Well he would be just another tall stiff who didn't know how to fight then and lose to the more overall skilled smaller ones.
Tua had a pretty good chin and very good power, but he could be out-boxed. How good was Corbett? and his era is a matter of opinion but he did beat some great fighters of his era. Tua was not great but had power and at 5'10 quite a powerhouse. Can he get to Corbett ? Did he have the alleged reflexes and power of Jeffries? I guess it all depends on the era you buy into
I wish that I could bring back Corbett from the dead and watch some Tua highlights with him, and then watch his face while I told him that he had to fight Tua.
Whenever we speak of 'evolution' too much emphasis is put on posture, where the hands are, how they move etc., as if they are the absolute factors which determine success. It's hit and not get hit and there are many different ways of doing this. Underpinning this classic rule is intuition. The likes of Jim Corbett, Jim Driscoll or Benny Leonard had something innate that transcended fundamentals. Had Roy Jones fought in the 1890s, and all that remained were a few minutes of film of him shifting about throwing hooks, the naysayers would sternly proclaim, "That messy style of trying to bomb you with hooks and a low guard would be picked apart today." With eras as far removed as Corbett's and Tua's I always think it's only fair if they meet halfway, say 1950, for an even break on the rule changes. With that established I would have to go with Corbett who was, by an measure or in any era very fast and very hard to hit clean, to outpoint Tua over 15 rounds.
Would those highlights include the Lewis fight, and the Byrd fight? Part of the problem is that Tua's fans watch highlight reels of him knocking out cans, then imagine the faces of the all time greats on their bodies.
I strongly disagree. What you're ignoring is that one generation's brilliant, transcendent intuition can become another generation's rote fundamentals. Techniques that were huge tactical advantages in the earliest era would be less so in others. Nowhere is this more clear than in the case of Corbett, who was fighting against men completely untrained to handle brilliant tactics and techniques that are now garden variety.
And I'm sure if we saw highlights of Corbett we wouldn't be shown him getting KTFO on four occasions...
we certainly would because Showing the likes of a 6'5 monster 250 pounder like lewis is what it took to beat him while still in his prime,corbett would've ran out of the room then and there!
No, but we could find key fights of his career where he didn't loose, or get made to look bad. We can only make Tua look good, by showing him against B tier opposition.