Who Is Anthony Joshua?

This is a commentary upon how the sporting world has changed.

Buried deep within this past Sunday's sports pages of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette was a single paragraph stating that Anthony Joshua defeated Joseph Parker in a twelve round unanimous decision to win the World Boxing Organization (WBO) Heavyweight Championship.  This goes along with the IBF, WBA, and IBO heavyweight titles that Joshua already held.  Unless there is yet another alphabet soup boxing organization of which I am not aware, this would seem to make Anthony Joshua the UNDISPUTED HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF THE WORLD, and until I saw that tiny item that was buried on page 12 of the sports section, I had never heard of him and would have had absolutely no idea as to who he was.

I bring this up because a case can be made that at some point in my lifetime, and certainly in the case of the generation of my parents' lifetime, the man who held the Heavyweight Championship was easily the most famous man in the sporting world.  A fight for the heavyweight title was the biggest event of any given calendar year.  In 2018, the name of the man who holds the title is unrecognizable, and the results of the title fight gets all of a single paragraph next to the high school swimming results in the Sunday paper.

(As an aside, I posed this "Who is Anthony Joshua" question only Facebook feed earlier today and asked anyone to identify him without resorting to the Google Machine.  After several hours and many guesses, only one guy could do it.)

The Champ

Just for the record, Anthony Joshua is a 28 year old Britisher.  He won a gold medal in the 2012 London Olympics, and has a professional record of 21-0, with 20 of his wins coming by knockout.

A graduate thesis could be written (and maybe someone has already done so) on why boxing, once one of the most popular sports in America, no longer holds that status, and can now best be described as a niche sport.  The lesson I suppose, is that just because you are on the top of the heap today, doesn't mean that you will be there forever.  I am sure that the guardians of the National Football League are well aware of that, and if they are not, they should be.