Nat Fleischer: What's the deal ?

Historical importance? I'd say about 90% of those Ring ranking were rather useless in historical sense, where they listed mediocre, often accidental fighters in top 10. I especially dislike that silly trend of counting the results of some particular fighter vs top 10 ranked opponents and that count having a lot of importance for some, without looking into particulars of each fight. Simple method of ranking fighters that is akin to using ring record book or boxrec record concise results to judge a fighter, without knowing his style or the particulars of his important wins and losses.

 

Here we differ.

Although I disagree with a lot of rankings, they are a good tool for constraining a fighter’s position in the division.

A person who ranks fighters purely on a head to head basis, is effectively god in their own little world, but rankings allow you to call bs on their worst excesses.

 

It made people stop thinking, I'd say it's like claiming McDonalds has a lot of historical importance, it is directed at grey mass of people.

 

I can only assume that it made people think more, especially in terms of the rank and file fight fans.

It was the first time they had been presented with any data to constrain the hype.

 

It was just a list of names, with very short explanation few people cared to read (it usually contained little useful info anyway). People didn't know the fighters behind the names most of the time, and usually it had little use for predicting the result of any particular fight that was to come or for a virtual matchup fight.

 

For a guy who knows so much, you seem to see so little.

 

Oh no Dan Daniel was a liar too?
His detective articles were really interesting

 

Just as an example, something that was at hand. From Ring magazine of November 1939:

RATINGS FOR THE MONTH
Here are my ratings for the month ending September 15:

Middleweights
--------
Title Vacant
Al Hostak
Fred Apostoli
Ceferino Garcia
Ron Richards
Ben Brown
Ken Overlin
Ossie Stewart
Eric Seelig
Nate Bolden
Walter Woods


The middleweight class showed Fred Apostoli scoring over Glen Lee in their Pittsburgh meeting. Ben Brown repeated his triumph over Teddy Yarosz in Atlanta. Ken Overlin scored over hard hitting Al Wardlow.
Nate Bolden kayoed Al Globe in four rounds. Walter Woods whipped Frankie Bruno. Harvey Massey whipped Bobby Birch, kayoed Roy Finn in three but was beaten by Tony Cisco. Lou Brouillard scored over Al Sinibaldi. Tony Zale kayoed Milton Shivers in three rounds.
Cal Cagni defeated Roxie Forgione and Wicky Harkins. Fred Henneberry lost on a foul to Dai Jones in three rounds in England. Dale Sparr kayoed Truman Harvey in four rounds.



You think this piece is useful to know middleweight division history?

 

I couldn't say without looking into it in more detail.

 

Now keep in mind you have no internet, no boxrec to look up the records of those fighters. At best you can rely on the ring record book that is yet to be published (annually) that will contain the records of the fighters mentioned above, but even there it'll be just a list of results, with no details.

 

Doesn’t that strengthen my argument?

That these really gave people another piece of information?

 

They gave a list of names, that's all. The writers I was talking about, who were prior to Ring magazine, gave some more information than just names, even if they were doing that mostly at the end of the year. I don't have my archive of PDF's at and right now to look up examples, but from my memory I think you can look up sport pages of New York Evening World and Washington Times or Herald in late December of 1920-1922 at the library of congress site, for examples of such write-ups.

 

I will take your word for it.

What I am arguing, is that it was a positive thing to have a major boxing magazine that produced similar rankings.

The difference being that in that scenario, they couldn't simply be ignored.

 

I certainly hope i am reading this wrong.

Are you saying that you hate that silly trend of rating a fighter in the top 10 just because they beat another figther in the top 10?

 

I hate when fighters are compared based on how many Ring magazine top 10 opponents they beat or lost to.