Mike Tyson will celebrate the 20th anniversary of winning the world heavyweight title next month.
Tyson's win over Canada's Trevor Berbick in 1986 was savage, quick and forgettable but the anniversary will be a poignant one because it was the fight that fixed Tyson, who was just 20 at the time, indelibly in the public's mind.
Many sports have altered radically since that night in Las Vegas, but in none has the change been more fundamental or more depressing than in heavyweight to capture the imagination of the global sporting public, arguably the last heavyweight of any nationality to do so. For a few years after that Berbick fight Tyson was the biggest figure in the sport - the American who ruled the world - continuing an intoxicating tradition that stretched past Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, back to Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey.
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But now? Nobody in the fight game knows for sure where the great American heavyweights have gone and, more disturbingly, nobody knows where the next great one will come from.
Nobody in the fight game knows for sure where the great American heavyweights have gone At present the four heavyweight championship belts are in the possession of a quartet of boxers from former Soviet republics. All have a weak connection to the one-time linear championship of the world, where heavyweight champions were connected by a series of mutual opponents from Larry Holmes in the early 1980s to the bare-knuckle heroes of the 1880s.
Not one of the four incumbents is a great fighter, not one can be compared favourably with any of the dozen or so fighters, almost exclusively American, who made the heavyweight championship the richest prize in sport. Men who spent a century turning the brutal business into a multi-million dollar industry. They are gone for ever, as is the once solid grip on the prize that the Americans enjoyed; the current champions took their respective belts from American boxers in fights of varying mediocrity and all are unlikely to become stars in America.
'It's a shame but that is the way it is'
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