Have boxing skills progressed, or have they regressed?

Certain top fighters do come every century or so, but it doesn't mean things have progressed at all.

Lomachenko is a generational talent, but him beating everyone doesn't mean his time has progressed at all. It just means that he was a generational talent at some point in history.

 

Where are all these Cuban and Russian world champs over the last 20 years?...Your argument about these countiries trainers being better is directed more to amateur boxing than the pro's. I agree with that but the amateurs is a different game to the pro's.

 

the way I look at it is each division in boxing has its peaks and valleys, the same with the sport as a whole. Todays boxers are better athletes, however the skill sets have been declining. Personally I think the sport peaked in the 80s and has been on a steady decline mainly because of the lack of fights, plus the decline of gyms and trainers.

 

The funniest thing is training camp. Training camp today means a guy is lazy and sits on his ass for about 8 months a year and then spends 2 months before a fight getting ready. The skill level has declined, the longevity declined, they say we have improve nutrition, well show me a fat heavyweight from 1960, all I can think of is buster mathis and do you honestly think he would thinner in todays world with all the extra large meals and extra fried and cookie and sugar foods? Gimme a break, nutrition has gotten worse in boxers since the modern era. Gaming the system taking peds or cutting the number of rounds or being overwieght but not drinking water and then rehydrating with iv drips. Its absolutely silly.

While the training equipment is more advanced as is our understanding of the body, the guys who come in with the new training have great physicques but cannot take a punch like bradley. You look at some of the guy lennox lewis fought who were his size or bigger and all muscles and they couldn't last more than a few rounds with lennox who easily dominated them.

Anyone who knows me, knows I am not a Lennox Lover but the fights were not close. Lennox has a belly and carried extra weight and destroyed Vitali. He only ffought 2 rounds in that fight and once he started trying he ripped half of vitali face off. Yet, old washed up mike tyson who was seen partying before the fight, managed to not get cut up by lennox, despite being shorter, older, having suffered a broken back, ribs, popped ear drum etc before fighting lennox. Holyfield after being drummed out by bowe and been in tough fights through all the toughest late 80 and early 90s fighters managed to draw and lose a decision to Lennox. So you see even a washed up fighter from the 90s out performs a top fighter of the last decade.

 

There will always be great fighters and great fights but technically the skills have went as far as they can go a generation or so ago. The best fighters will always be effective weather they use the greatest skill or not.

Newer ways to get into condition have come along and more focus on that might have taken away time spent developing the art. The skill is still there but there is less focus on it and because the nature of profesional boxing requires a manager to groom a prospect on tv competative fights are bypassed at the developent stage of a fighter in many case's.

It used to be that more fights were required to become noticed so something was often held back for bigger fights. fighters often spent more time solving the same puzzle in "treading water" type fights. With smaller gloves you coukd not afford to be hit so many times and with longer rounds against more competitive journeymen you could not afford to waste so many shots.

You can argue that a more skillful and sesoned fighter can be overpowered by the advances of sports science by hydrating an unfair weight advantage come fight time but to do so is to accept skill is less of a factor as it once was.

To some extent it might be but once you have two men both trying to rehydrate extra weight, both using the same training methods, diets, therapists it all begins to neutralize any advantage and all that is lost is the skill.

I am not knocking modern fighters because the talent pool is still there and we do still have great fighters at the top end of the sport. The best fights have and will always be the competative ones and so long as fights are competative we will always get great fights. Its competition that makes great fighters thats one thing you cant change in a science lab.

 

Sometimes we do and sometimes we dont. Less fighters have an inside game now where allfighters used to. We dont see "arm pull turns" anymore or the foreknuckle lead right to the kidney before fighters come inside anymore. We certainly see less work inside because spurt fighting is more fashionable now. Fighting in spurts just was not so effective because seasoned fighters could better predict when a burst was coming and were more happy to exchange with an opponent once a short burst was unleashed. Fighters tend to cover up and use the ear muffs like teddy atlas always says when underfire. Taking turns to hit each others gloves used to be a pointless exersize. Feints are also less in use now. Holding is more popular because it suits the more favoured stop start pace. lots of subtle moves have gone, but it does not mean todays fighters are not good...tbey are! It is really an essential lack of competition early on that is the main problem. Talent is still there. Its mostly just there is too much emphasis on power and less on skill. But then I am encouraged by cross arm defence coming back in vogue and the half guard. There is still hope.

 

I think fighters hold because of poor conditioning mostly. Tyson was the last fighter I really recall seeing using the hold properly. It is the SMALL guy who is suppose to hold on the inside to avoid BEING crushed by the big guy who can just throw his upper body on you and beat you to death. Jack Johnson was an expert of this, he'd hold a small guy in the croux of the arm, then throw hooks and uppercuts out of it. Now big guys use holding to avoid infighting which they are suppose to have learned. The proper way for a short fighter to infight is to ram the head straight into the sternum, grab the arms or stick his gloves in the croux of the arm and then punch him with uppercuts to the belly. When the tall guy tries to get down low, short guy then backs off and swings that uppercut to the chin.

Guys today really don't know how to fight, they get inside and clinch the tall guy inside of infighting him. The holding of Klitschko is not 100% his fault, lots of it is, but alot of it is guys without skills who do not know how to fight a bigger guy on the inside so are glad to clinch him back. But Klitschko is not exactly infighting back.

 

This always makes me laugh, as this claim has been put forward in every era, since gloved boxing began. People always believe, that boxing reached its zenit when they were young. Just look at Nat Fleischer's All-Time rankings, which favours pre-WWI fighters to such an extent, that it becomes farcial.

Here's what former bantamweight champion Harry Forbes had to say about "modern" boxing in an interview with the Tacoma Daily News - on Nov. 22, 1911:

"The boxers today do not know how to fight. In the old days, when the bell clanged for the beginning of a bout, the boxers did not get together like a couple of engines in a head-on collision. They sparred around a bit and tried to figure out the other fellow. When they saw an opening they led. They didn't rush into clinches and try to cave in the other fellow's ribs with inside blows or try to crack his neck with smashes to the base of his brain. That isn't fighting. The fighter today believes that endurance is the thing. He studies and hardens himself for the purpose of being able to take a beating and be classed as a 'good, game, willing fellow.' The old fighter was a boxer, who seldom wasted a punch. He studied generalship and the art of landing punches that would prove effective. A fighter trained in the old days to be able to land effectively from any angle, and when they did hit, every blow carried a sting with it".

In other words, as early as 1911 modern boxers sucked!

 

True... but there are still a lot of "historians" today suffering from the dreaded Nat Fleischer syndrome. Which, as we know, often leads to widespread old timer nuthuggery.

 

Today's fighters are faster, stronger, and smarter. As time goes everything progresses whether we agree and feel some type of attachment to the past. All athletes improve as time passes on, new studies are always occurring and information is reach faster. The rest of the world has caught up as well when it comes to valuable information and training and nutrition methods, making fights more competitive. I feel today's fighters are more versatile, some could bang, brawl, or box when ever they need to depending on the opponent. As in the past most likely would have been categorized as a boxer or a brawler.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b0yHvw-vW0

Floyd dreams of being able to fight like this. Marciano had brilliant defense on the FRONT FOOT. Floyd on the other hand needs to run away to have good defense.