Why the hate for Tony Galento????

Are you an expert in that era?

Weak talent.

 

Right, and when he went up against Galento he met another unskilled fighter with decent power, who was tougher and rougher than him. So there you have it.

 

That would be quite a claim to make.

Let's just say that I have researched this era more than most.

How have you established that the talent was weak?

You have Joe Louis, Lou Ambers, Barney Ross, Henry Armstrong, and Benny Lynch.

That sounds like a pretty darn strong era to me!

 

Then why did he beat Baer? Farr? Comiskey? Ramage? Draw with Pastor?

As I said, he wasn't great fighter but he was very capable contender. If all you had to have over Nova is power and toughness, then Abe Simon would likely beat him, let alone Maxie Baer.

 

And that's just naming a fraction of the talent... You could name a bag of guys who have genuinely great levels of talent from the 30s.

 

I'd say that I have researched the era more than most people have too.

By watching the available fights, reading up on the fights and fighters, and by considering the attributes of the guys who managed to make it to the top of the division.

If for some reason it wasn't obvious, I was talking about the weakness of the heavyweight division in that era. Joe Louis was the lone standout in what was a very weak time for the heavyweight division. The Ring top 10 rankings from the 1930s heavyweight division, for example, are full of men who were physically and technically unimpressive. Guys who would get spanked out of the gym by the top heavies (and cruiserweights) of most later eras.

 

It must have really interested you then presumably?

So how does any of this provide you with any sort of clear picture?

Is how good a fighter looks on film, a reliable indicator of how far they will go in the division?

Was the contemporary opinion back then, less prone to nostalgia about previous eras, than the contemporary opinion now?

Could the same arguments be made against other eras just as easily?

Now there you are introducing an assumption!

You are assuming that you can predict the outcome of a fight, between two men, whose eras were nearly a century apart.

That is quite a claim, when you obviously can't predict the outcome of fights today.

If you could, then why would you work for a living?

 

Who ever knows with Baer? As horribly unskilled as Baer was, on their best days I'd still pick him to stop Nova. The other former/fringe contender-types you list lost to plenty of unimpressive fighters, and often when they were closer to their primes.

 

I probably would pick prime Baer over Nova as well, but my point is that Lou showed a lot of toughness and durability in these 2 fights. He stopped Baer twice in slugfest and he got hit with quite a few heavy blows. He even had to get up in second fight - it shows that basing your chance on sheer toughness was not enough to beat Nova.

 

Only as a result of the discussions on this forum. I doubt there are many people who've read more contemporary newspaper articles on various 1930s heavyweight fights and fighters over the past few years than I have, for example.

Seeing how fighters and their opponents look on film (and how those opponents look in other fights, etc.) is highly valuable. If you know what you're looking at. Makes it much easier to assess a fighter's skills, speed, style, and even size. It also helps us better understand certain fight results that otherwise might seem puzzling to the people who just base their understanding of the sport on boxrec and Ring rankings, or misunderstood by the people who base their opinions on boxing folklore and conventional wisdom cliches.

You do the exact same thing, whenever you weigh in on these match-ups. The difference is that I thoroughly reject as completely baseless and implausible your ideological assumption that the earliest heavyweight eras are generally equivalent to the more recent ones.

 

Then we look forward to you contributing a lot of new information about the era.

If the above is true, then this should be your main priority!

I understand that, but obviously you can't predict how contemporary fights will unfold, or you would not need to work for a living!

I am not saying that they are equivalent.

I am saying that we can't know which are stronger/weaker!

There is always a problem, when somebody introduces an assumption into their argument!

If you think that era A, is superior to era B, then the burden is upon you to prove it!

 

I'd like to think that I've contributed a decent amount of information and perspectives from those articles over the past few years. I've certainly posted and discussed more contemporary news accounts than any other posters in this forum. Some of it hasn't gone over very well though.

Here's the thing. You are correct that there is no way to be absolutely, incontrovertibly sure that one era is weaker than another. But people who watch and follow boxing should still be able to develop hypotheses that we can rely upon until we come across convincing empirical evidence or persuasive reasoning to the contrary.

You treat eras as being equivalent all the time. I could probably pull up a bunch of quotes where you make completely unsupported and unsupportable ideological claims consistent with that. I vaguely recall you once writing that a b-fighter from one era would be a b-fighter in any other era (or something along those lines).

 

Forgive my ignorance, but you have not been here for a few years, unless I am missing something?

The burden of proof, is upon the person asserting something!

If you have empirical evidence, then you should be able to explain it!

I do not treat all eras as being equal, in fact I think that they are probably not.

The point is that the superiority of one era, over another, has to be supported by pretty hard evidence!

Otherwise it is the worst sort of speculation!

 

Why can't you argue like a normal person? Why this arrogant, condescending attitude?

 

Good point. I think I was confusing myself with a certain former poster who had a very low opinion of 30s heavyweights and who shared dozens of old news and Ring magazine articles over the past few years...