Shannon Briggs is the Black Hope, apparently. He's the WBO champ and the only heavyweight contender these days who doesn't hail from a region of Europe where they manufacture AK-47s.Here's how the Russians came to dominate the heavyweight division:
There’s no football to claim the hard-nosed big guys, no baseball, less basketball, a lot less money and a superior institutional apparatus for turning big men into competent boxers.Briggs' route:
Asthma has dogged him all his life. “I missed a lot of school,” he says. “I was always sick. I was in the hospital a lot. Asthma kicked my butt.” But if it wasn’t for asthma, he might not be a boxer at all. How did a strapping specimen like him escape being recruited for football? “I couldn’t play, nothing aerobic. Nobody picked me.”Briggs' work ethic shows in his medicine cabinet, which is filled with the drugs he takes to control/compensate for his asthma. They keep him up all night, they make him depressed. And he still apparently stinks after the 4th round.
Another example of how football sucks the talent out of every other sport in the country. Briggs is actually the American hope, too. Let's hope when he fights on June 2, he wears Carl Weathers' big Uncle Sam hat. And does better than Carl.
UPDATE: Holy crap are those Russians tougher than us. We'll all be talking like Malkovich by 2020.
