USA Heavyweight Boxing & Michael King #boxing #heavyweights #michaelking

what ever happened to the American heavyweight it seems at the current moment that the heavyweight division is being dominated by Fighters fighting out of the UK with Alexander usk perhaps being the exception but notable in his in its absence as we say um is the has been the presence of any significant American heavyweights now that um Deontay Wilder seems to be most definitely uh out of the top 10 well now I've posed this question um in some of my shorts and even in some of my longer videos and a few folks have pointed out that in America most of the sort of heavyweight males will gravitate towards either basketball or football and so while that may be true I I think there's yet something else underneath all of this and in a rather long- winded way of explaining what I mean I'm going to cite the example of a the late great Michael King who was a TV Mogul who felt perhaps the same way a lot of us do about the American heavyweight scene which is it's lacking so he decided he put his money where his his mouth is and he would do something about it um now Michael King passed away in 2015 so um his main project was which was called All-American heavyweight um went on during the 2000s so a little bit of background about M about Michael King he as I said was a TV Mogul and he and his brother um inherited the company called King World Productions from their father I think that was back way back in the 70s or maybe even earlier but at that point um the only product King World promotions had or King world production had was The Little Rascals now I'm sure you're familiar with that product right or or that TV show so obviously he he did well with that um one single product and they went on to secure such um TV shows such as Jeopardy Wheel of Fortune and they launched Oprah Winfrey's career so as you can can imagine the company did quite well and in 2015 um sold their company to CBS at that point Michael King sort of branched out into the Sports World and became part owners of the New Jersey Devils the New Jersey Nets and the New York Yankees when King decided he wanted to make a move with um American boxing he he formed King Sports worldwide and started to promote shows in the LA area and he had a real vision for um what he wanted to do with boxing but unfortunately it it didn't quite pan out now one of the sort of main things uh Michael King did was he tried to partner up with USA boxing to kind of um nurture uh US amateur heavyweight or amateur Fighters particularly the heavyweights and then help them uh launch their pro career one of his sort of success stories was um Dominic Brazil because they were able to get Dominic um to onto the US Olympic team now apparently Dominic later sort of quit Michael King's program I guess once he turned Pro and I don't know the details of why but um Michael King's idea was well as as people pointed out most um American males who are say of the heavyweight size choose basketball or football so he decided he'd recruit um football players to cross over into B boxing which is exactly the background that do Dominic Brazil comes from uh Brazil was a quarterback in college now I do have a a little bit of experience firsthand with um with Michael King's All American heavyweight program in that I did accompany a heavyweight fighter to the facility that Michael King set up in Carson California Carson is um basically a sort of big neighborhood Within that LA area and they established this gym that they called The Rock and it was really it was a huge facility I think there was at least three boxing Rings there tons of heavy bags uh it was just an incredible sort of huge footprint area of a boxing gym now according to uh the the fighter who who worked out there um all these heavyweights that Michael King recruited had basically their whole way paid for meaning room board lodging um any of their medical expenses um if they needed body work they'd had that paid for they had uh strength conditioning coaches nutritionists Etc so effectively Michael King was throwing um all the resources he had uh at this project so in other words he didn't want any athlete to have the excuse at all I just didn't have the funds to cover um you know say proper nutrition or proper supplements or proper medical care now right off the bat I think some of you guys will figure out what the the problem with sort of making unlimited funds available to individuals that creates its own set of issues right because once the money starts flowing out and the word gets out then that kind of tracks certain types of uh shyers now yet another aspect that of Michael King's um strategy was to do what he called Moneyball for boxing in in other words to get you know all the stats and this and that and try to figure out you know who would be the most um likely prospects or contenders to uh make it to the top of the Heap now here's the thing so in the end um The Last Man Standing so to speak out of all the money that um Michael King put into this All-American heavyweight program the last person left was Charles Martin and so that kind of gives you a perspective on um you know where the American heavyweight uh landscape lies um because Charles Martin hasn't been in the um top 10 for for for a minute so so here's my take on why um Michael King's All-American heavyweight program didn't quite pan out the way he wanted to even though he has money and even though he did all this statistical analysis on who's most likely to succeed as an as a heavyweight pro boxer it's because in the end money is never the solution if you do not have a solid plan it's not going to work no matter how much money you throw at an athlete you can't make them into a champion and you can't make Champion qualities out of them and then the second thing as far as statistics go it doesn't matter you know what it says on paper about an athlete because it's the intangible aspect that in the end determines if somebody's a fighter or not and that's just simply do they have a PA or not you're never going to find that on a piece of paper it's not measurable so the B botom line um I will go back to something that Paul malagi said more than once um a while back so Paulie's line was look if taking a physical beating is the worst experience you've ever had then maybe boxing is not for you what does paully mean by that well simply you know if dealing with physical discomfort to the nth degree is the worst thing you've ever had to endure well when that happens in the ring that's the worst thing you ever had to deal with then you just might crumble or decide you don't want any more of this or decide you don't need this but if at some point in your life you've been subjected to a little more than just physical discomfort uh you should or will have the resilience and the mental fortitude to just suck it up in that horrible terrible moment and persevere Paulie malagi uh showed showed that to us himself in his fight versus Miguel Cotto Now That's a classic fight if you have not yet seen it um you most definitely should uh check that one out because in that fight um Paulie's cheekbone got broken and Miguel Cotto really did lay into him but Paulie hung tough his nails and he was always trying to win right up to the final BT and even though Paulie lost that fight to Miguel Cotto he gained everybody's respect and that took his career to a whole new level as a fighter and I think that just sums up exactly what Paulie was referring to when he said hey they've taken the physical beating is the worst thing you've ever dealt with then you know maybe you don't want to do this maybe this is not for you and that's exactly the problem with u Michael King's All-American heavyweight program was there everything was taken care of there was you know he tried to erase that um so-called excuse of discomfort discomfort of not having the greatest food to eat not having the most comfortable place to sleep um not having any uh adversity whatsoever I mean you cannot create a prized Pig by treating uh a perspective prized pig as a prized Pig you know the prize Pig's got to prove itself first so bottom line is essentially these heavyweight fighters who were part of the All-American heavyweight program simply lack the coones or the heart whatever you want to call it um that would have them persevere in the ring at a world class level and as I said that's a quality that money cannot um buy nor can it cultivate and it's also something that's completely immeasurable and you'll never find no matter what kind of Moneyball uh stats you run on um athletes so let me know if you remember any of the other heavyweights that participated in the All-American heavyweight program tell me if you think uh there's any hope for American heavyweight boxing and if you got some value from this video please be sure to subscribe and hit the notification button if you'd like to show your appreciation by leaving a super thanks or by heading over 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