History changed if any of these Soviets had gone pro?

Being an American sorry to say I've never heard of any of those dudes, but they looked like good fighters...:deal

My only question is why in the hell didn't number 4 go pro, if he beat Valuev and the Klitchlo bros??:huh

 

They would have been great fighters and sped up the process that would have taken away the stranglehold the US had on the heavyweight division that we see today.

 

The Russians started competing in the Olympics in 1952 with no great success in the heavyweight division in the fifties and sixties. Hard to see them making a great impact at the professional championship level until at least the seventies.

"would have taken away the stranglehold the US had on the heavyweight division that we see today"

This does assume that the Eastern European domination of recent years is due only to the influx of superior Eastern Euro fighters. That is not, I think, the only cause. Boxing has simply fallen off the radar in the US. It is no longer a mainstream sport and so I don't think America produces the type of heavyweights it used to.

 

Well, the Olympic champions in '52, '56, & '60--Sanders, Rademacher, and De Piccoli were flops in the pros. Hard for me to see guys who couldn't beat them dominating the pros.

Boxing was still pretty popular in the seventies and eighties in the US and I think at that time a mainstream sport, if slipping in popularity.

It is hard to think of a really top American heavyweight born later than the 1960's.

 

I think we can see by the Soviet dominance in the heavyweight division that there would have certainly been an impact and some of these guys would have picked up a belt or more. I think Alex Mirohnichenko lost to Oleg in the pros but these guys all had the potential to rearrange history, especially in the Greg Page, Mitch green,Tony Tubbs days

 

I honestly think that if the Soviet Union had not collapsed, we might have seen a situation a bit like the story line of Rocky 4 unfold.

The best professional heavyweights would have been so weak, and the best amateurs so strong, that Moscow would have made the calculation that they had an amateur capable of defeating the heavyweight champion.

 

Actually, Miroshnichenko did turn pro. He won 20 fights or so. Then he got knocked out by Oleg Maskaev in Maskaev's pro debut (which shows how mis-managed Maskaev was from the start - but that's another story), and he never fought again.

About 10 years later, Miroshnichenko was murdered. (Rumors at the time were the Russian mob killed him, but I think that story was squashed.)

I've been looking for copies of Miroshnichenko's pro fights for a while. I was hoping at least the Maskaev fight was filmed.

i always wondered why Lezin didn't turne pro. He looked very good against the Klitschkos and Valuev. Wlad beating him in the Olympics was a big upset at the time.

I think Igor Vygotsky was doomed, kind of like Henry Cooper. Igor's losses were mainly due to cuts. I don't know if his skin would've held up against the best pro fighters, if it couldn't against amateurs.

 

Ya we would see klitschko or medzhidov sent over to murder Americans

 

Some would've been very good. Some would of totally flopped.

 

I have a hard time basing any professional success on an amateur record. They are two different animals and one is not a good predictor of the other. The idea that the ONLY factor in eastern european success today is the opening of the iron curtain is tunnel vision. The opening of iron curtain coincided with a major decline in interest in boxing in the United States and a dramatic decrease in the number of talented trainers, gyms, and fighters overall here. It still took a decade + for the old eastern block to start developing really good talented trainers and its no coincidence that the vast majority of those eastern block fighters migrated to Germany (which had the benefit of an established west German professional boxing culture). The idea that those eastern block countries could magically lower the iron curtain and start making an impact on the sport professionally overnight is ridiculous because they simply didnt have the trainers or experience at the professional level to do that. Even now a lot of these guys coming out of there are basically at a developmental level on par with the old stiff jab/right hand European fighters from decades ago. The problem is we have very few smooth, talented, and fundamentally trained boxers in the USA to take advantage of their glaring weaknesses.

 

Couple other things:

Vysotsky lost to Page. Page was only 19 and Vysotsky was 24 and had a lot more experience than Page.
When Vysotsky beat Tubbs Tubbs was only 18 and Vysotsky was 24, again way more experienced. And this brings up the point of contention which was always an issue between Eastern block amateurs and ours and gave a slanted picture of the Eastern block fighters success. Guys like Vysotsky were government trained, housed, funded, etc. They would be recognized as professionals anywhere else in the world and were often men who had spent their sporting life in the "amateurs" competing against boys who trained in the local gyms, fought their way up through the amateur rankings and would then turn professional before a new batch of boys would fight those same Eastern block fighters that stayed in the amateurs indefinately. So every year as those Eastern block fighters gained experience they got to fight a new batch of fighters just moving up and cutting their teeth at world competition level. Thats a huge difference in experience when you have a guy like Vysotsky who at 24 is facing kids 6 years younger.