Golden Era of Heavyweights: Author Izenberg doubts we're in dawn of another

Once upon a time, of all the memories made in ballparks and arenas from California to New York, there was nothing to rival that magic moment that could grab a heavyweight fight crowd by its collective jugular vein and trigger a tsunami of raw emotion before a single punch had even been thrown.

That’s the way it was when the heavyweight giants danced in the boxing ring during the golden eras of the greats Ali, Frazier, Holmes, and Spinks, to name a few. There will never again be a heavyweight cycle like the one that began when Sonny Liston stopped Floyd Patterson and ended when Mike Tyson bit a slice out of Evander Holyfield’s ear.

That’s how Jerry Izenberg, one of America’s top sports writers of the last half century, began his latest book, Once There were Giants:The Golden Age of Heavyweight Boxing (Skyhorse Publishing, $24.99, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Indies), an extraordinary, historically accurate chronicle of the golden era of heavyweight boxing in the U.S., a 35-year-period between 1962 and 1997. In two succinct paragraphs, the Hall of Fame reporter summed up what it was like to live through that era.

That’s precisely what makes this book one of those gems you can’t put down once you start reading. I spent a recent four-hour flight from Phoenix to Baltimore engrossed in Once There Were Giants, and was almost disappointed to see the flight end.

Izenberg watched history in the making, covering the sport then like few others, mostly as a writer and columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger, starting in 1951, when he was still a student at Rutgers.

Izenberg, 86, remains an active sportswriter – he’s one of two men to cover all 51 Super Bowls, and on May 6 will cover his 51st Kentucky Derby – and currently lives in the boxing capital of the world, Las Vegas. He listened to his first fight on the radio with his father in 1938: Joe Louis vs. Max Schmeling.

The legendary writer held himself to a lofty standard in penning Once There were Giants.

“The whole purpose of the book was to tell you what you didn’t know,” Izenberg told USA TODAY Sports by phone recently. “And if I couldn’t tell you what you didn’t know, then I had no right to write the book.”

Indeed, from the fascinating role the New York mob, led during the first half of the 20th century by boxing godfather Owney Madden and later by the murderous gangster Frankie Carbo, played in running not only the heavyweight division, but essentially all of boxing, to the politics surrounding the “Rumble in the Jungle” and “Thrilla in Manila,” – “the greatest fight I ever saw,” said Izenberg -- to the author’s long friendship with Muhammad Ali, and finally, to the night the Golden Era died, when Mike Tyson dined on Evander Holyfield’s ears, Izenberg offers up nugget after nugget of inside detail that this reporter gleefully soaked up.

Izenberg had to do little research for the book, he explained, other than to re-read his old stories and notes from those halcyon days. “There were almost no (big) fights that I wasn’t at,” Izenberg said. “I would get old columns of mine to see what I had to say that week.”

Carbo, according to Izenberg, ran the heavyweight division during the dawn of the Golden Era, until he lost his pocketed champion Sonny Liston, the last of the mob fighters. “After he lost Sonny, he still ran the middle-, welter- and lightweight divisions. It’s just that he never got back into the heavyweight division again,” Izenberg said.

“And that was like the Freedom Caucus. Now everybody could fight everyone else. And everyone was pretty (bleeping) good. That’s why you got a Golden Era.”

The most golden of the Golden Era heavyweights was Ali, who all but ended Liston’s career with his two stoppages in 1964 and '65. Ali and Izenberg first became acquainted during the 1960 Rome Olympics, where Ali won a gold medal.

“I paid no attention to him after that until he beat Charlie Powell,” Izenberg said. “But he kept calling me on the phone with his awful poems, and then I got to really know him and we stayed friends – look, I don’t have a friend for five days, usually -- we stayed friends for 50 years.”

Izenberg missed Ali’s funeral last June because the writer was being inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota, N.Y., that weekend.

On Saturday, from Wembley Stadium in London, 90,000 fans will pack Britain’s national stadium to witness what many are calling the biggest heavyweight fight in 20 years: IBF champion Anthony Joshua (18-0, 18 KOs) vs. longtime lineal heavyweight champ Wladimir Klitschko (64-4, 53 KOs). The bout will be televised live in the U.S. on Showtime (4:15 p.m. ET), and HBO will present a delayed broadcast at 11 p.m. ET/PT.

Could this be the start of another Golden Era in the heavyweight division, Izenberg was asked? After all, besides Joshua, 28, and Klitschko, 41, two former Olympic gold medalists, we have WBC champion Deontay Wilder (38-0, 37 KOs), who says he is itching to fight the winner and will be a guest analyst for SkySports, which is doing the PPV broadcast in the U.K.; also young New Zealander Joseph Parker (22-0, 18 KOs), the current WBO champ, not to mention Tyson Fury (25-0, 18 KOs), who defeated Klitschko in 2015 before vacating his titles and taking a break from boxing to deal with personal demons. He said recently he will return to boxing soon.

There is also undefeated Cuban Luis Ortiz (27-0, 23 KOs), who is a WBA mandatory for Joshua if he wins, and down the road perhaps Trey Lippe Morrison (13-0, 13 KOs), son of the late former champion Tommy Morrison, among other contenders.

“If Joshua beats Klitschko, then the whole race is on to see who’ll be the (undisputed) heavyweight champion,” Izenberg explained. “The problem with that is, it may not stimulate anything because there’s nobody (coming along) after them.

“Deontay Wilder is still a work in progress. Joshua is, too,” said the author. “So there’s no way to judge, but if he keeps improving at the pace he’s been improving, he could be a hell of a fighter.

Wilder, says Izenberg, reminds him of George Foreman the first time around when Foreman learned how to fight.

"He had a powerful right hand and he knocked people out with it. Then Ali exposed that in Africa," Izenberg says. "But when Foreman came back the second time -- and he called me at 4 in the morning to tell me about it -- I think Foreman learned that no matter who the fighter was, he studied them and knew everything about them. Before he beat (Michael) Moorer, you could see it. Holyfield (who won a unanimous decision vs. 42-year-old Foreman in 1991) will tell you that nobody ever hit him as often and as hard in any single fight as Foreman did.”

Izenberg believes Joshua has greater potential than any of the other heavyweights, though he added, “I did see a lot of heart from Wilder when he hurt his arm. And I know nothing about the guy from New Zealand (Joseph Parker).”

But a new Golden Era? Don't hold your breath, warns Izenberg.

“You can’t even compare this era of heavyweights to the Golden Era,” he said. “Now, if someone emerges from these heavyweights, and keeps getting better, and somehow we get some real heavyweight fighters coming up that keep improving, then you could start something.

“But right now I don’t see it.”

And Izenberg, perhaps more than anyone, knows what he's looking for.