Remembering the light-heavies

Hardly anybody else did!

Boxing’s light heavyweight division, men weighing between 160-175 pounds, has always been the red-headed stepchild of the sport. A class consisting of men too big to be “average-sized” or middleweights, guys not quite big enough for the bountiful purses of the heavyweight division, there have been some absolutely fantastic fighters in that division, men who certainly had the talent, if not the size (or destiny) to combat those bigger men and earn everlasting glory.

Not that they haven’t tried. The great Archie Moore, arguably the greatest light heavyweight of all time, gave Rocky Marciano all he could handle in what proved to be the Rock’s final fight, knocking the pride of Brockton on his ass in an early round before getting wound down in the 9th.

The spindly former light heavyweight king Bob Foster, a 6-3, 175-pound coiled spring of a fighter with the stunning wallop of a heavyweight, challenged Joe Frazier in Detroit’s Cobo Hall and shook the typically slow-starting Frazier with several booming right hands in the first round.

“Didn’t I tell you that skinny son of a bitch could hit?” Frazier’s trainer Yancey Durham hollered at him between rounds. “Get him out of there.”

England's light heavyweight champ John Conteh and Philly's Matthew Franklin (later Matthew Saad Muhammad)

My dad, my friend Mark and I went to watch the bout on closed circuit TV at the Boston Arena. After a rock-em-sock-em first round (A Muhammad Ali fan, I was rooting for a Foster win), the screen hanging over the ring went suddenly blank. When it came back on a few moments later, Foster was sitting in his corner with a doctor kneeling before him, a stethoscope to Foster’s chest. I knew immediately that he’d been knocked out.

The patrons at the Arena weren’t as quick on the intake. And once the picture returned and the slo-motion replay began, Frazier’s leaping left hook collapsing Foster like an unsoundly constructed building falling in pieces, an angry roar rose up and beer cans, popcorn boxes, all manner of things came flying into the ring.

As we were safely under a ledge, we could just watch. Wild. I’ve rooted for light heavyweights ever since. Later, Foster also fought Ali and cut the champ, a rarity, in what was a pretty good scrap. But he lost.

In the late 70’s and 80’s, the division was simply — and I believe historically — the most competitive of any weight division in the history of the sport. At one point in that topsy turvy decade, every single fighter in the Top Ten Rankings was, at one time, the champion of the division. Imagine that. All ten of them.

Normally, there’s maybe one or two fighters who appear on the scene and dominate their weight class for a few years until they run out of opponents. Remember how Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta ruled the middleweight division for so long, they ended up fighting each other six times. “I fought Sugar Ray so much, it’s a wonder I didn’t get diabetes,” LaMotta later quipped.

In that time period, the light heavyweight division was so competitive, so balanced, who was champion seemed to change by the week or whoever threw the last punch. That does not happen and to my recollection, never has in the history of the sport before or since.

Looking back over that cast of characters, I remember them as if Johnny Addie was calling their name right now. First, there was England’s swift and dangerous John Conteh, who belied the time-worn phrase “the horizontal British heavyweight” by showing he could really fight and loved the idea of combat. No mild-mannered Brit was he.

There was the barely civilized Jorge Ahumada, an Argentinian and a worthy successor to 1920’s cult hero Luis Angel Firpo, “the Wild Bull of the Pampas,” who once knocked Jack Dempsey out of the ring. But Firpo lost in one of the first “Fight Of The Centurys.” (I’ve seen the film. It wasn’t.)

Another champ was the crazy Victor Galindez, also from Argentina, who seemed to be insulted if he didn’t get walloped in the kisser at least once per round. He later became a race car driver and died in a crash. He was so tough, he might well have mused “I’ve been hit harder” before he expired.

Around the same time was New Jersey’s Mike Rossman, the “Kosher Butcher” whose ring philosophy was simple - one of us will end up on the canvas before this fight is over. His fights were never dull. Or long.

Somewhere in there also was the mysterious Vicente Rondon from Venezuela, who wasn’t a hard puncher or a particularly adept boxer yet always seemed to find ways to win fights and grab the title for a bit.

That’s just the first half. There was also Dwight Braxton, later Dwight Muhammad Qawi, a buzzsaw of a fighter who learned to fight at Rahway Prison, (we assume OUT of the ring first) as well as Eddie Mustapha Muhammad, a skilled boxer whom you might have spotted in “Raging Bull” as Billy Fox (the guy Jake LaMotta took a dive against). He was talented.

One champ I always questioned was the Yugoslavian lefty Mate Parlov, who looked as if he couldn’t crush a cream puff but was so awkward, he was hard to hit. Evidently, he managed to fool a few judges, way more than he should have. His reign was short-lived. Fortunately.

To me, the two best and most exciting fighters of that time period were the dynamic lefty Marvin Johnson from Indianapolis, a balding bull who just loved to go to war. He had two of the most exciting, slam-bang fights you’d ever seen with one of my all-time favorite fighters, Philly’s Matthew Franklin, who later changed his name to Matthew Saad Muhammad.

Franklin/Muhammad was an action fighter with the heart of two lions. He got knocked down plenty, almost always got up and found a way to prevail, often bloody and battered. He was homeless as a child and chose the last name “Franklin” because when picked up by the police, he was on the Ben Franklin Parkway. After all the stories you read and heard about the guy’s life, it made it seem like getting into the ring was the fun part of his day.

Yeah, there was a lot of boxing on TV in those days, long before I started writing sports for what ended up being a not-particularly lucrative living for a quarter of a century. But you bet I was paying attention. I used to buy “The Ring” magazine regularly and kept up with most of the divisions as if I had a real stake in them, particularly those light heavyweights.

Maybe, at least in part, because hardly anybody else did.