When it comes to picking the best of all time, people tend to disagree about which system is the most reliable for ranking fighters. Some people believe The Ring is still the Bible of Boxing, while others tend to prefer the more nascent Boxrec.com. I've heard criticism of both organizations. There really is no objective opinion, and when barroom arguments erupt about who should occupy the top spots, there tends to be a generational gap as well. I love and respect Bert Sugar, and keep copies of his works on my bookshelf, but the old timer's bias is something we've all encountered; I personally have trouble when it comes to ranking fighters who were barely, if ever, seen fighting on film.

Boxrec's all-time list includes eight Americans occupying the top ten spots, with the coveted number one slot rightfully held by Muhammad Ali. Charitably excluding champion Wladimir Klitschko from the The Ring list, two Americans in total are featured in the current top ten. They are Eddie Chambers and Chris Arreola. The third American in the triumvirate of possible champions is Kevin Johnson, and though he went the distance in a defensive snoozer against Vitali Klitschko, he showed much less heart than a game Arreola, who at least went out on his shield via a TKO stoppage.

All three of the American fighters mentioned are good, respectable boxers. None of them, however, has or will ever beat a Klitschko. An American will not get the crown in the most historic division until the brothers retire, or perhaps stay past their sell-by date, and get retired by someone who wouldn't have stood a chance against them in their prime. So what happened to the American heavyweight, and why does it matter?

Answering the first question is tricky, but the second one is easier. Quite simply, heavyweight boxing lacks an international star unless an American occupies the throne. Wladimir Klitschko sells out sixty-thousand seat capacity stadiums in Germany and breaks television records in European terrestrial markets, but Ross Greenburg, HBO, and the American general public have no desire to watch him fight.

Excluding Manny Pacquiao, the last time people who didn't follow boxing wanted to see a fight was when Mike Tyson was starring in his own video game. So how did Don King go from "Kid Dynamite" to promoting the "Beast from the East," Nikolai Valuev? Part of the answer may lay in the allure of other sports.

The NBA 2010-11 salary cap is $56.1 million. The NFL's 2010-11 cap was a similar figure of $58.040 million. But there is no such thing as a typical salary in boxing. The world's most elite fighters make roughly between $1and $20 million per fight. Further down the trough, prospects and contenders can rake in between $50,000 to half a million dollars for an outing. Throw shady management, breach of contract, underpayment lawsuits, and purse withholdings into the mix, and the figure can be halved or brought down to zero. Even a naive teenager, choosing between boxing and basketball, knows that boxing brings a lot of baggage with it.

The average weight of an NFL-league player is 248 lbs. In the NBA, the mean weight is 221 lbs. These are your potential heavyweights being lured onto the court and onto the field and away from the ring.

Basketball, Football, and other non-combat sports have refs, just like in boxing, but what they don't have is judges. The Saints never played the New York Giants for four quarters, scored more touchdowns, and then huddled together waiting for the decision, only to find their team robbed by a judge who seemed to have watched an entirely different game. This happens all of the time in boxing, as we all know. Your chances of being screwed, both out of money and deserved acclaim, are higher in boxing than in probably any other sport.

If this all weren't enough, Mixed Martial Arts has exploded over the last couple of decades, luring away those kids interested in combat sports rather than basketball or football. Before the rise of MMA, choosing boxing would have been a no-brainer for a young man interested in fighting. Bob Arum claims that because UFC is not a publicly traded company, their supposed pay-per-view buys should be taken with a grain of salt, but one would have to be blind to not see how much traction the sport has gained in just the last few years.

Some gyms feature both boxing and MMA programs, but if you can find two gyms, one dedicated solely to each sport, notice the subtle differences in age demographics. Boxing tends to skew older, with mostly fighters in their late twenties, thirties, and early forties. On the other hand, it's not abnormal to see Boy Scout-aged kids involved in group lessons on takedowns, arm bars, and grappling moves, preparing themselves to become the next MMA superstars.

Senator John McCain, who labored to give heavyweight Jack Johnson a posthumous pardon, is one of the few public figures who has been a positive ambassador for the sport of boxing. He suggested that "college boxing would be good for the fighters," but how many colleges provide scholarships for pugilists?

One of the perhaps most astute boxing analysts, Steve Farhood, said, "All the Soviet kids have an excellent grounding, they can all box and they think like boxers. They have better fundamentals and I can't believe I'm saying that." The great trainer Emmanuel Steward echoed these sentiments, recalling that when he first began training Heavyweight Champ Wladimir Klitschko, Wlad responded, "Why are you trying to teach me things I learned when I was twelve years old?"

I hate to bash my own countrymen and accuse them of comparative laziness, but when the weigh-in for the fight billed as "No Mercy" commenced and Cristobal "The Nightmare" Arreola stood next to "Dr. Iron Fist," the contrast was like night and day. Arreola is not, as David Haye asserted, a "disgrace." But with his love handles and loose chest muscles, he just didn't look like a warrior up there.

At the end of the day, before even wondering when the next Ali or Tyson will appear on the scene, I think we might want to collectively consider going on a diet.