Motivation Quote by Larry Holmes

Holmes isn’t just defending modern heavyweights; he’s defending his own era’s legitimacy against the sport’s favorite nostalgia trap. When he says you can’t “put those guys like Marciano” in with today’s fighters, the provocation is deliberate: it pokes at boxing’s habit of treating past champions like mythic creatures who’d magically dominate any timeline. Holmes, a fighter who lived through the late-70s and 80s talent glut, knows how those comparisons usually work: they’re less analysis than a vibe, a way for fans and promoters to canonize the past and quietly diminish the present.

The phrasing matters. “Those guys” creates distance, not disrespect, and “today’s class” frames modern boxing as a competitive environment with its own standards, not a pale imitation of a golden age. Subtextually, Holmes is arguing that greatness is conditional: shaped by training science, nutrition, larger average athletes, deeper amateur pipelines, rule interpretations, even the economics that determine how often top fighters actually face each other. Marciano becomes shorthand for an era with different bodies, different preparation, different opponents.

Contextually, Holmes is speaking from inside the heavyweight identity crisis that followed Ali and before the Tyson boom fully rewrote the script. He’s also battling the disrespect that comes with being “between” icons. The intent isn’t to erase history; it’s to stop history from being used as a blunt instrument. In boxing, fantasy matchups are a business. Holmes is refusing to let fantasy substitute for the hard, unromantic truth: eras don’t translate cleanly, and that’s exactly why arguing they do is so seductive.