debunking the myth of louis being completely past it ...

Not quite. Maske never beat a decent cruiser. Film proves there were excellent fighters around. Interest in the sport would have seriously dwindled if the quality was as poor as you would like to believe it was.

 

57 million males had just died. There was a great depletion of talent. They got by with what was left.

 

walcott, charles and archie moore made their name as ATGs during this period. Did they cherry pick? elmer ray, joe baksi, clarence henry, jimmy bivins? Then Layne, Satterfeild, valdes and Baker???

 

good reply, as tough of an era as any very experienced talented Champions but there will always be those picking hairs when they have an agenda

 

I agree.

Marciano may not have beaten the almighty The Brown Bomber, but he did beat a very good, legit contender, which still warrants some measure of credit.

 

Louis was favored partly because Marciano was not that highly regarded at that point in his career, that and Louis reputation. I agree that he had more left in him than Ali had against Holmes but thats not saying much.

Joe was a one handed 37 year old heavyweight who was fighting for the $. He had lost any zip on his righthand but he did still have a good jab and his hook was still potent as he had proven against Lee Savold.

Anyway it was still an impressive showing by Rocky Marciano because he did what he was supposed to do.

 

This post says it all :good

Louis had nine fights on the comeback trail prior to Marciano ,he managed just one ko and 2 tkos, his right hand was no longer the lethal wallop it had been, he relied on his jab and hook .
As Adam says ,the fact that he was competitive just demonstrates how good he was when in his prime.

 

A younger Joe Louis would have got his hands free a bit quicker but he was so utterly crowded as he was in his prime by that other charlie goldman trained swarmer Arturo Godoy that he was made to look much worse than he was against Rocky. Joe was smothered and barged into the ropes but in rounds 3,4,5 Louis changed tactics against Rocky and got a defensive, fending jab going but again there was no room to work off it and the effort drained him.
Rocky was a bad match up for Louis, an extraordinaryly awkward fighter who always would have been both smaller and stronger than Louis.

 

in ww2 around half a million u.s casualties, or <0.5% of the population, 1% of males, a maximum of 5% potential boxers lost.

 

i read somewhere that louis during his comeback only had limited use of his right hand so if he beat the men he did with one hand then its a feat in itself

 

Marciano restricted the use of Louis's right. There was no room to use it. Against more upright conventional contenders Louis was still dangerous post Charles with his right hand, film bares this out. I am sure he scored knockdowns with his right hand during this period.

 

:good how many heavyweight contenders perished in the war?

 

undoubtably many talents killed or injured, not enough to change the american hw scene as much as seamus's post suggested tho.

i think louis was at pretty much finished at world level, the marciano fight was because of his name, rather than his skills/chance of winning

 

I think you will find that a lot of people expected Louis to win.

Yes Louis was way past his best, but I don't think that anybody else would have beaten him at this stage, outside of Walcott and Charles.

 

Although I did read about one South African boxer, forgot the name, boxed in the olympics and won a medal IIRC, fought with the Nazi's and after the war was hung for war crimes. Don't remember if he was a heavyweight tho.