Vasiliy Lomachenko announced his retirement late last week and, for me, the only takeaway from that news was that most people’s takes on the guy and his legacy really suck.
I will say, though, that I got a chuckle or two out of super bloggers and boxing media intelligentsia seemingly walking back the fawning adulation they spent a decade tongue-slathering on the guy.
I suppose “putting Lomachenko’s career into perspective” after the fact is better than never doing so. But it still doesn’t erase the years and years of having “how special...once in a lifetime...all-time great...look, look, he’s so awesome” gushing shoved into our eye slots and ear holes.
For fuck’s sake, we were being crammed with Loma stuffing when the guy was two fights into his pro career, losing to Orlando Salido.
And now some of these Lomamaniacs are really thinking about Lomachenko’s career and wondering aloud “what might’ve been.” This is mostly because they’ve found a new white guy boxing crush-- 3-belt heavyweight champ Oleksandr Usyk.
Usyk is now the guy who is all-time, all-everything, measured against greatness, can do no wrong, “look how special he is!” He’ll be that guy until his career plays out, like Lomachenko’s did, and the realities of what actually went down force re-thinking-- well after the re-thinking actually matters.
But such is this modern boxing world of narratives when it comes to white fighters.
Yeah, I said it. White fighters.
White fighters are judged on a different scale than black fighters.
By some, they are given the benefit of every doubt. Every positive point is exaggerated tenfold, or more. They are sold as harder working, braver than black fighters. They are celebrated as noble warriors who eschew business matters in favor of the pursuit of greatness, unlike black fighters, who are frequently portrayed as shiftless and cynical.
When Artur Beterbiev and Oleksandr Usyk were as inactive as the Charlo brothers, it was the Charlos who were painted as lazy and/or disinterested. When Gennady Golovkin intentionally maneuvered around high-end boxers in favor of more tailor-made opposition, not a negative word was uttered. On the other hand, GGG’s black peers-- and there are a list too long to mention-- were lambasted viciously as “ducks” if it was even marginally believed that they weren’t fighting someone they should fight.
I could go on and on.
This is not a new dynamic in boxing. This white/black double standard dates back to the very beginnings of the sport. Even a legend like Joe Louis had to be schooled on the “right” way to be a “colored” fighter in a sport run by white people and covered by white media-- be quiet, be humble, don’t talk business, and, in general, don’t play into the stereotypes of the black fighter.
But there’s also an opposite, if not entirely equal, reaction to the action of white fighter favoritism.
By some, white fighters are regarded as perpetually over-hyped, overrated, and with artificially inflated bodies of work. Because of that, everything about them-- skill, raw ability, resume-- is questionable to varying degrees.Vasiliy Lomachenko falls squarely into this white/black dynamic.
So, then, how do we accurately gauge Lomachenko’s place in boxing history and his level of goodness/greatness if most everyone’s assessment is suspect?
Not to be too philosophical here, but maybe the secret in coming to a reasonably conclusive answer to that is in not even trying to gauge something that is inherently NOT gaugeable. We can’t measure him against historical greats without dipping into so many hypotheticals and assumptions that the effort comes off more like science fiction. And if everyone is judging everything about him on a sliding scale, how would it ever be possible come to any honest, fair conclusion?
For me, a little bit of everything is true...and a little bit of everything is false.
Lomachenko WAS overhyped and given credit where credit had yet to be deserved. However, his professional body of work, limited to only 21 fights, was deep and substantial. Essentially, he started his run right at the point where top fighters start making their high-water marks and he skipped over the early part of a career where he would’ve been fighting part-timers, club fighters, and journeymen.
Of his three losses, all were reasonably debatable and infinitely explainable. He was out-savvied by Orlando Salido in just his second pro fight. He was outgunned by a younger, bigger Teofimo Lopez, but still managed to come back and make the fight close. Against Devin Haney, he was essentially a super featherweight fighting a younger, fresher junior middleweight who was on the cusp of pound-for-pound consideration at the time-- and many felt (myself included), that he should’ve come away with the close decision win.
Having said all of that, though, the truth is also that he never beat anyone he wasn’t favored to beat.
Talent/Skill-wise, it was all there and you’d have to be blind and/or willfully ignorant not to see it. But he wasn’t all that much more gifted and/or skilled than any number of elite-level fighters of his day. His angle-oriented, footwork and reflex-reliant style was not something veteran boxing observers hadn’t seen before despite media incessantly raving about how once-in-a-lifetime his performances were.
Ultimately, his run as a meaningful elite-level boxer was longer than most, but his signature wins during this time haven’t aged all that well.
Is Lomachenko a Hall of Famer? Yeah, but so what?
How does he measure up to the all-time greats? Who cares and how would you even calculate that?
This may be the reason I’m not invited into any boxing historian clubs (among many other reasons), but I feel no compulsion to rate or rank fighters or to dive into the spit bucket time machine to stack them up against fighters of the past in what will always be nonsensical apples-to-oranges comparisons.
I enjoyed watching Lomachenko fight. It was also frustrating to see so much bullshit-- positive and negative-- attached to his name.
That should be enough.
Got something for Magno? Send it here: paulmagno@theboxingtribune.com