james j jeffries ATG NO!

It's possible that later heavyweight greats would have been a shock to Jeffries if they could be time machined directly from their own day to his.

I tend to go more by how I think fighters might have done against one another if they had come along in each others day. I think '03-'05 Jeffries, 20 rounds or greater, would have been a stiff proposition for any heavyweight who'd have had to actually develop in Jeffries day.

 

Absolute nonsense.

The coloured heavyweight champion when Jeffries won the title was George Byers, who got beaten by a welterweight.

Jeffries did not have to draw the colour line against him, because he was not seen as a credible challenger.

 

Nat Fleischer rated Jack Johnson as the greatest heavyweight of all time4, and Jeffries as the second in 1971.

Historian Tracy Callis rates Jeffries as the greatest heavyweight of all time today, and Johnson as the second.

I don’t agree with either of these men, but I would defend them both vigorously against any accusation that their rankings were motivated by racism.

 

Jackson was washed up, but lets not forgett that Jeffries was green as hell.

It was a risky fight given that he didn't know how far gone Jackson was.

 

Jeffries was pretty green, but it was no secret that Jackson was finished.

 

Debatable whether Byers or Frank Childs was the Coloured Champ when Jeffries won the title on 9th June 1899 .

 

It was widely known that Jackson had a drinking problem, and I suspect that this information probably filtered back to Jeffries. Even so it was Jeffries 8th known professional fight, and Jackson hadn’t lost for 14 years. This was a high risk fight for the young boilermaker.

 

The bottom line is that there was no black contender in the title picture until Denver Ed Martin, and he got beaten by Jeffries sparring partner.

Jeffries was about as absolute as any champion has ever been.

 

What I'm getting from this is that, ESB aside, most boxing writers had Johnson over Dempsey.

 

I see a bit of a mixed picture there.

 

It was widely known that Jackson was on the decline after the Slavin fight his sparring partner Con O Riordan wrote an article to that effect in The Times.
It was entitled The Sad Decline Of Peter Jackson.
It was written in 1892, 6 years before Jackson fought Jeffries

Jackson was a falling down drunk in the UK in 1892 , he then contracted TB
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=jl81AAAAIBAJ&sjid=9RMLAAAAIBAJ&pg=1207,1422560&hl=en

Jackson going into the Jeffries fight had not fought in 3 years and had engaged in only 9 rounds in the last 6 ,so to say he was unbeaten in the last 14 years may be technically true , but is actually meaningless.

 

I accept that Jackson’s drinking problems were well documented, but lets face it so were Sullivans before the Killrain fight, and he still beat the living tar out of Jake Killrain.

Jackson had taken a long layoff, but so had Corbett and Fitzsimmons before some of their major fights, and they still put in world class performances.

Is this really a fight that you want to offer up to your young prospect with eight fights?

I guess Jeffries was young enough to come again if it went wrong.

 

I have absolutely no problem agreeing with your last words, until Martin came on the scene there was no one to challenge Jeffries whom he did not face.
NB Martin was a novice when Armstrong beat him in 1899 . Martin became the coloured heavyweight champ in 1902 , he was a different proposition then, he won and lost to Armstrong ,but should have got a title shot imo.

 

I also think that Martin should have got a shot, but his claim was in the Rhulin class.