I'll watch it again. I just remember a slugfest in a phone booth. It was Don Frye vs Takayama before it happened.
Which made the fight harder than it needed to be. Baer had an enormous reach advantage and continuously allowed the much shorter stockier opponent to slug it out. A solid jab, clinching, better footwork and defense could have made this a clinic. To quote Teddy Atlas: "what the heck is the point of being tall if you're not going to fight tall?".
Both men put on a scintillating display of the sweet science at its most sublime: This content is protected
The same is true for someone like Lewis or Foreman, except than Baer was smaller in one fourth of his fights while they were almost never smaller. Baer being bigger than most of opponents doesn't mean anything, because he fought a lot of bigger opponents and he fared better against them than against smaller ones. It's not like he was a giant back then, he fought many fighters much heavier and much taller than him. If you want to blame Baer for his size, blame Ali, Foreman, Lewis, Jeffries, Louis and Wladimir more than him.
He was crude, but he was not an idiot. OK, he probably was an idiot, but he still gave some thought to how he was going to fight given opponents.
If you enjoyed that, you'll love this: https://www.boxingforum24.com/threads/don-frye-vs-takayama.655183/
Remember in that one thread where you said that Max Baer would crush Riddick Bowe?? Because I remember it!!
