This morning, as she was packing up glassware from a cupboard, Mrs. Goad asked me if I could help her dislodge a stubborn glass cup that seemed stuck to the shelf. I attempted to oblige her, but instead I broke off part of the glass, leaving a nasty gash in my right index finger.

Bloodied but unbowed, I bandaged the gaping wound and clumsily pecked out the article you are now reading. I refused to allow adversity to deter me from my mission. I displayed the sort of white-boy persistence against adversity that made the Rocky movies so popular.

Sylvester Stallone wrote the script for the first Rocky in what he described as a “frenzied three-and-a-half-day flurry of creativity” after watching a white journeyman boxer named Chuck Wepner endure a bloody beating by World Champion Muhammad Ali in 1975. It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that Rocky Balboa shared the same first name as the last dominant white American heavyweight champ, Rocky Marciano, who retired in 1956 and remains the only heavyweight title-holder in history to retire undefeated.

The last white boxer to hold the undisputed heavyweight title was a Swede named Ingemar Johannson, who was champ for almost exactly one year ending on June 29, 1960 when the black American Floyd Patterson knocked him out cold.

I was born a year after that, and my entire life I’ve lived without a white undisputed heavyweight boxing champion—that is, until last Saturday night.

Like most sports, boxing used to merely have champions rather than “undisputed” champions. What has gummed up the works, and one of the major reasons boxing has suffered plummeting popularity over the years, is that there are now several sanctioning bodies issuing their own championship belts, meaning that there can be several different boxers at any given weight class at any given time claiming to be the “world champion.”

Since it’s assumed that heavyweight boxers are able to beat everyone below their weight class, the heavyweight champ is essentially the real champ. And until last weekend, there hasn’t been an undisputed heavyweight champion since 1999, when Lennox Lewis—a black “British” man—collected all of the belts, only to lose one of them a year later when he failed to promptly fight a mandatory challenger.

Last Saturday night in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia—whose sheikhs, in a blow to Western pride, seem to have been financing and hosting all of the major boxing matches for the past few years—two white men faced off for the undisputed championship. Both fighters entered the ring undefeated.

In this corner: Tyson “The Gypsy King” Fury, a bald 6’9” behemoth who resembles the Amazing Colossal Man of 1957 sci-fi B-movie infamy. Fury was born 35 years ago to Irish Traveller parents and weighed only one pound at birth. He almost didn’t survive being born, but when he did, his father John—a pikey maniac in his own right who once spent prison time for gouging out another man’s eyes—realized his son was a fighter and named him in honor of the black maniac boxer Mike Tyson. Fury walked into the ring with a record of 34 wins and only one draw, the latter of which came against black American boxer Deontay Wilder in the first of their three fights. Fury dispatched Wilder via TKO in the second two fights in their trilogy.

In that corner: Oleksandr “The Cat” Usyk (pronounced “oo-sick”) a Ukrainian southpaw and former undisputed cruiserweight champion who moved up to heavyweight in 2019 seeking to become the only boxer in history besides Evander Holyfield to become unified champion in both the cruiserweight and heavyweight divisions. A southpaw with blue serial-killer eyes and a playful sense of humor, Usyk is a former Olympic medalist who took home the gold in 2012 after edging out three other finalists, all of them white. Usyk is 37 and came into the fight with a record of 22 wins and zero defeats.

Fury entered the match holding the WBC belt and lineal championship, while Usyk held the WBO, IBF, and (Super) WBA belts. Although Fury first won several belts after defeating the Ukrainian Vladimir Klitschko in 2015, he quickly vacated those belts after ballooning up to nearly 400 pounds, binging on alcohol and cocaine, and briefly contemplating suicide.

Both boxers earned the belts they held entering last Saturday’s fight by defeating two black boxers who’d once been deemed unbeatable. Fury TKO’d the black American Deontay Wilder twice, and Usyk twice thrashed the black “Brit” Anthony Joshua.

Although we’re barely a quarter into this century, the Fury/Usyk matchup was billed “The Fight of the Century.” I remember last century’s heavyweight “Fight of the Century.” It was held in Madison Square Garden in 1970 between black boxers Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. The people in my neighborhood wanted Frazier to win because he trained in Philly and wasn’t an uppity anti-white loudmouth like Ali was. Our wishes were granted—Frazier dealt Ali his first professional loss.

Back then, and until very recently, the idea of two undefeated white boxers vying for the heavyweight championship was an impossible dream. Hence the Rocky movies’ appeal. Those films were widely viewed as a fantasy about lost white virility.

This “Great White Hope” motif has existed almost since 1892, when boxing became a professional sport and John L. Sullivan was crowned its first lineal champ. Sullivan was succeeded by other white men until Jack Johnson, who was scandalously married to a white woman, took the throne in 1908 and held it until 1915. From then until 1937, the lineal championship fell back into white men’s hands. But from 1937 until 1949, the black American Joe “The Brown Bomber” Louis became world champ.

Post-Rocky Marciano in 1956, the only other white men to hold the championship belt in the 20^th century, and all of them briefly, were Ingemar Johannson in 1959, the South African Gerrie Coetzee (who held one of the four heavyweight belts in 1994), and the American Tommy Morrison, who held the WBO title in 1993 before quickly losing it and plunging into a downward spiral that led to a stint in prison and an eventual death from AIDS in 2013.

The 21^st century has been another matter entirely for white heavyweight boxers, who’ve held most of the belts for the majority of the new millennium.

The Ukrainian Klitschko brothers, Vitali and Vladimir, started winning heavyweight belts in 2000 and managed to unify the division in 2011 when they captured all of the belts, but they never fought one another because their mother forbade them from doing so. Vitali Klitschko hung up his gloves in 2013 and became the Mayor of Kiev in 2014, a title he’s held ever since.

Vladimir Klitschko lost his championship in 2015 to Tyson Fury.

Fury was considered a slight favorite last Saturday night mainly due to the size differential—he stood six inches taller than Usyk and outweighed him by roughly 30 pounds. Although I am more closely related to Fury genetically, I was pulling for Usyk in this David-and-Goliath matchup because Usyk became champion in September of 2021, but Fury spent most of the intervening time either fighting tomato cans or finding excuses to keep ducking out of fights with Usyk.

I doubt that either Fury or Usyk understand the term “white” as Americans do. The main ethnic identity I’ve seen Fury claim is that of an Irish Gypsy whose people have been oppressed by the British for centuries. Fury even once let these words slip from his lips before one of his fights with Deontay Wilder when asked if there was a racial element to their matchup:

We’re all human beings. It doesn’t matter if you’re black, white, pink or green. We share the same blood. We are humans.

For the time being at least, Usyk identifies as a Ukrainian whose people are at war with Russia.

Since I’m a white American racist, though, I saw both boxers as white. But I’ve also wondered how and why American boxers lost their dominance. Although black American boxers won five gold medals at the 1952 Olympics, the last black American to snag Olympic gold was Andre Ward in 2004. And scanning Wikipedia’s list of current boxing world champions, I couldn’t find a single white American on the list no matter the weight class. So did Americans get weaker, or did Europeans get t0ugher? And regardless of the answer, why did that happen?

The Usyk/Fury fight started slowly, but as the big bald pink bear started mauling the little gap-toothed cat in the middle rounds, it seemed that unless Usyk knocked Fury out—unlikely considering Fury’s size and the fact that Usyk is not a power puncher—I figured that Fury had it in the bag as round seven ended.

But toward the end of round eight, Usyk startled Fury with a straight shot to the nose, bloodying and possibly breaking it. And in the final half-minute of round nine, Usyk began clobbering Fury with a volley of unanswered shots that ended in a knockdown. Many analysts say that under normal circumstances, the ref would have stopped the fight right there and declared Usyk the winner by TKO, but since this was such a massive fight with so much money on the line, he allowed the fight to go the distance.

Usyk squeaked by with a split-decision win. Two judges scored the fight in his favor 115-112 and 114-113, while one judge gave it to Fury, 114-113.

Just like the classless Negro Deontay Wilder did when Fury beat him back in 2020, Fury immediately refused to accept the loss. When asked in the ring immediately after the decision, he said the judges gave Usyk a sympathy vote because he’s Ukrainian:

You know his country’s at war, so people are siding for the country at war. Make no mistake, I won that fight, and I’ll be back.

Many observers in “dissident” spheres have refused to celebrate Usyk’s win for the same reason that Fury claims the judges gave him the decision—because he’s Ukrainian. They say they would have preferred a Russian heavyweight champion.

If they’re looking for a “Russian” champ, two of the world’s best boxers right now are undefeated “Russian” light heavyweights—power-puncher Artur Beterbiev, who has won all of his fights via knockout, and Dmitri Bivol, who is possibly the world’s best defensive boxer at the moment. Those two were slated to lock horns for the undisputed lightweight championship on June 1, but it’s been delayed after Beterbiev claimed an injury. Beterbiev is a Chechen Muslim, and Bivol was born to a Moldavian father and a Korean mother.

Oleksandr Usyk is far whiter than either of those scrubs. And regardless of your feelings about the Russia/Ukraine war, your partisanship shouldn’t blind you to the fact that the biggest political issue of them all is whether or not you’re white.

And on Saturday night, the white guy won. It was inevitable.