Myth: Boxing is the only sport where 30s era athletes handily beat modern fighters

It's been more than 50 years since Duran put on gloves. If the theory is correct, he would have been no massed easily by guys like Robert Easter or Linares.

 

How many fighters the size of Henry Armstrong around today would stand much chance against him or beat him ?
There might be one or two, but the rest would be beaten up quite easily.

 

How am I lying?

I've got a functioning pair of eyes and a deep understanding of the sport.

Boxing has evolved. But it doesn't keep evolving every decade. Only a fool would argue otherwise.

 

I never said anything about wrestling.

I said in-fighting, as opposed to clinching and looking for the referee to intervene.

 

Your generalisations are really awful.

Give us some specific timeframes of what eras you're speaking of.

Which fighters are you referring to when you say they were terrible at boxing?

Yes, a fighter who has hundreds of fights obviously burns out quicker. But not every guy from the past fought that many fights. And it works both ways. Because if a fighter fights more often against different styles, he hones his skills without having months out of the ring, and he gains more experience and learns more. There's guys today who can get a title shot without having fought top level guys with different skill sets. So in some cases, when the opportunity comes, they're simply not prepared for it. So fighting less isn't always an advantage.

 

An idiot told me Dempsey could not compete at today's cruiser the other week. Fat 200lb Bellew would no doubt deal with Dempsey according to him.

 

That's a reasonable question to ask. I think across the board boxing has evolved for the reasons outlined by others and there is greater depth of talent too because the sport is more global. Even things like YouTube allows aspiring talents to see the greats in action when in the past they'd only be able to hear or read about them.

But people tend to make the case for today's boxing by comparing a modern-day great with one from the past and assume in these cases there's been an evolution too. I'm not sure that's the case and can't separate a boxer from his era without factoring in the advantages of modern sports science etc. It's a MASSIVE impact, too big to discard for me.

So I guess my answer is two-fold: yes the sport has evolved but the individual outliers from the past deserve respect and deserve a level playing field when compared to the greats of today. Especially when you consider what they did - the styles they evolved - positively impacted those who followed them.

 

What you're saying is a faith-based initiative. The number 8 finisher at Bejing put up a 10.03 which is still head and shoulders above Owens record. It's near midway between Bolt's 9.69 than Owen's 10.3. If you put up a 10.3, you'd be at least 15 feet behind Bolt's 9.69. The starting blocks, surface, and shoes won't make up for that kind of difference.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life...all-appreciate-how-fast-jesse-owens/80523426/

 

They have no concept of the sport.

A fighters D.O.B. has no relevance in any debate.

The only things to analyse are skills, styles and attributes.

 

"Biomechanical analysis of the speed of Owens' joints shows that had been running on the same surface as Bolt, he wouldn't have been 14 feet behind, he would have been within one stride," said Epstein.

Uh. . .

 

20 000 year old Euro level Neanderthal Men would figure the shoulder roll out and beat the crap out of these overrated US boxers.

 

Bolt has the longest stride in history and that sounds kind of like junk science to me.

 

K brah. I don't really care what it sounds like to you, it doesn't effect the validity of the analysis. Maybe if you ever actually tried running or sprinting you'd know how much difference surface makes.

There is always impresion to these things, but within 1 stride is a loss of most of the difference. The majority of the difference comes from surface differences. And that's comparing a specialist professional in Bolt, to a student working part time and also competing in high jump in Jesse Owens. Boxers trained full time and specialised way earlier in history.

 

Well, you singled out possibly the most ahead of his time athlete from back then to say he could still be good today, which I don’t disagree with. This thread is about how athletes in old eras were worse than today and that definitely applies to sprinters as a whole; Owens is an outlier and doesn’t do much to disprove that.