The fighters who showed you don’t need to be sculpted to be a contender
TYson Fury, whose fight against Oleksandr Usyk for the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world has now been moved to May 18, would be an anomaly under most circumstances. His thought processes are – shall we say – different. And in today’s world of sculpted elite athletes, his body type goes against the norm.
Fury is 6-foot-4 and has fought at weights as high as 277 pounds. The flesh around his waist shakes during a fight. Usyk calls him a “greedy gut.”
But Fury is slim compared to four men who fought for (and in two cases won) the heavyweight title. So let’s shame the body-shamers and take a walk down memory lane.
Tony Galento
During a 15-year career that began in 1929, Domenico Antonio Galento compiled a ring record of 80-26-5 with 57 KOs (he himself was knocked out six times).
Galento is listed as 6-foot-1 and fought at 183 pounds early in his career. In his later years he tipped the scales as high as 247 pounds. His stomach, it was written, “looked like a tidal wave of mud.”
Galento’s nickname was ‘Two Tons’. To accentuate his attractiveness (or lack thereof), he was known to refuse to bathe in the days leading up to a fight. Max Baer (who knocked out “Two Ton” in seven rounds) complained after the fight that Galento “smelled like rotten tuna and like a tub of old liquor being sweated out.”
The pinnacle of Galento’s career came on June 9, 1939, when he challenged Joe Louis at Yankee Stadium for the heavyweight crown. Louis was in his prime. He had won his most recent three fights by first-round knockout, a streak that included his legendary destruction of Max Schmeling. Galento (who outweighed the Brown Bomber by 34 pounds) came into the fight on the back of a run of 11 consecutive knockout victories.
Galento had never been knocked down in a prizefight. That changed when Louis landed a right-right and left-hook combination in the second round. Then the unthinkable happened. A compact left hook to the jaw dropped the champion in round three. Galento was at the height of his ring career. But Louis had higher mountains to climb.
In round four, Louis started landing at will. And when Joe Louis landed at will, the opponent was in trouble. Galento staggered helplessly around the ring when referee Arthur Donovan stopped the carnage at 2:29 of the fourth round.
Buster Mathis
In 1964, Sports Illustrated published an article by Robert Boyle about the Olympic Trials for the U.S. men’s boxing team. The article was entitled At the Fair with Fat Buster and began: “He wobbles.” He’s shaking. He rolls. He shakes. He is a dripping mass of flesh, a monument of fat. He is 6 feet tall and weighs 295 pounds. Sitting in the corner he looks like a melting chocolate sundae.â€
Later in the article, Boyle noted, “Buster wore a huge brace on his right leg to keep his knee from collapsing under his tonnage.” The brace is about the size of the fat circus lady’s girdle and if it had broken under stress, half the cheering fans would have been torn apart by shrapnel.”
Empathy and sensitivity were not Boyle’s strong points.
Mathis emerged victorious from the Olympic Trials, but was unable to compete in Tokyo due to a broken hand. His replacement (the man he had defeated in the final of the Olympic Trials) won the gold medal. His name? Joe Frazier.
Four years later, Frazier and Mathis met again in the ring. Muhammad Ali was forced into exile. The New York State Heavyweight Championship (one of two credible titles at the time due to the influence of Madison Square Garden) was on the line. Frazier knocked out Mathis in the 11th round.
Mathis would enjoy another moment in the spotlight. In late 1971 he fought Ali (who was on his way to a comeback after his own loss to Frazier). Mohammed knocked Mathis down four times and, in his own words, carried his opponent through the final round.
As Tex Maule reported, “When Buster got up at the start of the twelfth round, he staggered a few steps to the left before catching himself and walking toward Ali. Ali reached out to his left and tapped Mathis quickly on the forehead, like a man knocking on a door. Even these light punches made Buster’s legs wobble, and when Mohammed struck him with his soft right hand, he fell down. He scrambled to his feet and Ali gave him a light tap with the left hand as he stumbled around the ring and hit him again with a caressing right hand, and Buster was back on the ground. To his credit, the big man once again pulled himself up and tried to return to the attack, while Ali stroked him even more gently with the left and did not throw with the right.â€
Ali was criticized in some quarters for turning pacifist in the final round. But he told reporters, “I don’t care if all those people are shouting, ‘Kill him.'” I see the man in front of me, his eyes all glazed over and his head turning around. How do I know how hard to hit him to knock him out without hurting him? I don’t care if I look good for the fans, I have to look good for God, I have to sleep well at night. How am I going to sleep when I killed a man in front of his wife and son just to please you writers?
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George Foreman
Then the tide turned to the less slender.
George Foreman – believe it or not – weighed 217 pounds when he knocked out Joe Frazier in 1973 to claim the heavyweight throne and only 220 pounds when he lost to Muhammad Ali in 1974. Then he retired and his weight ballooned to over 300 pounds.
After a ten-year absence from the ring, having “slimmed down” to 267 pounds, Foreman returned and knocked out Steve Zouski. Now, fat jokes and cheeseburgers were at the heart of a Big George Foreman marketing campaign. But the last laugh belonged to Foreman. Twenty years and 36 fights after losing to Ali, he knocked out Michael Moorer to regain the heavyweight crown. And his equity stake in the George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine earned him more than $100 million.
Andy Ruiz
Andy Ruiz is 6 feet tall and turned pro at 297 pounds. By the time he challenged Anthony Joshua for the heavyweight title in 2019, he weighed just 268 pounds, but he still wasn’t exactly chiseled. Top Rank (who promoted Ruiz for much of his career) was so disgusted by his unhealthy lifestyle that it allowed him to terminate his contract.
Big mistake.
At the kick-off press conference for Joshua-Ruiz, Manny Robles (who trained Ruiz) warned: “A lot of people doubt Andy because of the way he looks. But appearances can be deceiving.â€
Ruiz began his comments by warning, “Everyone underestimates me because of the way I look. I’m doing this to win it. He then told the assembled media that he had been eating a Snickers bar in his dressing room to give him energy before each fight, and expressed hope that he could parlay the fight against Joshua into an endorsement deal. with Snickers.
“My first amateur fight,†Ruiz added, “I was seven years old. There wasn’t a kid my weight in my age group, so I had to fight an older kid. When I was young I was self-conscious about my weight, but I got used to it.â€
When asked if he had a message for Joshua, Ruiz warned in his high, singsong voice: “Anthony, don’t underestimate this little fat boy. I’m coming to get you.â€
Ha-ha-ha. Ruiz was a 20-1 underdog. He knocked out Joshua in the seventh round.
And then the ‘little fat boy’ ruined it. Six months later, Ruiz entered the ring for his rematch against Joshua at an even more out-of-shape 283 pounds and lost a 12-round unanimous decision.
Over the decades, more than a few heavyweights have entered title fights overweight and out of shape. Buster Douglas’ performance in his 1990 loss to Evander Holyfield is Exhibit 1 of that proposition. But Galento, Mathis, Foreman and Ruiz are different in that their weight was a much-discussed part of their identities. No one talks about Tyson Fury from ‘Two Ton’.
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Thomas Hauser’s most recent book – The Universal Sport: Two Years Inside Boxing – is published by the University of Arkansas Press. In 2019, he was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.