Anthony Joshua becomes the unfortunate avatar of his heavyweight era

His mind seemed clear. Even after being knocked down in the first, third, and fourth rounds and having taken steady punishment from a true puncher in Daniel Dubois, Anthony Joshua — smiling, nodding, beckoning — appeared to have his wits about him. But he didn’t have his legs under him. The head was willing, and potentially able. The body would not cooperate.

That runs counter to the split between strengths and shortcomings that had defined most of Joshua’s career.

His body made him the betting favorite over every single opponent he ever fought, at least the first time he fought them. (The lone time he was an underdog was in the rematch with Oleksandr Usyk, after we had 12 rounds of clear evidence to support that oddsmaking.) One look at Joshua suggested this was the man to carry boxing into and through the 2020s. Standing six feet, six inches, with roughly 240-250 pounds of chiseled muscle, Joshua was a post-Lennox Lewis lab prototype come to life. And he possessed all of the physical tools for this line of work: a long, heavy jab; knockout power in either fist; impressive athleticism and reflexes for a man his size.

But it was that pesky stuff from the neck up that let him down. His confidence was never quite the same after suffering a knockdown against Wladimir Klitschko (even though he rallied to win that night). He wasn’t sure from fight to fight if he wanted to be a boxer or a destroyer. He changed trainers repeatedly and was left with too many cooks arguing in his mental kitchen. He was too tense in the ring, and as a result, he’d gas out early in fights, his breathing becoming labored or his legs heavy.

Of course, it all connects — tension becomes exhaustion, mental strain bleeds into physical strain and vice versa. Whichever half of the equation was letting AJ down at a given moment, the fact remains that, all too often, he was less than the sum of his parts.

It would appear, on the heels of this most deflating defeat of his career against Dubois — four knockdowns, a pure knockout, done and dusted one minute into the fifth round — that the book on Joshua is written. He will go down as a good, perhaps very good, but not all-time-great heavyweight, one who offered unlimited promise but proved wildly unpredictable and inconsistent and was, ultimately, a bit of a letdown.

And that makes him an avatar of this entire heavyweight boxing era.

We can define the era as spanning from November 28, 2015 — the day Tyson Fury ended Klitschko’s almost-decade-long reign — until, probably, this coming Dec. 21, when Usyk and Fury are scheduled to rematch. More to come on that, but it figures to serve as a bookend.

It’s been a good heavyweight era. Certainly, it has run rings around the Klitschko brothers era that preceded it: two Hall of Famers who mostly lacked for competition and generated little enthusiasm outside of Europe. This era of Fury, Usyk, Joshua, Deontay Wilder, et al, could rightly be called a very good era. But that’s as far as you can go. It’s not an all-time great era. It isn’t the ‘90s, and it sure as hell isn’t the ‘70s.

As fans, we got lots of thrills out of it, no doubt. The third Fury-Wilder fight was among the most exceptional title tilts in heavyweight history. Joshua-Klitschko was unforgettable. Usyk-Fury wasn’t far behind. The Fury-Wilder draw featured a classic finish, the Wilder-Luis Ortiz fights were both fun, Andy Ruiz’s upset of Joshua was a doozy, and there were all sorts of wild scraps at lower echelons, from Alexander Povetkin-Dillian Whyte in the bubble to the recent Derek Chisora-Joe Joyce war.

It has been a heck of a ride. The heavyweights have recaptured much of the magic that was lost when one Klitschko or the other was deliberating and dominating.

But much like AJ’s career, in the heavyweight division over these years things rarely went according to plan. And much like AJ’s career, it could have been so much more.

Most notably on that “coulda been” front, we somehow never got Fury vs. Joshua or Joshua vs. Wilder. Maybe one or both will still happen, but neither would mean much anymore. Those fights, once for legacy and supremacy, would now be for money and personal pride. And it’s doubtful that either will happen at all anyway.

Either one of those, at the right time, could have been the most massive mainstream-crossover heavyweight event since Lewis vs. Mike Tyson. But the right time came and went.

More so than the disappointment, though, it’s the parallel unpredictability of AJ and of the changes to the division’s hierarchy that really stands out.

Every time Joshua got the boxing world believing, every time it seemed he had it all together, it unraveled. He was the king of the sport in 2019 when he ran into late sub and 11-to-1 underdog Ruiz, knocking Ruiz down as per the script in the third round, then suddenly stumbling and crumbling. He avenged the loss (in uninspiring fashion) and some two years later was about a three-to-one favorite to best the seemingly undersized Usyk, but we know how that one — and the rematch — went. Again Joshua rebuilt. He won four straight, each win better than the last. He was more than a four-to-one favorite over Dubois. But the underdog stepped fearlessly forward and, by midway through the first round, the smart money was all flowing one way.

For these last nine years or so, the division as a whole has echoed that feeling of “just when you think you have the answers, I change the questions.” Fury reached the top at the end of 2015 and disappeared for the next 30 months. He then elevated himself to the point where he was the subject of all-time heavyweight great conversations, and proceeded to squeak by an MMA fighter making his professional boxing debut and get whupped by a former cruiserweight champ. Ruiz had one great moment and ate himself out of contention. Wilder’s story is one of both an unfathomable ascent, given his late start and pitiable technique, and a rapid descent. Nobody’s Bingo card included Joseph Parker’s revival over the past year, or Joyce stopping Dubois but getting stopped twice by Zhilei Zhang.

Even Wladimir Klitschko’s role in the torch-pass to the new era defied convention; his loss to Joshua was so stirring as to make boxing fans pity non-boxing fans, and his loss to Fury was so dreadful as to make boxing fans pity themselves.

Back to Joshua and his legacy: I was insisting on my podcast about a year ago, before the Otto Wallin fight, that AJ was not quite a Hall of Famer — an insistence that was met with significant brushback from our listeners. It felt like an ice-cold take as he enjoyed a revival in crushing Wallin and Francis Ngannou, and as of a few days ago, I was prepared to admit that I was wrong, he was indeed a sure-shot Hall of Famer.

But now, after one utterly disastrous defeat to Dubois, he’s back to not getting my vote (with the caveats that his career is not over and that I can’t predict how weak a Hall of Fame ballot he may eventually find himself on).

What happened against Dubois reframed his entire post-Usyk comeback. Is it fair that we retroactively question results we once celebrated? No, but it’s what we do. If you listened to podcasts or read social media late Saturday night into Sunday, you heard/saw some variation on this: Jermaine Franklin was a light-hitting no-hoper (and Joshua couldn’t get him out of there!), Robert Helenius was washed (and Joshua needed seven rounds to get him out of there!), Wallin was stylistically made to order, and Ngannou was exactly who we thought he was before Fury created the fiction that the former UFC star could box.

The reality is that Joshua will probably get into the International Boxing Hall of Fame anyway, because that’s what happens when you’re on the borderline and you fight in the heavyweight division. If you took the resumes of Riddick Bowe, Ingemar Johansson, Michael Moorer, James J. Braddock, Luis Firpo, or Jess Willard and replaced the word “heavyweight” with, say, “lightweight,” none of them would have plaques in Canastota. Even Ken Norton would be iffy if you ported his record over to a different division.

So, yeah, Joshua — especially if you factor in the “fame” quotient — likely gets inducted someday. It’s just a lot harder to feel good about it in the wake of Dubois manhandling him.

Dubois, by the way, fits in perfectly with the unpredictability of this heavyweight era. He was the heir apparent. Then he lost unexpectedly to Joyce and came damned close to getting stopped in the first round by Kevin Lerena, and it was starting to feel like the only thing he was heir to was David Price’s legacy. Then he surrendered against Usyk, and most of us turned the page on him.

That was only 13 months ago. Dubois has since — in a nine-month span! — handed Jarrell Miller his first loss, done likewise to Filip Hrgovic, and flattened AJ.

Good luck figuring out the heavyweight division in the post-Klitschko age.

The curtain may be about to fall on the era, depending on what happens three months from now in the Usyk-Fury rematch. If Usyk wins again, there’s a real chance he retires, with no mountains left to climb. That would also likely signal the end of Fury — at least as an elite force. Wilder is finished, whether he knows it or not. Joshua may not have another rebuild in him at 34, and even if he does, it would be the most shocking twist of all if he suddenly developed the punch resistance to get back to the top.

Ruiz, Ortiz, Whyte, Chisora, Joyce, Zhang — they’re all 35-plus and somewhere near the finish line. The era is ending — if not on December 21, then assuredly soon thereafter.

And when it ends … I never would have imagined last year, or even last week, really, that I’d be saying this, but the next era may belong to Dubois.

He’s just 27, doesn’t bear the wear of a long amateur career, and has fought just 95 professional rounds. But he’s not inexperienced — he has built up the necessary calluses by navigating adversity and tangling with the likes of Usyk and Joshua.

Welcome to the Daniel Dubois era of heavyweight boxing?

Maybe. Just keep those expectations in check, and hopefully you won’t soon find yourself scraping said expectations off the canvas.

Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with more than 25 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, Ringside Seat, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X or LinkedIn, or via email at [email protected].