Would Tommy Burns learn new skills in a modern 101 Boxing class?

Maybe he would be the teacher, not the student.

 

He'd learn how to throw arm punches with aplomb!

 

He was heavyweight champion of the world in his prime with around 50 professional bouts. He would be teaching the class.

 

Burns wasn't trying to be a champion of excercise but he was a fighter thru and thru. Not sure how that would go over with today's fitness instructors.

 

He wouldn't learn much. He's just stepped out the time machine from 1906 and he wouldn't be able to keep his eyes off them girls.

 

He would not understand the terminology as that's jargon, not techniques, from more recent history.

 

Before he was hammered by the much larger Johnson,Burns was considered a master of in-fighting.Excellent at getting into range and gliding out again,his footwork was honed from playing top class lacrosse.Burns had the skills to defeat larger men such as Hart and the boxing ability to overcome crafty stylists such as O Brien,aside from advanced nutrition and diet , what would he learn from modern boxing classes?

 

Burns was an excellent fighter, just not much of a heavyweight.

 

Tommy Burns was buried in an unmarked grave,~Grave 3, Plot 451, Balsam Section, Ocean View Cemetery, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. But the record of Tommy Burns is marked. It says that a man who never was heavy enough to be called a heavyweight was fighter enough to rule the heavyweights as Champion.

 

There's been no "evolution of technique" since Burns was fighting.
All the punches and all the defensive techniques were known and written down in books at that time.

There might be better fighters nowadays but no new techniques have been invented or developed through some mysterious "evolution".
Modern boxing has been around 300 years or more.

 

This is only true if you define "technique" very narrowly, as the basic mechanics of certain boxing tactics. But if you think of technique more broadly, such that it encompasses: a) how these mechanics and tactics become routinized in practice; and b) how fighters implement them as components of their overall fight strategies, then there has clearly been an evolution of technique.