For all of boxing’s myriad faults, the heavyweight division has in recent years been the sport’s equivalent of Old Faithful: reliably spectacular and entertaining. The likes of Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua, Deontay Wilder, Daniel Dubois, and Oleksander Usyk – among others – have repeatedly engaged in meaningful and exciting contests that would entitle them all to stand, arms outstretched, and yell, “Are you not entertained?”
For those of us of a certain vintage, writing sentences such as the above still feels slightly jarring because there was a period when that was far from the case. I’m not talking about the lengthy reign of Wladimir Klitschko, whose undoubted all-time greatness couldn’t disguise the paucity of quality challengers and the monotony of his many defenses. There was a period before Mike Tyson exploded onto the stage when the heavyweight division was dull at best and positively decrepit at worst. There was plenty of talent – and of course an all-time-great champion in Larry Holmes – but there was also disarray.
The Lost Generation
This was the period known as the Lost Generation of heavyweights, when seemingly skillful boxers apparently had little interest in either staying in shape or rising to the occasion, and passed title belts back and forth like hot potatoes.
The spider at the center of this web of mediocrity was Don King, who saw Muhammad Ali’s retirement as an opportunity to fracture and dominate the sport’s flagship division. As Michael Katz of The New York Times wrote in May 1983: “In this corner, a Don King fighter. In that corner, a Don King fighter. Frequently, they are both managed by the promoter’s adopted son, Carl. Guess who wins? … King’s control of boxing’s premier division is staggering: Both champions and 6 of the top 10 heavyweight contenders owe their loyalty to him.”
Who won and who lost was of little concern to King, who was guaranteed to leave the ring with the victor. It made no difference whether his champion went on a lengthy title run or coughed up his belt at the first hurdle: either way, the champion would still be a King fighter.
Over the decade between Ali all-too-temporarily retiring after his rematch with Leon Spinks and Tyson becoming lineal champ by flattening Michael Spinks, there were 15 recognized claimants to the heavyweight crown.
For much of that time the one true claimant was of course Holmes, a future Hall-of-Famer who nonetheless could not capture a fraction of the public love and affection directed toward his predecessor. But while the WBC honored him as such, the WBA had its own parade of titlists, none of whom, before Tyson, made more than two successful defenses and most of whom made none.
And then, when Holmes didn’t want to defend his WBC belt against Greg Page because he deemed the money on offer insufficient, he dropped it and embraced the upstart IBF, further splintering the title landscape.
Which is how, on December 1, 1984, the WBA was able to present a match between Page and Gerrie Coetzee as being for the heavyweight championship of the world.
It would be Page’s second attempt to win a heavyweight title that year. Following Holmes’ abdication, he was matched with Tim Witherspoon in March 1984 for the WBC strap and lost a majority decision.
Five months later, he lost again, by decision to David Bey, dropping his record to 23-3 and, naturally, lining him up for a shot at the WBA crown. Page, of course, was a Don King fighter.
Page, who had also fallen to defeat to Trevor Berbick, had logged wins over the likes of Alfredo Evangelista, Renaldo Snipes, and James Tillis, but coming off back-to-back losses there was a sense that, aged just 26, he might already be spent, without ever truly becoming a force.
The man he would be facing, Gerrie Coetzee, had wins over Leon Spinks, Ron Stander, and Scott LeDoux as well as a draw with Pinklon Thomas, but had also gone one better than Page in that he had not one but two failed attempts to win a title. Fresh off stopping Spinks inside a round, he took on John Tate in October 1979 but dropped a unanimous decision. Tate promptly dropped the belt to Mike Weaver, who knocked him out with just 40 seconds remaining in the 15th round. Weaver made his first defense against Coetzee, becoming the first man to knock Coetzee down and stopping him in the 13th round.
Weaver then outpointed James Tillis before suffering a highly controversial first-round stoppage loss to Michael Dokes. Dokes and Weaver fought to a draw in a rematch, and in September 1983 Coetzee was granted a third grasp at the brass ring – and this time he seized it, knocking out Dokes in the 10th.
Coetzee was still not the champion, of course: that honor remained with Holmes and would until he dropped a contentious decision to Michael Spinks in September 1985. But, with Holmes having decamped from the WBC to the IBF, Coetzee was now one of three claimants to the biggest prize in global sport.
Both Holmes and Coetzee expressed interest in a unification bout and even signed a contract to that effect, but the original backer of the event could not find the money. Attempts to resurrect it failed when the WBA refused to sanction it unless Holmes surrendered his belt and entered the ring as a challenger to Coetzee. Coetzee, keen to gain recognition by taking on Holmes, offered to abdicate his own throne, but King wasn’t interested in facilitating that. Besides, the situation became moot when Coetzee needed surgery for a right hand that had suffered so many injuries it had been surgically fused into a permanent fist.
The next year, with Holmes having moved on, attention turned to finding an opponent for his first defense, but the logical pick – David Bey, who beat Page in August 1984 – turned the opportunity down, because he didn’t want to fight in Coetzee’s native South Africa.
The Pariah Nation
The South African government had introduced a system of institutionalized racism called apartheid – or separateness – in 1948; the following year, interracial marriages were banned, and in 1950 citizens were divided into four categories – white, black, Indian, and colored – which governed the jobs they could have and where they could live, among multiple other restrictions. Between 1960 and 1983, 3.5 million black South Africans were removed from their homes and forcibly segregated, primarily to 10 “tribal homelands,” four of which South Africa declared to be independent states.
The response of other countries was slow to gather force but had begun to harden into opposition by the 1960s. The country was obliged to leave the Commonwealth of Nations (a grouping primarily of countries that were formerly part of the British Empire) in 1961, and Britain and the United States suspended arms sales in 1964. Calls from the likes of Marlon Brando for a cultural boycott of South Africa first stirred around that time, although it would not be until the 1980s that such efforts truly began to diversify and take hold.
Some of the most notable and public refutations of the apartheid regime came from the sporting world. The International Table Tennis Federation banned the all-white South African table tennis body in 1956; soccer governing body FIFA expelled South Africa in 1961, and the International Olympic Committee did likewise in 1970. Sports from cricket to chess imposed their own restrictions or outright bans.
And then there was boxing.
Boxing has rarely encountered an odious regime it did not embrace; it is little surprise that, given its lack of ethical concerns allied to the absence of a central governing authority, it was one of relatively few sports to continue doing business in the country and with its athletes. There were exceptions: the AIBA expelled the South African amateur boxing association in 1968, and the WBC refused to include South African boxers in its rankings.
The WBA was another matter, as evidenced by Coetzee’s multitude of title shots. His first, which he lost to Tate, was held at the Loftus Versfeld Stadium in Pretoria, in front of a mostly white crowd of 80,000 – but also, for the first time in the stadium’s history, some black fans.
During the Tate-Coetzee fight, civil rights campaigner Jesse Jackson led a protest outside the headquarters of CBS, the bout’s American broadcaster, arguing that, while authorities had yielded to promoters’ insistence on mixed-race seating, “the world won’t know it’s for one night only.”
King tarred rival promoter Bob Arum, who did more business than him with the WBA, as the “apostle of apartheid” for taking fights to South Africa but found himself firmly in the crosshairs after the announcement of Coetzee’s fight with Page.
“I’m against apartheid today, and I was against apartheid yesterday,” protested King, who sold his promotional rights for the fight to South African promoter Sol Kerzner. “I’m not going to South Africa. All I did was sell my rights.”
That didn’t wash with his critics – including Holmes, who was one of the first boxers to loudly accuse King of bilking him and who by now was more than willing to put in the boot whenever the opportunity presented itself.
“I think King should be ashamed of himself,” he said. “He’s always talking about his principles. It seems he sold ‘em. If a man’s got principles, you can’t buy ‘em.”
King had been a founder member in 1982 of Artists and Athletes Against Apartheid, but the group’s co-chair, tennis legend Arthur Ashe, said he had “embarrassed” the organization.
Ashe told Katz of the New York Times that King was “the most influential signatory to our position, since boxers are the most likely athletes to be invited to South Africa, boxers and tennis players.”
He and his fellow activists had, he continued, “been very successful in convincing black athletes and entertainers not to go down there. As far as I know, Page is the only one who slipped through in the last 12 months.” After meeting with the promoter, he said, he was “fairly convinced that without Don King, Greg Page wouldn’t have fought in South Africa.”
King protested that he had tried to talk Page out of the fight, just as, he asserted, he had been the one to dissuade Bey.
Ah yes, Bey. In a conversation with Katz, Bey said that “the apartheid thing” prevented him from going, even though it meant giving up a $650,000 payday, “not counting $100,000 expenses, right up front.”
Still, he held out hope that now he would get to face Holmes for more money and an opportunity to be a “great champion.”
“I’m proud of him,” said Holmes. “He’ll fight me one of these days.”
The Fight
In his first two title shots, Coetzee had started well but faded down the stretch; he confessed that he had something of an inferiority complex when it came to American opponents that caused him to doubt himself as fights went on. He had been able to shrug that off against Dokes, boxing with more poise than he had previously done in big fights and mixing left hooks into his normally right-hand-heavy repertoire. Page had entered his own shot against Witherspoon out of shape after sitting out much of training camp in protest at what King was paying him. On this night, however – in Sun City, Bophuthatswana, one of the so-called “independent” black homelands – both men turned in performances that were the complete opposites of their earlier efforts. Coetzee appeared, if anything, overconfident, loading up on overhand rights while an unexpectedly spry Page moved in and out and landed sharp, fast counters between Coetzee’s swinging blows.
On several occasions, Coetzee appeared hurt by Page’s clean punching, and at the very end of round six, he dropped to one knee in Page’s corner, although the blow that precipitated the knockdown had been thrown after the bell. Coetzee looked exhausted as he made his way back to his own corner, and just a few seconds into the seventh, he was on his hands and knees again, this time legitimately. To his credit, he came out swinging again, taking the fight back to Page, but his punches were wide, his defense porous, and his legs and spirit weary as he trudged back to his stool.
Page spent much of the eighth bouncing on his toes, seemingly waiting for Coetzee to leave himself open for a counter, but then suddenly stepped into a powerful combination that dropped Coetzee onto his back for the count.
There was, of course, controversy, as the knockout came fully 45 seconds after the round should have ended. Coetzee’s subsequent protests came to naught, however, and the WBA affirmed Page as the winner.
“You told me I was through. You told me I was washed up!” Page shouted as he leapt from the ring and began dancing toward the dressing room. The Washington Post reported that “hundreds of local blacks joined in his celebration after defeating the white South African, Coetzee, in this racially divided society. They followed Page, waving their fists in the “black power” salute of African nationalists.”
If true, such celebrations came wrapped in no small amount of irony. Page did not exactly present himself as a crusader for change, stating afterward that the Government of Bophuthatswana had offered him a home and asking rhetorically: “Am I going to move there? Let me tell you something, I was treated better over there than I was in the United States.”
Of the principals involved in the fight, the one who was the most outspoken about apartheid and the need for racial equality was the white South African, Coetzee.
He had in fact earned a following from, and a fondness among, many black South Africans for his outspokenness.
“I feel I am fighting for everybody, Black and white,” he said before his fight with Dokes. “What makes me happy is for Black, brown and white people to accept me as their fighter.”
Coda
Tyson’s early reign of terror put an end to the Lost Generation of heavyweights and left King on the outside looking in. By the time Iron Mike scored perhaps his most iconic and important win over Michael Spinks, however, King, who had been whispering sweet nothings persistently into Tyson’s ears, had succeeded in digging his claws into his latest cash cow. Coincidentally or otherwise, King’s period as Tyson’s promoter overlapped Tyson’s decline inside the ring and his careening off the tracks outside of it. By the late 1990s, Tyson had sued King for millions of dollars – before agreeing to settle for a smaller amount to help pay off his debts – and he would later say of his erstwhile promoter that he “did more bad to Black fighters than any white promoter in history.”
The members of the Lost Generation could have told him that, of course. Witherspoon was the member of that cohort who most vilified King; when he lost his version of the world title via first-round stoppage against James “Bonecrusher” Smith, he seemed relieved, stating that, “Losing meant Don was out of my life and that was all I wanted.” He sued King for $25 million before settling out of court for $1 million.
Page, meanwhile, lost the belt he won against Coetzee in his first defense, a mind-numbingly awful bout against Tony Tubbs. He continued fighting well past the point at which he should have stopped, his ring career finally ending in 2001 when, at age 42, he suffered a brain bleed after being knocked out by Dale Crowe in a fight for which he was paid just $1500. He suffered a stroke during brain surgery and was paralyzed down the left side of his body. Unable to speak, he would scrawl notes on a pad from the hospital bed in his home. “God is good,” said one. “Don King stole my money,” said another.
Page died in 2009 when he slipped out of bed, his head becoming trapped between the mattress and the railing; unable to move, he asphyxiated.
Larry Holmes was true to his word and granted David Bey a chance to take his title in 1985; but Bey didn’t become the great champion he hoped he would. Holmes knocked him out in 10 rounds and in the process effectively finished him as a fighter. After entering the ring against Holmes 14-0, he lost five of six bouts afterward, briefly retired, won three of nine subsequent contests, and retired again with a ledger of 18-11-1. He started working in construction and died in an accident on a construction site in Camden, New Jersey, in 2017.
Two bouts after losing to Page, Coetzee was knocked out in a round by Frank Bruno and retired. Seven years later, in 1993, he returned for two fights – both of which he won – and then in 1997 fought twice more, retiring for good at age 42 after losing to Iran Barkley.
By then, South Africa was a very different place. In 1989, with the country’s economy crumbling and apartheid clearly untenable, incoming president F.W. de Klerk accelerated efforts to consign it to history; the following year, Nelson Mandela was released from jail, becoming the nation’s first truly democratically elected president in 1994.
One of the people Mandela asked to meet after his release was Coetzee.
“It was overwhelming because the country was preparing for democracy and Mr. Mandela was leading the way,” Coetzee said. “It was a surreal moment and he awarded me a medal. I was surprised to hear that he had listened to radio commentaries of a few of my fights while he was in prison.”
In 2003, Coetzee, who died of lung cancer in 2023, was awarded The Order of Ikhamanga in Bronze, one of the country’s highest civilian honors. The citation recognized “his achievement in the field of boxing and contribution to nation-building through sport.” His fights, it noted, saw “South Africans of all hues” cheer on the white Afrikaaner against black Americans, “thereby confounding the false logic of apartheid.”
Kieran Mulvaney has written, broadcast and podcasted about boxing for HBO, Showtime, ESPN and Reuters, among other outlets. He also writes regularly for National Geographic, has written several books on the Arctic and Antarctic, and is at his happiest hanging out with wild polar bears. His website is www.kieranmulvaney.com.
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