an Olympic bronze at the 2008 Beijing Games after just 35 amateur bouts, the World Council’s version of the heavyweight championship after 33 professional fights, a total of 10 successful title defenses – one more than Mike Tyson and Joe Frazier – and career earnings in excess of $100 million.

This improbable journey ended at 3:26 on Sunday morning in the al-Nafud desert, more than 7,500 miles from the aluminum-sided gym where it began, when he was defeated by a cement-fisted colossus named Zhilei Zhang, who outweighed him by nearly 70 pounds.

The 38-year-old American didn’t formally announce his retirement after his fourth defeat in five fights, escaping the Kingdom Arena into the Riyadh dawn without speaking to the media, but some things don’t need saying.

It doesn’t take an expert to see that his race is run.

Much like in December’s listless performance, he appeared mentally checked out from the opening bell, a timid silhouette of the charismatic knockout machine once capable of ending a fight at any second.

A light had gone out.

In reality, his run as an elite heavyweight ended three years ago with the finale of his epic trilogy with Tyson Fury, their third encounter in 34 months, each filled with heart-pounding drama with no fewer than nine knockdowns in all.

When it was finished, he left a part of himself in the ring he’d never get back.

You could probably say the same for Fury.

On one hand, his career postmortem could be framed in terms of what might have been.

What if he’d found the sport earlier in life? What if he’d come from a boxing hotbed instead of a backwater with a negligible record for producing quality fighters? And more practically, what if he’d prioritized a training setup that always seemed lacking, most recently sacking the former Olympic champion Mark Breland in favor of the unproven Malik Scott?On the other hand, there’s a credible argument that he is one of the great overachievers in all of American sport.

From the start, there was something endearing and almost quaint about his nickname – the Bronze Bomber, proudly invoking his third-place finish in Beijing – given the often supercharged egos of top prizefighters.

(If you mentioned Floyd Mayweather Jr’s 1996 Olympic bronze within earshot, for instance, he’d probably have a stroke.

)In the simplest terms, he was a deeply flawed boxer, guided masterfully by manager Shelly Finkel, who became perhaps the most devastating puncher in the sport’s centuries-spanning history.

At one point, he was undefeated in 40 professional fights with 39 wins inside the distance, the highest ever knockout percentage for a heavyweight with that many bouts.

Not unlike a thunderbolt serve in tennis, power is the equalizer in boxing that can compensate for average marks in nearly every other category.

That proved critically important for him, whose late introduction to the sport left him without the technical foundation ingrained in many fighters before their teenage years.

If he’d come about in the first half of the 20th century, before boxing’s gradual retreat toward the margins of American life, there’s no question he would have been one of the country’s most famous athletes.

These days, a fighter needs a special something to truly crossover into the cultural mainstream, but his crowd-pleasing, made-for-YouTube knack for separating opponents from their senses was somehow not enough.

Outside the ropes, he wasn’t stylish.

His Alabama drawl was mistaken for dim-wittedness.

Not even his knockout-friendly approach was enough for him to become a truly reliable box office attraction, a fact that Fury needled him with relentlessly and with cruel intentions.

All of it created a chip on his shoulder which only grew as the years passed.

That long-simmering resentment prompted him to overcompensate with the media, leaning into a villain’s role that never really fit.

He made increasingly bombastic statements which often backfired.

When he memorably said that “I want a body on my record” – plainly telling an audience of millions that he wanted to kill an opponent in the ring – his public perception took a southbound turn while he was widely shunned by a boxing community all too familiar.

His almost comical explanations for his defeat in the second Fury fight, including that his ornate ring walk costume was too heavy, drew ridicule and inspired memes.

But none of it squared with the man I knew from our conversations: the sensitive, soft-spoken, introspective father who put his health on the line for family.

He never quite achieved the all-time greatness his cultists proclaimed, nor was he quite as bad as insisted by the armchair critics who vastly outnumbered them.

In the end, he was a country kid who extracted as much as possible from his natural talent, went from rags to riches, brought loads of excitement for more than a decade to a heavyweight division that needed it, and left an indelible mark on the sport.

In a cruel trade where happy endings are few and far between, that’s plenty good enough.