There will perhaps never be another year in which a sport will lose as many of its truly great figures as boxing did in 2017.
Floyd Mayweather took his record to a perfect 50-0 with a one-sided win over Conor McGregor and then, once again and perhaps for the final time, called it a day. Andre Ward had already succeeded him as the world’s finest fighter with his second defeat of Russia’s dangerous Sergey Kovalev but then he chose to retire, aged 33 and after just 32 fights.
While Ward could yet return, as his career has not been that bruising, the decisions by Miguel Cotto, Juan Manuel Marquez, Shane Mosley, Wladimir Klitschko, Timothy Bradley and Robert Guerrero had a finality to them and were undoubtedly the right calls. They didn’t want to join the lengthy list of fighters who carried on too long. Throw in the fact that Bernard Hopkins had his final fight this time last year and that Roy Jones Jr. is vowing a match-up in February will be his last and it leaves 39-year-old Manny Pacquiao as the only remaining elite figure linking the present era with the past.
Now the search is on for their successors, particularly in the welterweight division where Mayweather, Pacquiao, Marquez, Cotto, Mosley, Bradley and Guerrero fought with such skill and distinction to define a platinum era.
The presence at 147lbs of Americans Errol Spence and Terence Crawford, both truly gifted and the latter to the extent he could prove an all-time great, means it could yet remain the world’s glamor division, even at a time when the heavyweights are showing such rich potential. Fellow American Keith Thurman provides them with a further dangerous rival, and optimism persists that Crawford could yet fight Pacquiao in what would be his highest-profile test.
At light-heavyweight, match-ups between champions Kovalev, Artur Beterbiev, Adonis Stevenson, and the highly-rated Badou Jack to determine the new No. 1 will be intriguing. In the super featherweight division, Ukraine’s double Olympic gold medallist Vasyl Lomachenko, whose extraordinary abilities were most recently demonstrated in an unexpectedly one-sided defeat of Guillermo Rigondeaux, is now considered one of the world’s very best. He has become a big deal and a big scalp.
America’s Mikey Garcia, having secured his two biggest victories during 2017, fights in February to win a world title at super-lightweight, his fourth weight. The cruiserweight edition of the Super Series is expected to conclude in the coming months with Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk established as not only the 200lb-division’s finest, but as one of its greatest of all time.
That his compatriot Klitschko retired after April’s dramatic defeat by Anthony Joshua, in a match-up that presented the finest heavyweight of his era against the one expected to define the next, was largely emblematic of boxing’s past year. That any fight involving Joshua — an announcement of one against WBO champion Joseph Parker is imminent, and another against WBC champion Deontay Wilder would be the highest-profile in the world — will be among the most significant in 2018 will demonstrate how convincingly he has taken Klitschko’s place as the kingpin in the heavyweight division.
The controversial draw at middleweight between Mexico’s Saul “Canelo” Alvarez and Gennady Golovkin represented the year’s highest-quality fight and perhaps its most controversial. A convincing winner in the likely rematch would see them usurp Lomachenko and Crawford as the world’s finest, pound-for-pound.
That title once belonged to Mayweather but 2018 is now set to herald an era-defining changing of the guard.