Fighters who could have been great with better trainers early in their careers

Truth on Paul Williams
Reminds me of Diego corrales on the love for inside fighting.

I’ll throw Fernando Vargas in the hat.
More so on management then on training.
That Tito fight was a couple of years too soon.
his career pretty much fell apart after that.

 

He'd just tell him to shut up in the corner

 

We have a winner!

 

Every left-handed boxer in history who was forced to fight out of the conventional right-handed stance "because southpaws don't get fights" should be included on the list, as well.

 

With Jr. I always think how much negative impact his father has on him? I really wonder how much better he could be if you (hypothetically) took his father out of his life and he still became a boxer.

 

You think he would have the neck to do that
This is East London they would just wack him over the head with the bucket

 

I disagree. I think his team did a great job with a guy who came into boxing way too late. Even Steward couldn’t fix Wilder’s fundamentals.

 

I dont know

Jermaine Taylor beat Hopkins with his original trainer

He switched to Steward and stagnated or got worse

Big name trainers dont necessarily mean results

Who you click with is who you click with

 

I have the impression Sanders didn't take boxing too seriously. Was he even a full time boxer? Wasn't he a cop during his boxing career? I suspect he was more interested in being a golfer than a boxer. He also didn't like to train from what I gather.

 

Yes you're right. I think he was a part-time cop most of his career and later he ran a car-towing business.

This goes to show he didn't focus on boxing for income, probably not because he wanted to but because he had to. I understand he lived in South Africa all his life.

 

Yeah, I never knew people could be part time cops. Is that a thing? I think he was also a pretty good golfer and he would have preferred making money golfing than boxing.

**** you box rec. Why the **** doesn't your site work half the time I try to use it...

I checked his record and it seems once he hit 34 he started fighting only once a year. I wonder why.

 

i wouldnt laught that much. The statement is very true to a degree. Even in the 90s it was very problematic to establish fights over seas. Only britain and the us could do this on a kind of wobbly regular basis. Thats the reason that fights like michalchewski vs rjj never took place. Nobody in germany knew who Rjj and vice versa, so they went on fighting a lot of rubbisch opponents. Today a fight between a guy from the Ural vs a guy from Colombia is a main event in the US and i can watch it from japan on my iphone, things have evolved to the better and yes boxing back then was more like Golden Gloves in pro Ranks compared to now.

 

Zab Judah

 

Hardly. He beat everyone except Holmes and Tyson. He could have had the perfect trainer and he'd still have the same record.

 

If he had a better trainer, he wouldn't have had the same record because he wouldn't have faced the same guys.

Frazier was 56-2 as an amateur. He beat Tony Tubbs, Tim Witherspoon, David Bey, Jimmy Clark, Mitch Green, etc. He was the top U.S. amateur. And he was a good boxer/puncher. George Benton was his primary trainer. Then, as Marvis rose to the top of the U.S. amateur ranks, Joe started moving in and Benton was pushed to the side.

When Marvis turned pro, his dad wanted him to fight more in the style of 'Smokin' Joe.' It wasn't suited for him. His dad also wanted him to fight Joe Bugner, because Joe had. And Joe wanted Marvis to fight Larry Holmes after only 10 fights.

It was a bizarre start to a career.

Given a different trainer/manager, namely his dad, Marvis likely would've at least won one of the alphabet titles. He'd beaten most of the alphabet champs at the time a few years earlier in the amateurs (and Bonecrusher as a pro).

It's not like he couldn't compete with them. He already had, and he'd beaten them.