In most sports the current guys are better than previous eras, why would boxing be any different?

George Foreman and Larry Holmes disagree. Fighters might have been bigger,stronger & faster in the 90's but they were not better
Not one fighter from the 90's could even put Foreman or Holmes down
Yet three different fighters from the 70's were able to put Foreman (Ali,Lyle,Young) and Holmes (Shavers,Weaver & Snipes) on their ass.

 

Yeah i wouldn’t go that far back to the Dempsey era. But get a top guy from the 40’s and I think he’s just as good today as he was back then.

 

You can't really.compare eras but that said if Ali or whoever fought now he'd have the exact same training/nutrition/diet info as anyone else, if you have natural ability and heart you can compete in any era.

 

I'm going to define 'previous eras' as the time before 1990. Why? Because it's my damn response and that's what I think.

So...I think the very best of previous eras (and I do mean the very best) are gifted, freakish physical specimens who may still be 'elite' now. I think here particularly of weight divisions that rely on granite chin, heart, stamina and enough power. SRR, SRL, McCallum etc being handy examples. But outside of this tiny number, I think it is reasonable to offer the generalisation that the 'depth of book' grows much weaker. And the further back you look, the more stark the tailoff becomes. In terms of raw athleticism and explosivity, in terms of technique and speed, in terms of nutrition and understanding of body mechanics, I believe athletes competing today are superior.

Nowhere is this more stark than the heavyweight division. I got called names only recently by one of those guys who posts black and white videos and writes pages and pages about that sort of thing. The video featured (exaggeration incoming) two out of shape but determined heavies, both undersized by today's standards, each with horrible technique but a good chin, plodding sloppily with hands low, throwing arm punches from all angles, and moving slowly around the ring. This generated the usual 'wow aren't they amazing' responses from the usual sort of aficionados. Get real. It was horrible. The kind of thing you'd show kids in the gym and say 'dont do that'.

Things move on.

 

This is so cringe. You guys write about boxing like its star wars or lord of the rings get real.
Of course it is different then football or soccer because of violence being part of the sport but keep it down.
The reason why kids that come from a poor background are usually the best at boxing is cause they grow up with violence and not having any other option other then this sport.
Thats the reason why american blacks suck that much in boxing nowadays cause they can go to college now and can even become president. In the 70s and 80s that was not that easy.
In mexico on the other hand cartels rule mayor parts of the country and they do funky town, so no wonder that latinos are the dominating force in boxing today.

 

I agree that boxing is a bit special - in that we don't see the clear improvement over time, that characterizes almost every other sport. At least not over the last many decades.

I think it's silly to claim, that today's boxers are so evolved, that the old-time greats would have no chance - and equally silly to claim that modern boxers would be easy meat for the old-timers, because they are all sissies who haven't learned to fight and gas after 8 rounds!

I realize, that different posters have different agendas they want to push - sometimes so hard, that all reason and common sense go out the window. Which is a great pity, as it often obstructs a serious debate. But then again, it's the Internet... so there's probably no way this can be helped.

 

Foot work is not the only way to evade punches. In fact, some of the best defensive modern day fighters did not rely on much foot movement. examples of this are James Toney, Julio Cesar Chavez, Oscar De La Hoya, and even today Canelo Alvarez.

Those guys mentioned above were defensive wizards despite being remembered for their offense. But the reason their offense is more memorable is because the type of defense they used allowed them to stay in position to counter, or even initiate an attack.

 

I think boxers do improve, but not every generation. If you take boxers from 60 years ago or more they won't look good H2H vs current boxers. However, current generation is not better then 2000s or 90s eras. Even old guys like Ortiz, Helenius, Pulev and Povetkin are still in top 10 or top 15 despite being 40 and shot.

 

I have a similar take, except I think that many boxers from the mid-twenties to early thirties were already developed enough to handle the modern game. You place the cut off around 1940. I think we are reasoning along similar principles but differ slightly on the exact cut off date that the sport finished evolving.

There is a lag time between when a new sport is invented and when the athletes can fully adjust their skills and training to the rules. We see this in MMA where it took the players 20-30 years to evolve to the current style and for the sport to grow large enough to attract and train a world class level athlete. MMA started around 1990 and now it's fully grown. The only way to improve MMA at this point is to expand it's talent pool by internationalizing it. We see the same thing in other combat sports. Western kickboxing was derived from hard sparring karate around 1970. They mixed in some boxing training for stamina and it became modern kickboxing. The first big promoter of the new style was The Professional Karate Association. By the eighties it had run into Muay Thai and had to adapt to low kicks, until by the 90s it was what we see it as today when we watch Glory Kickboxing or K-1.

We've been privileged to grow up watching these sports evolve on tape before our eyes. But you can see the record for other modern martial arts evolve and plateau too. With boxing, I take the modern era change in rules from bare knuckle to gloves as a breaking point where they became different sports. So in the 1880s there is the beginning of something new, different from what went before. I think Britain outlawed the sport and all the British fighters took their skills to America, where early on it was mostly illegal and had difficulty growing all the same. But once it got legalized in America it flourished here. We had to change things such as how much wrestling and hip throwing was allowed. This lead to changes in stance like a closer higher guard and tactics like jabbing and combination punching becoming more important. Then you needed the sport to grow enough for money to attract talent, and a public platform to gain exposure. That's what film, radio, and newspapers did. That's what Tex Rickard did. He was our Dana White. You can watch sports go trough stages from legalization, regulation, to popularization. I don't think we had an actual ranked competitive structure until maybe Ring starts doing that in 1924. You start getting the Lonsdale Belts recognizing 8 champions in 1909, but I don't know about contenders.

What's interesting is that you can see Muay Thai going through a similar process in the early twentieth century as it transitioned away from Muay Boran. They establish the gyms. Then they built the stadiums where fights were put on for gambling purposes. Boxing has an impact on the ring and punching style. They introduce referees and timed rounds, gloves, groin protectors, and codify the rules in the 20s. They'd figured out the style and grown popular enough by at least the 60s so that footage I've seen looks the same as todays.

Another sport that was invented around the same time as modern boxing is Judo. It was invented in 1882 by Jigoro Kano as a derivation of Jujitsu. It gets traction in Japan, becomes an international sport in the 60s when it becomes a regular Olympic event. Kano's first European student invents Sambo for Russians and the Gracies in Brazil turned Judo into Brazilian Ju Jitsu. And now we see it in the octagon everyday. By the 70s I'm sure it had enough time to settle and spread far enough that judoka's like Yasuhiro Yamashita could compete at the highest levels today. If size is what people worry about then Antonius Geesink was 6'5" when he was kicking ass in the 60s.

Sure, there's been improvement in Baseball, Basketball, and football in that time, and they are just as old. But the difference is that those are team games for one and they don't have the weight categories, which evens the playing field, for another. The overall level of play has improved in Basketball since the 50s and 60s but they don't all play at Bill Russell's level either. Bill Russell was 6 foot 10 and Wilt Chamberlain was 7 foot 1. They'd fit right in with the modern game. You can't say that modern athletes are bigger and stronger than Wilt Chamberlain because they aren't. I think guys like Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain are the physical maximum for human beings. You can increase the population of your talent pool and you are probably only going to get more A1 perfect specimens like them than you otherwise would, so instead of one Bill Russell you might get two. You might get a Magic Johnson, a Michael Jordan, and a Larry Bird playing all at the same time. You might increase your population until you have multiple superstars like Kobe Bryant and Lebron James in the same league.

That might explain how we got Mayweather and Pacquiao at the same time. You look at mma versus boxing and it becomes obvious that most of the UFC is domestic level athletes. They'll have one possibly two athletes at a time which would be at our top ten p4p level. That's because even though their sport has evolved it's technique and increased it's structure, it still hasn't gone worldwide and is drawing on a smaller talent base. I checked years ago and we had almost eight times as many pro boxers as they had pro mma fighters. It's probably only one fifth or one sixth now, since their sport is still growing. But depending on how many competitors you have, you'll get a certain number of world class players at the top. That doesn't mean that all of our boxers are better though. That means that the layers of achievement are deeper and it takes more to be at the top.

Champs still fight like the champs of the fifties, and contenders still fight like contenders of the fifties, but there's more of them now. We spread them out over 17 weight classes instead of eight. If there were only eight belts then the competition would be twice as fierce and the divisions would be twice as stacked. The records would be better too since every champion to keep his crown would have to fight guys who would be champions in the current divisions.

Some of the sports had more room to improve than boxing has over the years. Baseball, basketball, and football guys were practically amateur and had separate jobs at the mill that they'd take time off to play. Boxing had established itself as a professional sport you could feed your family with by the 30s. It was decades ahead of the others both in terms of professionalism and financials. In 1930 Babe Ruth shocked America by making $80k a year, more than the president received in annual salary. Meanwhile, in 1927 Gene Tunney received the first million dollar purse for boxing Jack Dempsey in their rematch. That's equivalent to about $12 million dollars with inflation in today's currency and Dempsey made about half as much himself. The gate was worth about 22 million in today's money. So by comparison we can see that boxing was the much bigger business in the 20s, 30s, and 40s. When there is that much money at stake, you will have a lot more fighters. You'll have a lot more gyms. And you will have a lot more trainers. I think the trainers and gyms form the unseen infrastructure of the sport and it took a generation or two for the first fighters to retire and open their own gyms and start training younger fighters. That's part of why there is a lag between the birth of a sport and the time that fighters actually perform at the highest levels. You could get an A1 athlete like Jack Johnson, Barbados Joe Walcott, or Sam Langford and not be able to maximize their potential because you couldn't train them right without the proper infrastructure.

I don't think that sport progresses indefinitely. It has a growth cycle from infancy to maturity, just like people. Then we stay adult-sized until we die.

 

I don't think Ketchel would beat Canelo, but I think that Mickey Walker or Harry Greb would make Canelo look like a fool.

 

At cruiserweight*

 

I'm not an old school fetishist but when I see fighters like Frazier, Norton, Holmes etc I just see a whole 'nother level of skill and drive compared to almost anyone at CW or HW today. Then again I see fighters today and I see unprecedented levels of athleticism from huge guys that would have been bumbling oafs back in the day. The sweet spot for me was the 90s where the skill and drive coupled with the increase in size and power/explosiveness to provide some of the most beastly HWs that have ever stepped into the ring. Had there been the type of mythmaking we had back in the Ali days I don't doubt fans would be waxing lyrical about these golden times.

 

The CW division has for many years been somewhat like the HW division of old, but because it's mostly been composed of ex-Soviet and African fighters with little to no English or media personality (in the West) there's been no myth making. That's a huge part of what gives an era its magic, or conversely makes people overlook it or claim it to be weak.

Imagine if Ali was a Ukrainian dude competing against a Chechen Frazier and a Kazakh Foreman, Shavers was a naturalised German from Serbia, Quarry was a random Congolese guy and Norton was Polish and none of them spoke more than broken English or had any real presence in the States. Even if the fights were punch for punch the same there wouldn't be anywhere near the anticipation or excitement surrounding the athletes or their fights. And without those narratives it's just a bunch of men punching each other.

 

It's pointless arguing with those nutjobs. They'll look at Galento's sloppy ass flailing away like a drunk bartender and equate him with a prime David Tua, or watch some random dude slip a jab once and claim he'd dominate the HW division because no one could hit him. Severe levels of delusion with that bunch.