a broken nose and a torn left bicep in what was hopefully the final fight of his 19-year career.
***
Regarding our heavyweight champions, famed novelist and screenwriter Budd Schulberg once said, “Just as people get the government they deserve, so each period in our history seems to create the heavyweight champion it needs to express itself on the platform where body language and social currents fuse.”
Though it sounds a bit mystical, Schulberg’s reflection was as acute as a counter punch to the chin, and remains so today. Heavyweight champions are both muscle-bound mirrors that reflect their times and fleshy manifestations of the current cultural, political and socio-economic climate in which they live. With blood, sweat and leather heavyweight champions help explicate, and codify, our society.
Jack Johnson, the man who defied white America when there was no black movement to bolster his defiance, risked his life each time he stepped inside the squared circle. Our first black heavyweight champion, he illuminated our widespread fear and foreshadowed the freedom and self expression we would later enjoy. There was Jack Dempsey of the Roaring Twenties, a hobo brawler as stylistically uninhibited as the times in which he lived, and his successor, Gene Tunney, the steadiest and most cerebral of prizefighters, a Shakespeare quoting man who symbolized the serenity that preceded the Great Depression. The backroom boys had their Italian giant, Primo Carnera, and when Hitler’s darling Max Schmeling held the crown, an American savior named Joe Louis, the first black champion to be accepted by white America, was there to chop him down. And of course there was the Lip from Louisville, Muhammad Ali, the greatest, the blackest and the prettiest champion of them all, a personification of his generation as much as he was a product of it.
Today there are few, if any, big fish in the heavyweight division. The waters are shallow, nearly devoid of life and controlled by products of Eastern Europe. The Klitschko brothers, both of whom are exceptionally tall, consistent, strong and economic, preside over the division in a fashion that is far from dynamic or exciting, but has yet to be nullified. They are, like the other eastern European fighters, sound technicians, if not blazing dynamos. England’s David Haye also holds a belt, but has yet to face either of the Klitschko brothers and doesn’t seem all that excited about doing so, despite his ample skills.
These fighters, like foreign technology, European basketball players and college students all over the globe, have not only caught up to Americans in recent years, but are surpassing them in many areas. The stereotypes of old, which claimed the Europeans were soft, boring and stylistically bland, are now tired clichés. Americans climbed to the pinnacle of the sport and either sat down to rest or found easier ways to make their millions. The rest of world, meanwhile, caught up the old fashioned way- through hard work.
The championship belts have proliferated and their value, naturally, has depreciated. The allure of boxing supremacy in America is no longer the siren song it once was. Young American fighters have found ways to win fights and make money without enduring the Spartan lifestyle of self-denial, isolation and discipline their heroes so adamantly adhered to. They have become content, complacent, entitled and self-indulgent; and if they are in fact mirrors, then they reflect with sharp clarity a country defined by convenience and consumerism which feels that it can afford to coast off sheer talent alone. They are recipients of opportunities they rarely deserve, and consequently have become men of reputation and prestige but little character – a fatal flaw in the morality play of heavyweight boxing.
The truth is evident: a little money and success, it seems, can kill a fighter.
The fact that Shannon Briggs, Evander Holyfield and the still-slick James Toney remain in background of the heavyweight picture illuminates the inadequacy of its true principals. These are fighters who should be enjoying their retirement, but instead see within the division’s utter weakness a second chance at glory and continue to unjustly linger on the outskirts of boxing supremacy. Meanwhile, the few American hopefuls dance in and out of our consciousness, jabbering away to mask their tentative jabs, mimicking an indecisive political climate where there is plenty of bickering and pontificating but no action – a country mired in theory but clearly afraid of committing to a punch, just like our fighters.
***
Of the ten men listed in Ring Magazine’s heavyweight rankings, just two are American. (Tomaz Adamek, though a U.S. resident, is Polish and therefore excluded.)
Philadelphia native “Fast” Eddie Chambers checks in at number six in the world, but doesn’t possess half the slickness of the pool hustler from whom his name derives. Though a good fighter, Chambers will never conquer the Minnesota Fats’ of the boxing world. Every time he has attempted to step up in competition, he has been beaten back down to the division’s reception area – first by Alexander Povetkin, and most recently by Wladimir Klitschko, who knocked Chambers out in the twelfth round of their 2010 bout.
The 39-year old Tony “The Tiger” Thompson, another American who remains in the mix but moves farther away from the title with each passing day, should be excluded from the discussion based soley on the fact that he is the only fighter to ever have had his shoes stolen before a bout at the Playboy Mansion.
And then there’s Number Ten, Chris “The Nightmare” Arreola (29-2, 25 KOs), the bald-headed brawler from the City of Angels covered in baby fat who slugs as hard as he lives. His beefy frame breeds within spectator’s hearts contempt and disgust. His battered nose is as long and wide as the Golden Gate Bridge. (To paraphrase John Schulian, Have you ever seen a rich man’s son with a broken nose?) He is outspoken and makes for an intriguing post-fight interview, not unlike Paulie Malignaggi after a Juan Diaz fight. He is a wrecking ball when good, an absolute bore when bad, and for the moment is America’s only hope in reclaiming the heavyweight championship of the world. (Sad, but true.)
This piece began with a reflection on Shannon Briggs for a few reasons: because, in an indirect way, Arreola brings to mind Briggs in that he is currently the only American heavyweight that stylistically and physically resembles what we expect from a potential American champ. (Or at least on the rare occasion he’s in shape.) He is six-foot four inches tall and currently weighs two-hundred and fifty pounds. He fights in a come-forward, crowd pleasing punch-you-in-the-mouth style. He wins without ornamentation or flair. If Arreola is to ever wrap a championship belt around his expansive waistline, rest assured he will do so through old fashioned brutality.
Like Briggs, he is an underachiever who possesses the natural power to dispose of the undeserving early and the deserving late. He has been accused of poor training habits, a nonexistent diet and wasting the power that God was nice enough to install inside his oversized fists – a fact he openly acknowledges.
“I was just content with being me,” Arreola recently told Sports Illustrated. “I was happy with myself as a fighter.”
Arreola also calls to mind another fighter from the Borough of Kings – Zab Judah. Throughout his career, Judah underestimated opponents, suffered mental lapses and was convinced that his remarkable physical tools would be enough to grant him admittance into the small, locked room called greatness – an oversight Arreola knows intimately.
After suffering a string of losses that threatened their futures in the sport, Judah and Arreola now find themselves jogging together on the lonely road to redemption. Their corners are now filled with new faces. Vows to the neglected lover named Discipline have been renewed. Their sentences are laced with that rare thing called humility, no doubt obtained while licking their wounds inside their self-made cathedrals of failure. In other words, they’ve matured.
“It was an extremely humbling time,” Arreola reflected. “I did a lot of soul searching. Last year was the worst year of my boxing career. And it was all my fault. I shot myself in the foot.”
But unlike Judah, whose newfound maturity may be a case of too little too late, Arreola is still young enough, particularly for a heavyweight, to successfully resurrect what was once a promising career. Arreola also has something going for him that the other young fighters (Kevin Johnson, are you listening?) in the division don’t – pride. It arrived to the party late, but it’s finally here.
Arreola is angry – not at his promoters or trainers or hangers-on – but himself. We have witnessed the grueling drama of his body for the past few years, and always with tragic results. Our beloved champions of yesteryear would refuse to walk outside, let alone inside a ring, if they did to their bodies what Arreola has done to his throughout his career. But it seems, however, that Arreola has finally discovered the theory of self-actualization. His potential will not be fulfilled overnight, but for the first time in a few years, it is no longer hidden deep inside thick tires of excess fat.
Chris Arreola, at 29 years of age, has at last decided to search for an opponent other than himself.
***
Two weeks ago, on the last weekend of January, as everyone in the boxing community eagerly awaited the first unification bout between two undefeated American champions in twenty-four years, there was a heavyweight fight in Temecula, California.
Chris Arreola, who weighed in under 250 pounds for the first time in three years, entered the ring inside the Pechanga Resort & Casino to a welter of raucous cheers from the hometown crowd. He wore his trademark Los Angeles Dodgers hat on top of his bald head, freshly barbered facial hair over his huge chin and a look of determination stuck somewhere between the two. Accompanying him to the squared circle was his new trainer, the master motivator Ronnie Shields.
Shortly after Arreola disrobed and revealed his new, but far from ideal, frame, the bell rang, a few punches were thrown and then the fight was already over, as if his slimmed down torso was a work in progress that he wanted to show off for a minute and then cover back up.
After allowing his opponent Joey Abell to pepper him with sharp combinations early in the round, Arreola unexpectedly countered a lazy jab with a monstrous right hand down the pipe that snapped the upper half of Abell’s body over the ropes and let it hang there like wet laundry on a clothesline. Abell, however, refused to collapse, so Arreola threw four more punches to Abell’s face that were about as hard as the Minnesota ground from which his opponent hailed, and referee Tony Crebbs stepped in at two minutes and eighteen seconds of round one and called the bout to a halt.
Elated, Arreola made sure to leap onto the middle rope of each corner and bang away at his chest, warning the rest of the division, “I’m back!”
In a post-fight interview, however, the tenth best heavyweight in the world was reserved and perceptive. “This is just one fight,” he told ESPN’s Teddy Atlas, “I still have a lot to prove.”
He certainly does.
Whether you believe in Arreola or not is irrelevant. Shannon Briggs is out of the ring and hopefully moving into his life. Kevin Johnson, Chazz Witherspoon and Eddie Chambers are fighters whose shortcomings will forever relegate them to supporting character status. Chris “The Nightmare” Arreola is our leading heavyweight in this morality play, and if you aren’t pleased with our contribution to the most historic division in sports, you need only look in the mirror to glance upon the guilty party. After all, we created him.
America – this is your heavyweight, the “Nightmare” from which you will not awake. I hope you like him.
After the fight, this writer watched a tape of the 1998 Lennox Lewis-Shannon Briggs title fight and saw a very talented American contend for the most coveted crown in all of sports – and lose. There was a savage finality to the bout that should accompany every heavyweight title fight, a lucid delineation of talent that seems to no longer exist. This writer never thought he would pine for the days of a prime Shannon Briggs, but after watching these two bouts back to back, he unaccountably did.
Oh, how hard we have fallen.