Terence Crawford and Errol Spence are finally set to meet in the ring for welterweight bragging rights in Las Vegas on July 29. By making their matchup official, the two best 147 pounders of their era will avoid joining the list of boxers who failed to make a big fight that fans and media alike were clamoring for. Truth be told, most fights that are highly touted do in fact get made, especially if they’re lucrative – even if, in some cases (we’re looking at you, Floyd and Manny) they don’t happen until several years past their peak.
But history is nonetheless replete with matchups that didn’t happen, whether they had been merely speculated about, had made it as far as detailed discussions, or seemed inevitable because of the trajectories of the two fighters. Here is our list of five that could, perhaps should, have happened but didn’t.
- Lennox Lewis vs Riddick Bowe
The modern era’s prime example of a failed fight. There was no good reason for this matchup to not happen, and plenty of reasons why it should have done. In November 1992, Bowe had defeated Evander Holyfield in a classic to become undisputed heavyweight champion, and a clash with the WBC’s top contender Lewis seemed inevitable. To add fuel to the fire, Lewis had stopped Bowe in the 1988 Olympic final. When Bowe called a press conference in London, hopes were raised; instead, he literally trashed the WBC belt, placing it in a trash can and declaring that, “If Lewis wants the belt, he has got to get it out of the garbage.”
- Sugar Ray Leonard vs Aaron Pryor
In 1982, Leonard was the main man at welterweight, having made Roberto Duran quit and recovered from “blowing it, son” to stop Thomas Hearns. Pryor was the unbeaten champ at 140 pounds. Pryor had already rejected two offers to face Leonard because he wanted more money before finally signing to face him in the fall of 1982. But first, Leonard had to dispense with challenger Roger Stafford in Buffalo. One week before that contest, Pryor was driving to Buffalo to taunt Leonard and hype their fight when he heard on the radio that Leonard had suffered a detached retina in training and the fight was off. “I pulled off to the side of the road and cried,” Pryor recalled.
- Roy Jones vs Mike Tyson
Stay with me here. Yes, these two did meet in the ring – but in a no-stakes exhibition when both men were long retired. There was, however, a brief period when it seemed they might meet for real with a version of the heavyweight championship on the line. After Jones, the former middleweight and super-middleweight champ and reigning light-heavyweight titlist, defeated John Ruiz and took his heavyweight belt, discussions soon began over the prospect of him facing Tyson, Evander Holyfield, or both. Had he done so, and particularly had he beaten the fading veterans, he might well have been acclaimed as the greatest of all time. Instead, he balked at a proposed $40 million offer to square off against what was left of Iron Mike, went back down to light-heavyweight, and would suffer nine defeats, five by knockout, as his once-triumphant career fell off a cliff in its waning years.
- Jack Johnson vs Sam Langford
Johnson and Langford did square off once, in 1906, when Johnson probably weighed 40 pounds more than his opponent. Johnson knocked Langford down and won a 15-round decision. But Langford, who had begun his career at lightweight, was steadily moving up in the ranks, becoming so feared that even in his relative dotage, Jack Dempsey refused to fight him. The Manassa Mauler wrote in his autobiography: “The Hell I feared no man. There was one man, he was even smaller than I, and I wouldn’t fight because I knew he would flatten me. I was afraid of Sam Langford.” Once he won the heavyweight championship of the world in 1908, Johnson ironically drew the color line and refused to fight any other black fighters – or at least any black fighters who stood a decent chance of beating him. Langford certainly met that description: he was so good that, by 1922, aged 37, blind in one eye and with a cataract in the other, he still knocked out future middleweight champion Tiger Flowers in the second round. But he never was granted a shot at the sport’s ultimate prize.
- Sugar Ray Robinson vs Marcel Cerdan
Cerdan compiled an impressive professional record of 110-4, with two defeats coming by way of disqualification and one when he had to retire nine rounds after dislocating his shoulder. That last defeat, the last fight of his career, came in a 1949 defense against Jake LaMotta of the middleweight championship he had won the previous year against Tony Zale. A rematch with LaMotta was ordered, with Cerdan strongly favored to win, which would have set up a potential clash with welterweight champion Robinson for the title of pound-for-pound best in the world. But his flight from Paris to New York crashed near the Azores, killing Cerdan and 47 others on board.
Honorable Mentions: George Foreman vs Larry Holmes, Lennox Lewis vs Wladimir Klitschko, Riddick Bowe vs Mike Tyson, George Foreman vs Mike Tyson, Joe Frazier vs Ken Norton, Barry McGuigan vs Azumah Nelson, Juan Manuel Marquez vs Erik Morales, Roy Jones vs Darius Michalczewski, Matthew Saad Muhammad vs Michael Spinks
