YMMV / The Great White Hype

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Despite frequent protests about giving a title shot to someone who has never fought as a pro, this has happened in reality.
  • 1956 Olympic gold medalist Pete Rademacher bragged that he could defeat then Heavyweight Champion Floyd Patterson in his pro debut. Patterson obliged and gave Rademacher a title shot for his first pro fight, and knocked Rademacher out. (Although similar to the film Rademacher had some early success, knocking Patterson down in the 2nd round. Patterson came back and knocked Rademacher down seven times before the fight was stopped in the sixth round.)
  • This almost happened again in 1976 with Teófilo Stevenson after Stevenson won a second Olympic Gold medal for heavyweight boxing, but Stevenson was a Cuban citizen and famously refused to defect from Cuba, which he would have needed to do in order to fight in a professionally recognized bout. (Stevenson later won a third Olympic gold medal, along with various other amateur championships and honors.)
  • More than 20 years after the film, it became a reality again, albeit not for the heavyweight title. Floyd Mayweather fought MMA champion Connor MacGregor, who had never fought a single professional boxing match, under boxing rules. Mayweather, a far more defensive and cautious fighter than the fictional Roper, let MacGregor deplete his stamina before stepping up his own attack, and the referee stopped the fight in the 10th round to keep an exhausted and defenseless MacGregor from being seriously hurt by Mayweather.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The film got a brief resurgence during the lead-up to the boxing match between Conor McGregor (a white, Irish Mixed Martial Arts fighter who never fought as a boxer) and the undefeated boxing champion Floyd Mayweather, a controversial and racially-charged match that was widely derided for being a shameless cash-grab. Like the movie, the Black boxing champ won the fight handily, though rather than get a quick knockout, Mayweather let McGregor gas himself out before defeating him in the tenth round.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Mitchell and his team exposing the corruption and the politics that goes on in The Sultan's organization would no doubt make an interesting mockumentary film.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The film was made during a long era when black fighters dominated heavyweight boxing, including legends like Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, and Lennox Lewis. Various characters mock the idea of a Caucasian heavyweight boxing champ as unthinkable. At the time the film was made, the last white heavyweight champion of note was Rocky Marciano, who had retired 40 years before.^note Gerrie Coetzee (1983) and Ingemar Johansson (1959) had both also been champions, but essentially just for one fight each, and neither were unified so they tend to be glossed over or shrugged off. Similarly, Tommy Morrison briefly held the WBO heavyweight title, but the WBO was not considered a credible boxing organization at the time, and often crowned "champions" that were blatantly inferior to the champions recognized by rival sanctioning bodies. Since the retirement of Lennox Lewis in 2004, white boxers have arguably dominated the heavyweight scene mostly in the form of fighters from the former Soviet Union. The Ukrainian Klitschko brothers held the heavyweight division hostage for over ten years before passing the torch to the white Englishman Tyson Fury and fellow Ukrainian Oleksandr Usyk, and fringe titlists and top contenders also tended to be disproportionately Eastern European.^note Nikolai Valuev, Ruslan Chagaev, Alexander Povetkin, Sultan Ibragimov, Siarhei Liakhovich, Oleg Maskaev, and Murat Gassiev, among others. Someone saying that a Caucasian champion is impossible would seem like the outlier today, rather than the other way around.

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