Minimumweight Jimmy Barry Vs Chayaphon Moonsri Flyweight Torpedo Billy Murphy Vs Moruti Mthalane Bantamweight George Dixon Vs Naoya Inoue Featherweight Terry McGovern Vs Leo Santa Cruz Lightweight Joe Gans Vs Vasiliy Lomachenko Welterweight Tommy Ryan Vs Terence Crawford Middleweight Kid McCoy Vs Saul Alvarez Light Heavyweight Bob Fitzsimmons Vs Eleider Alvarez Heavyweight/Cruiserweight James J Jeffries Vs Oleksandr Usyk
Its not often you have to say this about the old timer.but I don't know if Jeffries could make cruiserweigth! We might end up having to send Fitzsimmons in against Usky, and match Jeffries with Joshua!
I'm unfit to have an opinion on most of the smaller guys, but I do like this thread. It's interesting.
Good point, I was thinking he was only a few pounds over, but I forgot heavyweights still often dryed up back then. Still I doubt they did it to the same extent as modern guys with day before weigh ins, and we could just call it a catch weight or something . I'm not sure when the it changed, but I remember Tommy Ryan saying they used to wear what they fought in at weigh-ins.
I was sure, a thread like this would spark some heated discussions - but apparently not! Anyway, I'll try to list the 9 fights in descending order of likelihood of a win for the modern fighter, as I see it: Inoue-Dixon Mathalane-Murphy Moonsri-Barry Alvarez-McCoy Crawford-Ryan Usyk-Jeffries Alvarez-Fitzsimmons Lomachenko-Gans Santa Cruz-McGovern In the first 3, I believe the old-timers would have VERY little hope of success. In the next 3, I would strongly favor the modern fighters - but wouldn't bet my life on it! The last 3 are, imo, a bit more difficult to predict. I still can't pick against the moderns with any real conviction, but I think Alvarez-Fitz and (especially) Loma-Gans are very interesting fights... that could tell us a lot about how much boxing has (or hasn't?) evolved, over the last 120 years.
Dixon is likely the best of the 3 - but Inoue is incredibly good, with great power. I just can't see Dixon holding him off for very long. To be honest, Murphy wasn't really much (even in his own time) and was ko'd 30 times against moderate opposition. Jimmy Barry was very highly thought of by his contemporaries (and also by some modern historians, like Tracy Callis), and he may have looked good in the 1890s... but his record is incredibly thin. And I mean really, REALLY thin! Nothing there that makes me believe, he would give a modern title holder too much trouble.
Murphy probably isn't as good as the others, though I don't think Mthalane is either, but worth noting he had 200 fights, and was often pretty heavilly outweighed, a lot of the KOs were people 20+Ibs heavier.
