Three-time Olympic heavyweight champion Te?filo Stevenson died of a heart attack last week at the relatively young age of 60. The death was sudden, and he will be deeply mourned by his family and the people of his homeland, Cuba, and by the world of boxing as a whole.
Stevenson?s Olympic wins came in the 1972, 1976 and 1980 Games. He is one of the greatest fighters ever to come from a Caribbean island that is small in population, but is a huge producer of talented boxers. Yet Stevenson never fought a single round as a professional. Because he opted to remain an amateur, the tantalizing question of how he would have fared in the punch-for pay ranks is one that will never be answered.
During the time Stevenson was active, the amateur boxing style was much closer to its professional counterpart than it is now. Today?s computer scoring system, which prefers pitty-pat tapping over power punching, was far in the future. So Stevenson would not have had to make significant alterations to his style to adapt to the professional game.
On the other hand, Stevenson-the-pro would have been fighting during the Golden Age of the heavyweights ? the era of Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Ken Norton, Larry Holmes, Jerry Quarry and Earnie Shavers, among others. Te?filo may well have been the greatest amateur and Olympic heavyweight of all time. But he would need to be all that and more to compete against that august company.
Stevenson could have left the amateurs in one of two ways: defect to a Western country, or receive permission to box professionally from Cuba?s president, Fidel Castro. Castro may well have reasoned that the professional world heavyweight championship would be a feather in the cap of his Communist regime, not to mention a cash cow. In real life, Castro clamped down, and Stevenson stayed put. But what if Stevenson had been able to participate in the Golden Era, one way or the other? How he might have fared would have depended on when he made his fateful decision.
If Stevenson had turned pro after the 1972 Games, he would have faced extremely stiff competition, even though at 6?5? and 220 lbs he would have been one of the biggest heavies of that time. He possessed a solid jab, a thunderous right, and good mobility for a man his size. Still, the Ali of that time would have found a way to beat him. Foreman was an intimidator before Ali rope-a-doped him in 1974. He would have outslugged Stevenson. Frazier was on the downslide, and Stevenson had the physical attributes necessary to give ?Smokin? Joe? a hard time. Norton?s chin would likely have betrayed him once Stevenson?s right made contact with it. Stevenson?s own chin, on the other hand, would have been checked by power-punchers Shavers and Ron Lyle. Quarry would have provided a stiff test that Stevenson might not have passed. It?s conceivable that Stevenson could have won the title between 1972 and ?76. But it?s unlikely that he would have gone undefeated against the cream of the early ?70s crop.
Had he waited until after the 1976 Games to turn pro, Stevenson would have stood a much greater chance to succeed. Ali and Frazier brutalized each other during their 1975 ?Thrilla in Manila,? and neither of them had much left afterward. Foreman didn?t recover psychologically from the defeat Ali laid on him in 1974, and George retired in 1978, only to come back in the 1990s and win the title again at the age of 45. Norton was slowing down, as were Quarry and Lyle. Shavers still possessed dynamite in his fists, but he, too, was past his peak. The only obstacles standing in Stevenson?s way in the late ?70s would have been Jimmy Young and Larry Holmes. The slick-boxing, underpowered Young could possibly have bamboozled Stevenson into a loss. And Holmes had the jab, the skill and the heart necessary to handle the big Cuban in a hard-fought war similar to Larry?s epic title-winning effort against Norton.
As for current heavyweight contenders Tomasz Adamek and Eddie Chambers, who fumbled through a 12-rounder on Saturday that was won on points by Adamek ? Te?filo Stevenson would have beaten both of them on the same night.
