Ho-Hum heavyweight

Philadelphia, PA (Sports Network) - Forget the "recognized" world championship.
It's small potatoes by comparison.
Lurking just below the grimy surface of the heavyweight division these days, there's a seamy underworld of overblown prospects, fringe contenders and over-the-hill impact-makers still plugging away for one last chance.
Evander Holyfield and Henry Akinwande kept their battle for kingpin status in the latter grouping alive on Saturday night, each scoring one-sided 10-round decisions against hand-selected opponents with little chance of upsetting the 40-plus apple carts.
Holyfield, 44, swept scorecards against journeyman Lou Savarese on a PPV show from El Paso, while Akinwande - a 6-foot-7 Brit making his home in Tallahassee, Fla. - performed a similar, albeit less-publicized number on Ukrainian pug Andriy Oleinyk.
The 41-year-old stylist earned the milestone 50th win of his career against the 12-8-1 Oleinyk in Moscow, going 10-for-10 in the eyes of all three judges in his first outing since dropping the IBF's intercontinental crown to Leg Platov last November.
That title was the most recent in a series of second-tier jewelry for the Londoner, who's also held the British Commonwealth, EBU, WBO, WBC/Fecarbox, WBC international and WBN intercontinental crowns while going 50-3-1 since his debut in 1989.
Still, he'd hock the trinkets for another crack at full-fledged WBC laurels and a chance to right the wrongs of a five-round clinch fest against Lennox Lewis - which ended in the passive challenger's disqualification in July 1997.
Only two men have beaten Akinwande since the Lewis debacle - Platov and, ironically enough, Oliver McCall (KO 10 in November 2001) - whose own go-round with Lewis had ended via teary fifth-round surrender just five months earlier.
McCall, for his part, has lost just once in 26 outings since his breakdown and actually moved closer to an improbable return to credibility with a 12-round decision over Sinan Samil San in a WBC eliminator on June 16 in Ankara, Turkey.
Meanwhile, coming up on the outside of the 200-plus pound scrap heap is hulking slugger Francois Botha, who'll end a nearly five-year ring exile tonight with a scheduled 12-rounder against one Bob Mirovic at the Carousel Casino in Temba, South Africa.
The outing - for the WBF's vacant interim title - is the first for Botha since he ended a 51-bout run with an eight-round TKO loss to Wladimir Klitschko in March 2002 and a 10-round stalemate against Clifford Etienne four months later.
The now 38-year-old Botha, like McCall and Akinwande, was also stopped in a grab for Lewis's top-spot status, falling in two non-descript rounds in a WBC/WBO/IBF championship fight in London in July 2000.