Look at what has happened to our beloved sport in the past 20 years and compare it to what you believe it will become in the next 20. The HW division is dead and it seems that PPV is just getting more and more expensive. I have faith in the WW division (It will be much better when Gayweather's ass goes away) So what do you think the next 20 years will do for Boxing?
In the next 20 years, the decline of boxing technique that many have warned us about will be complete. Professional boxers will have forgotten how to box completely. They will stare uncomprehendingly at footage of Lennox Lewis throwing punches, before returning to the gym to headbutt each other and pump iron. A few will bemoan the decline of boxing skill. They will be ridiculed as old fogeys. And possibly headbutted.
The technical...finer parts of the game are a lost art with all hwts. remains to be seen how boxing shakes out the next 20 years. Hate to say it but it needs govt control by those who are knowledgable concerning it's history. Eliminate all commissions, back to 8-10 weight divisions as a start. Where the good trainers will come from I have no idea...only a handful of good trainers remain in the US right now.
Ya thats all we need is our joke of a Govt to control what we are barely holding on too. Eliminating all commissions dont sound bad though, with only 8 to 10 weight divisions that would be a good start but I dont ever see it happening, it gonna get worse before it gets better.
Everything goes full circle and a surprising amount of what happens in boxing history is reletive. In most cases boxing's so called evolution is more a case of something gained, something lost. It levels out. A good punch in the face hurts as much now as it always did. People can argue about the over all level, its mainstream popularity but we still get great fights. A great fight is still a great fight if it happened in 1860, 1908, 1938, 1956, 1973 1999 or 2013. Great fights create great fighters. So there will always be great fighters so long as we get great fights. Boxing techniques are not being lost. You could argue that boxing techniques might not be applied so thouroughly but the basics have not changed. Everything has been passed from generation to generation. So what has been lost? The footage of training? Not the film of how a knockout happened. A lot of bare knuckle stuff got fazed out but a lot of that has re-evolved within the smaller gloved combat sports that newer generations will dable in before settling on boxing. Film exists of the greatest fights and can easily studied. What worked once can be reworked to a current relevance. I dont see what has been lost.
Trainers need to have the luxury of being given the funding to work full time with a fighter. It is easier for a trainer to look good when he was working with kids who had been boxing their whole lives in an amatuer system closer to the pro game. People give too much credit to so called "great trainers" but a lot of them were fortunate to work within gyms when New York was the Mecca, they got in with the "right people" and only had time to work with kids who were already the finished article. Who got credit for creating the finished article in the first place? If 90% of the greatest fighters were not trained "cradle to grave" by the same guy that means 90% of great fighters were groomed by other trainers who did not get the credit. The great trainers will argue that they provide "finishing touches" to an already great fighter but it's a whole lot easier to look like a great trainer if you are only ever asked to provide "finishing touches" than start with a blank canvas each time. It's like the guy who puts the wheels on the car taking credit after a thousand men created a masterpiece of car engineering!
You blame this heavyweight decline on lost techniques and inferior coaches. Yet our lighter weight fighters still have many of the "finer points" that the heavyweights lack...even though they have the same coaches (who supposedly also don't know these "lost" techniques). Could you explain this? Not saying you don't have an explanation; I'm just curious what you think the mechanism is.
Its sad we have to turn to the turn of the ****ury (early 1900's) to look for answers..What is lost?..The integrity of the sport for one, and while technique may not be lost everything else is.
Actually, this is a great argument that boxing has been declining. Even though we have a couple great coaches left, most of the work -- as you say -- will be done by lower-level guys. Without a pool of talented coaches at the grassroots level, the fighter won't learn as much when he's passed around by lower-level coaches earlier in his career.