My grandpa said that Jack Johnson beats young Mike Tyson

I'll bet if you call up Holyfield and Golovkin, Holyfield will have no desire to run the experiment. Even with his money troubles, I bet you'd have to pay him a damn pretty penny to stand still and take a shot.

Also, the gloves Ketchel was wearing when he floored Johnson were basically horsehair mittens.

 

You do realise that Holyfield is now 55 years old?

 

And? We'd be testing his chin, not his reflexes. But okay, swap him for the 1990 model.

You know, sometimes not every minute condition is painstakingly spelled out in a thought experiment because it can be tedious to go into extraneous detail where common sense can fill in most of the gaps.

 

Jack may well beat Tyson

 

And ..... are you seriously saying that the current 55 year old Holyfield can take a punch as well as he did when he was in his fighting prime?

 

well I'm 54, and my paternal grandfather saw the Johnson-Burns fight as a 28yo.

 

Unfortunately I never knew my grandfather. He died a few years before my father was born.

 

My great grandfather was a huge Jess Willard sized guy who, as an army chef during WWI, is said to have routinely walked about twenty yards from a storehouse to a kitchen with 150 pound sacks of flour under each arm. (He died long before I was born but according to my grandfather this was well attested by my great-grandad's old army buddies.) He'd have been born at just about the right time to challenge Jack Johnson if he'd gone into boxing...

Oddly enough, each of his direct male descendants has been progressively smaller than he. My grandad is 6'5", my dad just barely under 6', and I'm a hair over 5'10".

 

I laughed, Ken. It didn't go to waste.

 

Well if the fight was held in 1912 I'd take Johnson

 

Tyson smokes him in less than 4 rounds. Johnson did not hit hard enough to get Iron Mike's respect, and lacks the chin to last long.

 

I was scratching my head for a bit trying to work that out ...

 

Nothing to work out really. If it's a paternal grandfather, the contradiction (and joke) is obvious; if it's a maternal grandfather, there's no contradiction but the joke might work even better as wry bathos.