Tyson Fury, whose fight against Oleksandr Usyk for the undisputed heavyweight championship of the world has now been rescheduled for 18 May, 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 runs against the norm.
Fury is 6ft 9in tall and has fought at weights as high as 277lbs. The flesh around his waist jiggles when he is in combat. Usyk refers to him as “greedy belly”.
But Fury is svelte compared with four men who fought for (and in two instances, won) the heavyweight title. So let’s put the body-shamers to shame and take a walk down memory lane.
Tony Galento
During a 15-year career that began in 1929, Domenico Antonio Galento compiled a 80-26-5 ring record with 57 KOs (he was knocked out himself six times).
Listed as 5ft 9in, Galento fought at 183lbs early in his career. In his later years, he tipped the scales at weights as high as 247lbs. His stomach, it was written, “looked like a tidal wave of mud.”
Galento’s nickname was “Two-Ton.” Accentuating his appeal (or lack thereof), he was known for refusing to bathe in the days leading up to a fight. Max Baer (who knocked out “Two Ton” in seven rounds) complained after the bout that Galento “smelled of rotten tuna and a tub of old liquor being sweated out.”
The high point of Galento’s career came on 9 June 1939, when he challenged Joe Louis at Yankee Stadium for the heavyweight crown. Louis was in his prime. He’d won his most recent three fights by first-round knockout – a streak that included his fabled destruction of Max Schmeling. Galento (who outweighed the Brown Bomber by 34lbs) came into the fight on a run of 11 consecutive knockout triumphs.
Galento had never been knocked down in a prizefight. That changed when Louis landed a straight-right, 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 summit 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 was staggering helplessly around the ring when referee Arthur Donovan stopped the slaughter at the 2:29 mark of the fourth round.
Buster Mathis
In 1964, Sports Illustrated ran an article by Robert Boyle about the Olympic Trials for the United States men’s boxing team. The article was titled, At the Fair with Fat Buster and began, “He wobbles. He quivers. He rolls. He shakes. He is a dripping mass of flesh, a monument of fat. He is 6 feet 3 and weighs 295 pounds. Sitting in the corner, he looks like a melting chocolate sundae.”
Later in the article, Boyle observed “Buster wore a huge brace on his right leg to prevent his knee from collapsing under his tonnage. The brace is about the size of the circus fat lady’s girdle and, had it snapped under stress, half the cheering fans would have been shredded 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 because of a broken hand. His replacement (the man he’d defeated in the finals at the Olympic Trials) won the gold medal. His name? Joe Frazier.
Four years later, Frazier and Mathis met in the ring again. Muhammad Ali had been forced into exile. The New York State Heavyweight Championship (one of two credible titles at the time because of the influence wielded by Madison Square Garden) was on the line. Frazier knocked out Mathis in the 11th round.
Mathis would enjoy one more moment in the spotlight. In late 1971, he fought Ali (who was on the comeback trail after his own loss to Frazier). Muhammad knocked Mathis down four times and, by his own admission, carried his opponent through the final round.
As reported by Tex Maule, “At the start of the twelfth round when Buster stood up, he staggered a couple of steps to his left before he caught himself and moved toward Ali. Ali reached out a long left and tapped Mathis rapidly on the forehead, like a man knocking on a door. Even these feathery punches made Buster’s legs wobble, and when Muhammad hit him with a gentle right hand, he went down. He struggled to his feet, and Ali flicked him lightly with the left hand as he staggered around the ring and again hit him with a caressing right, and Buster was down again. To his credit, the big man hauled himself up once more and tried to return to the attack while Ali patted him even more gently with the left and did not throw the right.”
Ali was criticized in some circles for turning pacifist in the final round. But he told reporters, “I don’t care about all them people yelling, ‘Kill him.’ I see the man in front of me, his eyes all glassy and his head rolling around. How do I know just how hard to hit him to knock him out and not hurt him? I don’t care about looking good to the fans, I got to look good to God, I got to sleep good at night. How am I going to sleep if I killed a man in front of his wife and son just to satisfy you writers?”
George Foreman
Then the tide turned toward the less svelte.
George Foreman – believe it or not – weighed 217lbs when he knocked out Joe Frazier in 1973 to claim the heavyweight throne and a mere 220lbs when he lost to Muhammad Ali in 1974. Then he retired and his weight ballooned to more than 300lbs.
After a 10-year absence from the ring, having “slimmed down” to 267lbs, Foreman returned and knocked out Steve Zouski. Now fat jokes and cheeseburgers were at the core 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 reclaim the heavyweight crown. And his equity interest in the George Foreman Lean Mean Grilling Machine brought him more than $100m.
Andy Ruiz
Andy Ruiz stands 6ft 2in and turned pro at 297lbs. By the time he challenged Anthony Joshua for the heavyweight title in 2019, he was down to 268lbs but still wasn’t exactly chiseled. Top Rank (which has promoted Ruiz for much of his career) became so disgusted with his unhealthy lifestyle that it let him buy his way out of his contract.
Big mistake.
At the kick-off press conference for Joshua-Ruiz, Manny Robles (who trained Ruiz) cautioned, “A lot of people doubt Andy because of the way he looks. But looks can be deceiving.”
Ruiz began his remarks with the warning, “Everyone underestimates me because of the way I look. I’m in this to win it.” He then advised the assembled media that he ate a Snickers candy bar in his dressing room to give him energy before every fight and expressed the hope that he could parlay fighting Joshua into an endorsement deal with Snickers.
“My first amateur fight,” Ruiz added, “I was seven years old. There was no kid my weight in my age group, so I had to fight an older kid. I was self-conscious about my weight when I was young, but I got used to it.”
Asked if he had a message for Joshua, Ruiz warned in his high-pitched, sing-song voice, “Anthony, don’t underestimate this little fat boy. I’m coming for you.”
Hah-hah-hah. Ruiz was a 20-1 underdog. He knocked Joshua out in the seventh round.
And then the “little fat boy” blew it. Six months later, Ruiz entered the ring for his rematch against Joshua at an even more out-of-shape 283lbs and lost a unanimous 12-round decision.
Over the decades, more than a few heavyweights have come into title fights overweight and out of shape. Buster Douglas’s appearance in his 1990 loss to Evander Holyfield is Exhibit 1 for that proposition. But Galento, Mathis, Foreman, and Ruiz are different in that their weight was a much-publicized part of their identity. No one talks about “Two Ton” Tyson Fury.
Thomas Hauser’s most recent book – The Universal Sport: Two Years Inside Boxing – was published by the University of Arkansas Press. In 2019, he was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame.
