In another world, Larry Holmes would be placed on the Mount Rushmore of Boxing’s Heavyweight division but in this world, he isn’t. Despite absolutely dominating the sport in the marquee division, Holmes isn’t but is one of the most, if not the most underrated boxers and heavyweight boxers of all time.
There are a handful of reasons for this mainly due to Holmes ascension to the throne immediately after the great Muhammad Ali’s descent from the throne. Many saw Holmes as nothing but Ali’s former sparring on top of Holmes beating Ali to a pulp when they faced off.
Like a Ghanaian athlete waiting on government to settle money owed them, Holmes was in a Damned if you, Damned if you don’t situation when matched up against Ali. Beat him (which he did) and get hated forever for embarrassing an icon or get beaten and be forever the laughingstock and the butt of jokes.
Such reasons are valid for narrative purposes, but such narratives have a short time span. That actual reason for the lack of respect to Holmes is Holmes’ failure to match the Holy Grail in boxing.
Holmes won 48 consecutive bouts but failed to match Rocky Marciano and Floyd Mayweather’s record of 49 wins in 49 fights. Missing out on recording such a tremendous feat largely validated the slights towards Holmes.
An aside though, Mayweather bettered this record by beating Conor McGregor for his 50th win in 50 bouts but fighting a Mixed Martial Arts fighter in his first professional boxing bout sure does lighten the gravity of his ending his career with a flawless record.
It is for similar reasons that even in the face of a brilliant campaign that few saw coming, Tottenham Hotspurs’ 2023-2024 campaign is still a failure, a choke job and another Spurs being Spurs moment. In the lead up to this season, Tottenham welcomed Ange Postecoglou as manager, saw top scorer Harry Kane leave for Bayern Munich while ushering in largely unproven talents in Guglielmo Vicario and Micky Van De Ven.
As such, many pundits wrote off their chances of challenging for a top four spot but that was quickly done away with by Spurs brilliant start to life under the Aussie manager. The football was brilliant, players like Yves Bissouma and James Maddison looked unplayable and the wins kept coming.
Spurs led the league and that was all she wrote until adversity kicked in when Maddison and Van De Ven got injured and Bissouma lost confidence after losing his place in Mali’s starting unit at the 2023 AFCON.
This came around the same time, English Premier League’s title contenders, Liverpool, Manchester City and Arsenal, found their stride. These factors combined to put Spurs under a ton of pressure to clinch one of the EPL’s top four spots that they eventually missed out with Tottenham set to finish in fifth place.
Even in the face of so much progress and brilliant performances for the most part of the season, Spurs showed once again that nothing has changed with the team’s biggest challenge and that is having the mentality to achieve big things.
Making it to the Champions League in the face of several uncertainties was a big challenge and Spurs failed to overcome another big challenge. If there was a time for Spurs to overachieve and deliver a big shock, this was the year because there realistically won’t be a time England’s top flight would have this much chaos on the part of several top teams.
Manchester City, Arsenal and Liverpool are operating in a different stratosphere so they are practically uncatchable at this point in time. However, Aston Villa got distracted by its European campaign in the UEFA Conference League, Manchester United broke down, Chelsea continues its rebuild while Top 5 dark horse contenders, Brighton and Hove Albion and West Ham United, failed to kick on from last season’s brilliant campaigns.
Several factors broke the way of Tottenham for Spurs to absolutely seal the last UEFA Champions League spot but they fumbled it in a way Spurs have done so for so many years even if they weren’t supposed to be in this position in the first place.
It sounds harsh to make such a judgment on Ange Postecoglou’s team but this criticism comes from a place that judged the Black Stars run at the 2022 FIFA World Cup as a missed opportunity to make it past the group stage.
While Ange practically did everything right, Black Stars head coach, Otto Addo, didn’t particularly cover himself in glory with some questionable decisions on timing of substitutions, personnel selections and tactical switches.
In the face of all these shortcomings, all Ghana needed was to at least score a draw against Uruguay in its final group stage game to qualify to the round of 16 stage but they fumbled it.
The factors broke for Ghana, same way it did for Spurs and both choked and deserve as much criticism as the Black Stars.
Aside questions over which player leads the attack moving forward, Tottenham Hotspurs are in a very good space considering key figures like Vicario, Ange, Van De Ven, Maddison, Destiny Udogie and Heung-Min Son are in place but Spurs’ ceiling is realistically limited considering what the EPL’s heavy hitters are primed to do to get back to the top.
As such, missing out on a Champions League spot now is a big fumble job only Spurs can pull off.
