Could Heavys like Jeffries, Corbett, Fitz hang with the heavys over the last 40years?

It's a crying shame that there's so little footage from back then. So hard to judge going y newspaper reports and anecdotes. A guy like Adamek was really very good, but when size started to combine with skill at HW, he had problems.

 

It depend on the rules of the matches.

 

I've not been following this argument but I will say there a decent number of fights accused of being fixes that looking at the evidence, I'm really not convinced by. For example the Jim Hall Frank Slavin is listed as considered an out and out fix on boxrec, I had a look at the reports, and what really seemed to happen was Slavin turned up drunk and got smashed around the ring. He actually took quite a bit of punishment. Slavin also turned up drunk in an exhibition with Charlie Mitchell, and possibly got beat even worse, so it makes sense.

The McCoy-Corbett one is similar IMO. Reading the reports at the time it sounds very legit, and considering McCoy had been dropped by an out of shape Tommy Ryan, I see no reason to think Corbett couldn't do some damage against him. The evidence for the fix seems to come from their wives, I think both were going through divorces or something at the time, so they had a pretty strong agenda against them. And IIRC one of them only said it after the other said it publically, so they weren't independant witnessess.

At this point, I think it's wise to not just trust comments about fights being fixed without really looking into them. There's all sorts of people now claiming random fights were fixes or dives, that clearly aren't, so why assume the past was different?

 

There was a very strong movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the USA to outlaw boxing, as well as other sins like boozing.

One of the usual anti-boxing arguments was that boxing was like modern pro wrestling. Everything was a fix, and presented as such by this or that anti-boxing newspaper. Makes it often impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.

 

on the original question,

No. I don't think they could,

but I don't see that as being relevant to historical ratings.

 

Keep an open mind.After the Corbett fight McCoy went on a UK tour and did not fight in NY for another 6 years,coincidence?

 

That surely would speak to the public opinion, not the truth.

 

Was boxing legal in New York during those six years?

I thought the Horton law expired very shortly after the Corbett-McCoy fight.

 

To historical ratings ,no neither do I.You can only be the best of your era.

 

The two have been linked together by some, Klompton says they are not connected ,tbh, I don't know.

 

No.

 

Who knows? If public opinion was that it was fixed, why and how did they arrive at that opinion?

 

I thought it was mostly just based on comments from their wives.

 

To me, the fighter that would do the best is Johnson, and I think surprisingly well. Next would be Fitz and Sam, who wouldn't do quite as well

 

Agreed although corbett would adjust very well to modern boxing. Look at the films how fast he moved, how well he moved. Imagine if he adopted a gene Tunney approach