Has the Classic forum learned anything in the old vs modern debate?

The highlighted section interests me. Let's say you compare a guy from the 1920s top 10, and a guy from the 2020s top 10. What would you say to a critic who denies that they're "comparably good opponents" in the first place? There are certainly people who believe that the 1920s heavyweights were just plain bad fighters. So it would seem to be difficult to establish the initial assumption that the two eras are comparable. Thoughts?

 

Certainly, you're under no obligation to watch them fight at all. I'm not even trying to convince you that they were any good. And I'm not offended by your comparing them to Rough N Rowdy fighters. (If anything, your comparison foregrounds the issue I'm most curious about, so I'm probably indebted to you.)

What I'm more interested in is learning the explanation, from your perspective, of why boxers remained terrible for such a long time.

Let's take your list of problems they have -- overreacting to feints, rarely using jabs, lunging with wide punches that leave their chins unprotected, only occasionally using fundamental techniques that Evander does easily, and in general looking like toughman competitors.

I guess I'm wondering why competitors in a professional sport that was 42 years old (and which had evolved out of gloved boxing from the early 19th century) were still so inexperienced after so much time. The way you describe them, they sound like they'd be a couple levels below most golden gloves competitors today. Why do you believe that these men never learned to avoid these mistakes after dozens of fights and lots of sparring? Why hadn't their coaches learned? It seems peculiar that an entire combat sport (technique and athletes alike) would remain frozen in novice-level stasis for such a long period of time.

You don't have to provide an explanation, of course. As you pointed out, you're not trying to convert anyone. But it would be helpful to hear your thoughts on the matter.

 

Nothing but the finest trolling for our beloved forum.

Me, personally?

As a general matter, I've become less confident in the "old timer" fighters' abilities than when I started posting here a long time ago. I began with a fairly orthodox view of the arc of boxing history that you might have seen in Monte Cox's work, along with a romantic attachment to very early pre-Fleischer boxing. The attachment has remained, but many of the beliefs about the old timers' head to head abilities have eroded.

You can brute-force an argument in favor of the older boxers by throwing out minutiae. It's something I've done myself from time to time, since I'm an argumentative jerk who likes putting both sides out there. But I think modern boxers are, on average, probably better than their predecessors.

EDIT: It's also one of those things where it's hard to see where the evidence points until you try to make the arguments both ways, and see where the weaknesses are. How much support you can dredge up for each. The pro-modern arguments hold up better overall, IMO.

Two quick examples.

Consider first the old observation that the old timers had more fights. This is true...to some degree...for some periods in boxing history. But the people making the argument often telescope long periods of boxing history together, and take the outliers as normal -- for example, assuming that Greb and Robinson were typical. There's also the issue that many modern pros had long amateur careers. I haven't encountered many old timers with zillions of amateur fights. (Last time I checked, way back, Robinson had quite a few, but not as many as lots of amateurs today. I think Louis had something like 60, and he was considered a promising amateur.)

Another example on the athletics side. It's true that one of the reasons that athletic performances (hammer throw, lifting, etc.) have improved is better technique rather than greater athleticism. So some of the progress is illusory in terms of the athletes' physical improvements. But. Consider the case of Hermann Goerner, whom I brought up specifically to make this point years ago. Goerner claimed a 793 pound raw (no special suits, etc.) deadlift, which compares surprisingly well with raw total deadlifts done today. Unfortunately, subsequent research by people involved in weight training history has revealed a problem: Goerner's professional totals may have been considerably exaggerated, and their attestation is poor. The lesson is that when you see an extreme anomaly in the past, it's possible you're just making a historical mistake. The lesson carries forward into some of the more Bunyanesque things they credit Jeffries with, for example.

EDIT 2: This doesn't mean, however, that you're never going to have anomalies. Nor does it authorize extreme conclusions that assume, e.g., that all boxers were nitwits before Floyd Patterson. Different eras of old timers sometimes had advantages we don't. They may have been worse overall, but they weren't necessarily inferior at everything in a uniform way. Sometimes they may have been better at specific aspects of the game than we are, even though they weren't better in a global sense.