Earnie Shavers: 1944–2022

An elegy for the great heavyweight contender of the 1970s, whose transcendent power and strong character outlasted his bad boxing luck

Earnie Shavers: 1944–2022

Boxers, for the most part, are some of the most decent human beings I have ever seen. Boxing, for the most part, is horrible. Rarely is it more horrible than in how rural talent is handled by their “management”? The sport has been haunted by unprincipled hustlers who couldn’t delegate or assign trainers or management to better their fighters because it would mess with their cut. Most of the time, these figures are fathers like Gregorio Benitez, less invested in his son Wilfredo’s health and well-being than in spending his purses on the ponies. Sometimes it’s the cosplaying macho men in Philadelphia in the 60s, and 70’s who thought it was best to leave a generation of middleweight contenders to leave their primes in endless gym wars.

Earnie Shavers labored under the same Ohio scumsphere that bred Don King and ended his career as a fighter mowing the promoter’s lawns. That no one deemed to develop his raw talent, to give him the crab defense he would need to fight inside as a stocky man or teach him how to modulate his power to keep an opponent on his toes, is an indictment of the unforgivingly cruel…