Old school knowledge(magazines) vs New School (internet)

the magazines were great.. There was not much debating then, since I didn't have anyone to talk boxing with.. I would go get KO or ring and read it in the car and eat lunch. It was a great time. I read it from cover to cover.

 

yeah it is always that way isn't it? And most people swear by the era they grew up with. Which is why ATG p4p lists are really nonsense. There is no way to really rate anyone fairly..

 

Honestly, I haven't seen a boxing magazine on a news stand in quite some time.

I don't bother reading the Ring online, either.

Yeah, the Ring had correspondents that travelled all over the US via automobile - JR Jowett, Eric Bottjer (now a big time matchmaker), etc. They seemed like they had a tight nit fraternal thing going - and they were very literary.
Then, you had the correspondents from around the world. The writing was top notch. The only drawback was you were reading about it two months after it had taken place.

I really don't follow current boxing much at all so I can't really compare the writing of the Ring today with say the '80's-early 2000s. I'll take your word for it that it has gone downhill. I posted an article by former Ring Editor Ivan Goldman, a few months back, where he said the Ring has essentially become a mouthpiece for Golden Boy Productions. It's a shame.

As for the websites, no I can say the writing is not as good as KO, Ring, Boxing Illustrated back in the day.

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Yeah, good Internet writing on boxing is hard to come by. It's been a few years since I've read any of their articles, but I was really impressed by Jimmy Tobin and some of the other guys writing at the Cruelest Sport blog though.

 

I sure wish I kept my brother’s and later on my own collection of old boxing magazines like the Ring, Boxing Illustrated, KO, World Boxing and Big Book of Boxing. As a kid, I just loved reading articles like Larry Holmes vs the Heavyweight greats or later on Mike Tyson vs the Heavyweight greats, plus all sorts of fantasy matchups between the then current stars and the great fighters of the past which is the same thing fans are still doing today on forums like this.

 

90% of time debating mythical matches, instead of sharing primary source information about thousands of fights of famous old-timers which absolutely majority don't know any details of, other than what's in the record books or boxrec. As though it is difficult, with lots of online newspaper archives out there, for every one to look up one fight a week, or two weeks, and share that knowledge with everyone else. No, we'll better waste another lifetime debating Ali-Louis, Dempsey-any-modern-heavyweight, whatever.

 

To each their own.

 

Anybody else subscribe to the 90's Fightnews newsletter? It much more uptodate than any of the glossy mags but in the pre and early internet days. I lived for that thing showing up in my mailbox.

 

What kind of information did they contain? Why did you look forward to em' so much? When did they stop?

 

They were the most uptodate info. If you followed the Asian, Latin American. European or African circuit, they were indispensable. They dug deep and you got results within a week or so. Tiny print and tons of information.

Don't know when they stopped or if they morphed into the website. I hit the road in the latter 90's and didn't have a stable address for a while.