A Marciano comeback?

I think Rocky had three good fights left in him but in those days he needed at least two fights a year to maintain that. The era where a fighter can take years off and return had not been invented yet. A career was built on regular fights against lower levels of opposition to more time off between Winning harder fights to the stage where there was a fine line between lack of activity and maintaining the ability to still beat good fighters.

That's all changed now because the competition has changed. Matchmaking prevents higher percentage of competitive bouts per career, advanced training and diets can artificially prolong a career and higher levels of less experienced fighters, slower paced fights, emphasis on size over speed all means older fighters can extend a career now.

After a year out, Rocky goes from having two or three fights left in him to one good fight left in him ...if he starts his career over from the beginning.

I think Rocky worked that out for himself and decided against it. There was a window where he needed to fight in order to maintain what he still had and that window closed when a worthwhile payday could not be found before a deadline he set himself.

Rocky was human. If he was forced to come back to pay debts like Joe Louis he probably would not have done as well as Joe Louis did on his comeback.

 

didnt i read somewhere he was offered a fight against johannson and actually went into training for it, only for him to quickly realise the game was up? Im sure i read that somewhere

 

yup, he tried to get in shape but his back wasn't letting him.

That and the thought of Sonny Liston becoming a contender surely had him running down the doctors for a sick note.

 

Marciano was at his best in the Moore fight imo. He would have knocked Patterson out had he continued on for another year or two.

 

It was an article he wrote for the Boxing Illustrated after Ingo had ko'd Floyd. He said, he tried to get into shape but couldn't recapture the form he wanted to be in to fight again and so he decided against it.

 

Two years is a long time in boxing ,he had been stunned by Moore, was cut once again,and was having back problems . He had irrevocably fallen out with his manager and didn't trust him with his purses.

 

I'm just going by how he did in the Moore fight. Not taking into account any of that outside of the ring stuff.

 

Unfortunately it has to be taken into account.
He gradually beat down and exhausted a 39/41 years old, [depending on whether you believe him or his mother,] fighter who ,by his own admission was past his best and who said, in a taped interview his legs were gone when he fought Rocky. He was floored and cut in that fight,and admitted he was stunned when he got up.A year after his title shot, he challenged Patterson and was despatched pretty clinically in just 5 rounds.That result does not bode well for Rocky taking on Floyd another year after that.

 

Rocky dominated Moore all the way imo except for the knockdown. Moore was a tough fighter even at the time he fought Rocky so 8 rds isn't unreasonable to knock a guy out. Its not like Moore was a defenseless old man, he was still going strong.

Whatever it may be with his back problems and such, I think he would have given Floyd a beating if he could maintain the quality he was in the Moore fight.

Also, Moore's word isn't that reliable. I just watched an interview of him saying that Rocky was 15 years younger than him. That means Rocky was 23-26 years old! One of the many lies I have seen him tell.

 

Rocky didn't have the luxury of fighting a Moore that suffered a beat down by Rocky.

 

There's a story that Marciano considered a comeback in 1959 because it was in June of that year that his contract with Al Weill finally ran out - at last he would have been able to fight and not give away 50% of his purse.

 

Moore is one of the few ,if not the only fighter who seemed to perform as well after his Marciano fight as he had in it.My point is Floyd kod Archie a year after the Marciano fight and now a poster is suggesting that 2 years after fighting Moore, Marciano would beat Floyd , that is a big assumption imo.

 

Going off of Marciano's performance against Moore it isn't.

 

Since he didn't come back is probably a good sign he wasn't too confident in his chances.