FLOAT LIKE A BEE
his toughest test to date in Italy’s Guido Vianello and emerged with a clear-cut unanimous decision victory. “I feel like there’s always a lot of things that I can work on, and I think that fight gives a great platform for me to start building more,” Torrez stated. “But, with that being said, Guido was kind of a staple name as a contender. He fought some really good guys and he had some great fights with some of the guys that are in the top 10 as well, and I’m really proud of the accomplishment of winning that. And I do think that it kind of put me in contention for a lot of these top-10 guys.” He’s right. But here’s the catch: When Torrez gets to that top 10, he will find himself as the lone American challenging a group of contenders hailing from the U.K., New Zealand, Germany, Croatia, China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Nigeria, and led by Ukrainian Oleksandr Usyk. Richard, how does it feel to be the Great American Hope? “I don’t really know if I see myself as a great American hope,” said Torrez, not exactly comfortable with having the dreams of a nation placed on his shoulders. “I see myself as just the kid from a small town in the USA with big dreams, big aspirations and who is working hard to achieve that. And if people want to get behind that train, then I’m all for it. But I’m not really promoting myself as the great American hope, just the everyday guy that worked hard and put his nose to the grindstone.” It’s understandable. Having a 250-plus-pound man trying to punch you in the face is stressful enough. Navigating the business adds to that. And now we want him to rescue American boxing as well. So, how did we get here in the land
that produced some of the sport’s great heavyweights? Is it as bad as it looks? “The heavyweight division in the United States is basically dormant,” said Lou DiBella, a Hall of Fame-inducted promoter and television executive who ran the boxing program at HBO during perhaps the last golden age for American heavyweights in the 1990s. “The truth of the matter is everyone wants to talk about the greatness of
Usyk, and I’m on board with that. But if you go to the average person in the United States, they cannot tell you who the heavyweight champion of the world is. And it’s even worse than that; the average sports fan cannot tell you who the heavyweight champion of the world is. And that’s the quantum difference between boxing in America in 2025 and boxing in America in 1995, and particularly boxing in America in 1975.
“The power of the heavyweight champion of the world has diminished in terms of his stature in the general sports world in that same period of time. But nothing like it’s diminished in the United States.” Among the U.S. contingent are former titleholders Deontay Wilder and Andy Ruiz Jr., Torrez’s Top Rank stablemate Jared Anderson, Michael Hunter and the man who oddly still
Torrez lost to Bakhodir Jalolov in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic final.
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