In an interview last week with talkSPORT Boxing, Queensberry Promotions founder Frank Warren said, “We’ve got the best heavyweight stable, I should think, in the last — that anybody’s had in the last, what, 50 years? Going back to Don King days.”
When someone is speaking extemporaneously, I am inclined to cut them slack if their math is a little off. I suspect Warren meant in the last 40 years or so, since King ruled heavyweight boxing in the 1980s.
I also cut someone slack if they unintentionally provide boxing column material. And Warren most definitely did that.
He’s correct that his current roster of heavyweights is exceptional. And he’s correct to pinpoint King’s former stable as the most stacked of modern times. And his statement begs a column-length comparison: Which heavyweight stable is/was superior?
Let’s start by introducing the teams.
The Queensberry side is easy because names, photos and bios are neatly organized on the promoter’s website. The following big men currently fight for Warren:
• Tyson Fury (for now, anyway; Zuffa Boxing is the lead promoter of his comeback fight on April 11, and assorted lawyers are poised to submit invoices related to the former lineal champ’s promotional future)
• Fabio Wardley
• Daniel Dubois
• Agit Kabayel
• Joseph Parker
• Moses Itauma
• Zhilei Zhang
• Derek Chisora
• Lawrence Okolie
• David Adeleye
• Tony Yoka
• Joe Joyce
• Solomon Dacres
For the purposes of this exercise, we can ignore the last five names on that list. They add depth, but they’re fringe contenders at best, trialhorses at worst, and they don’t compare to any of the fighters from the Don King Productions 1980s stable that we’ll be talking about.
But removing those lower rungs of the Queensberry ladder, focusing only on the top eight names, Warren has the heavyweights ranked first, second, third, fourth, seventh and eighth in the current Transnational Boxing Rankings Board ratings, and that doesn’t count Fury and Zhang, who were both recently removed due to inactivity.
Oleksandr Usyk is the lineal champion, and Queensberry does not promote him. But otherwise, if we count Fury as a top-five contender (he would likely be somewhere among the top three if active), Warren has the entire top five beneath Usyk. And he has eight of the top 10 contenders if we count Zhang, who last fought one year and 11 days ago.
The King stable is more complicated, because it’s hard to pinpoint its exact peak moment – and it’s unfair to pit Warren’s stable now against King’s stable from the entirety of the ‘80s. That would be like asking what’s better between Bad Bunny’s last album and the four-disc Led Zeppelin boxed set.
Heavyweight boxing in the ‘80s divides fairly neatly into two eras: the first half ruled by Larry Holmes, and the second half ruled by Mike Tyson (with the relatively brief Michael Spinks heavyweight interregnum bridging the gap).
And King promoted both Holmes and Tyson. But not overlapping. Not really.
King got a piece of Tyson when “Iron Mike” snared his first title belt in November ’86, but didn’t fully separate Tyson from his previous handlers until around the time of the Tony Tubbs defense in March ’88. By then, Tyson had already vanquished an aged and semi-retired Holmes, who didn’t fight again in the ‘80s after Tyson stopped him.
So to say King’s ‘80s stable included both Holmes and Tyson would make for a deeply unfair comparison. It’s one or the other.
And since King didn’t fully control Tyson until the decade was nearly over, and most of DKP’s best heavyweights were in their prime in the first half of the ‘80s, the proper thing to do is to cut Tyson out of the conversation and focus on the later stages of Holmes’ prime (even though he broke free of King for three fights late in his reign).
So that gives King the following fighters:
• Holmes
• Tim Witherspoon
• Pinklon Thomas
• Michael Dokes
• Greg Page
• Trevor Berbick
• James “Bonecrusher” Smith
• Tony Tubbs
No, he didn’t quite have all of those fighters on his roster at once, but they were all his within a window of a couple of years.
“I think Frank could probably legitimately say that he has the best crop of heavyweights since King in the 1980s, but there is still no comparison in my mind. King’s dominance was far greater,” opined British boxing writer and podcaster Steve Hunt, who has some expertise on the subject as the author of 2025’s Heavyweight Title Fights of the 1980s: A Complete History. “The problem with Frank’s position, I would argue, is that he doesn’t control the real champion. King knew that control of the titles was what mattered and having both champion and challenger under contract ensured he would come out on top, no matter the result.”
Indeed, that’s the key factor that favors King. Usyk is The Man at heavyweight, beyond dispute. He is as plainly supreme now as Holmes was in the early ‘80s and as Tyson was in the late ‘80s. And Queensberry Promotions has no stake in him.
King, as Hunt pointed out, made it his mission to promote the champion of the world – and as many beltholders as possible too.
DK couldn’t wrangle up everyone. There were plenty of prominent heavyweights who resisted, who may have had fights co-promoted by King but never gave themselves over to him entirely: Spinks, Gerry Cooney, Gerrie Coetzee, Mike Weaver, for example.
But King had the great majority of the heavyweights who mattered, and he controlled the title conversation at nearly every turn.
And there’s little doubt about it, prime Holmes ranks above anyone in Warren’s present stable (even if we might like to believe Itauma will someday be on that level).
For depth beyond that top spot, however, I’m not so convinced King’s crew was better than what Warren is currently working with. Take away Holmes from the King side of the equation and ex-champ Fury from the Queensberry side, and which set of seven beltholders/contenders would you rather have?
Wardley, Dubois, Kabayel, Parker, Itauma, Zhang and Chisora?
Or Witherspoon, Thomas, Dokes, Page, Berbick, Smith and Tubbs?
(One thing is clear: Which side of the Atlantic Ocean serves as home to the best heavyweights in the world has shifted over the last 40-odd years.)
Name by name, these present highly competitive mythical matchups between good heavyweight fighters who either fell slightly short of greatness in the “lost heavyweights” era or who are, with a possible exception or two, going to fall short of greatness in the 2020s.
It must be noted that any of these comparisons are deeply flawed because we know exactly what King’s guys did or didn’t become, and the jury is out on most of the current crew. We can reach reasonably confident conclusions about Chisora, Zhang, Parker and probably Dubois. But Wardley, Kabayel and Itauma could either claim legit championships and end up in the Hall of Fame, or go down as flashes in the pan who made no more lasting a mark than the Bonecrushers and Berbicks.
Match ’em all up, and there aren’t a lot of easy picks. On a quick gut-reaction prediction game, who do you like? Witherspoon or Wardley? Thomas or Dubois? Dokes or Kabayel? Page or Parker? Berbick or Itauma? Smith or Zhang? Tubbs or Chisora?
I’d believe you if you told me you finished with a 5-2 slate in favor of King’s guys. And I’d believe you if you told me you went 5-2 the other way.
And, to make up for the fact that King had Holmes and later Tyson, whereas Warren does not promote Usyk, you might need to score those matchups 5-2 for Queensberry in order to claim Warren has the superior stable.
The fact is, it’s an unanswerable question, and not only because pinpointing King’s most dominant moment is difficult. It’s unanswerable because whatever we currently think of Itauma, Kabayel, Wardley, maybe Dubois and maybe even Parker, we will think something different about them when we have distance from their careers.
Let’s say Itauma and Kabayel emerge as true greats – not impossible – and eventually engage in an Evander Holyfield-Riddick Bowe-level rivalry that elevates them both and defines the late ‘20s as something of a heavyweight golden age. If that happens, Hunt’s insistence that King’s roster was superior will not age well.
We simply can’t know yet. What we can declare is that Warren has one hell of a loaded heavyweight stable, the deepest for any one promoter since King’s promoting prime.
And if he can figure out how to approach Usyk and trick, threaten or bribe him with a briefcase full of cash until he signs with Queensberry, that would put Warren over the top.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.
