Ring magazine is officially lost it

I suspect that this was partly due to necessity being the mother on invention.

In Sullivan's day you had to fight at heavyweight, if you couldn't make 154lbs.

In Jeffries day you had to fight at heavyweight, if you couldn't make 158lbs.

In Johnson's day the light heavyweight title wasn't worth two buckets of spit.

A lot of these men competed at heavyweight because they had no alternative, and it might be the case that men since them could have replicated their accomplishments, had they been backed into that corner.

If I didn't think that Sullivan's opposition was poor, then I would have no hesitation in naming him as the greatest heavyweight of all time.

The problem is that even having made that assumption, we don't know how poor it was, and we can't even rule out the possibility that it was good.

I am certain that surviving boxing records, become less complete the further back you go, including at the highest level in some cases.

Just look how much Jeff Clark's record has changed in the time that we have been posting on this forum for example.

About the same as their chances against Cribb or Mace, i.e. slim to none.

What I am getting at, is there do not have to be guaranteed big paydays in an era, to produce world class talent.

 

I agree that Hagler looks much better than Ketchell on film, but so does Philadelphia Jack O'Brien, and look what Ketchell did to him.

 

For all you know Jeffries and Fitzsimmons might have beaten any two of them in the same night.

As a student of boxing history, it is your job to think the unthinkable.

 

Jeffries was a special fighter, so was Ali, Marciano and the Lewis/Louis's They climb to the top and rule there era for most of it. You can argue against Jeffries over the Johnson issue during the later end of his title rein. But that does not take away what he did from 1899-1903 or so. You can argue head to head vs the later greats, or his all time placement, but if we are still talking about Jeffries over 120 plus years from now, than he was special. Cribb and Mace are special also with the comment from Janitor.

 

Ketchell may not look good on film, but you can not argue with his results vs other top fighters of his era.

 

The heavyweight title remained high profile and lucrative, however. Even Roy Jones, in the days of alphabet titles and well recognized lower weight championships, couldn't resist the chance to go for a heavyweight belt. (After being careful to bulk up 30 pounds and skedaddle back to LHW as soon as he beat Ruiz.)

Mickey Walker would be another one who tried his luck. Not considered a murderous puncher at heavyweight like his predecessor Fitzsimmons. Probably because the heavies he faced were better.

If later middleweight fighters thought they had a realistic chance of nabbing the biggest prize in sports, it would be right peculiar that they didn't try for it.

When you say "can't rule out the possibility that it was good," you're getting back to your earlier demand for mathematical certainty that I thought you'd abandoned.

We can be pretty darn sure that a third world country populated by smaller people with low life expectancy, where boxing is illegal and not even separated from bareknuckle rules, and where most of the top "heavyweights" are either novices or old junior middleweights, is not producing a great crop of heavyweight contenders.

The fact that Jeff Clark's record is filling up demonstrates that the research is working to track down the missing fights, no?

For the record, has Boxrec ever opined about the completeness of its records? I'm just curious at this point.

Whoa, whoa, whoa there, fella. Bartley Gorman and Lenny McLean were the bestest bareknuckle fighters -- nay, "champions" -- of their era. Sure, bareknuckle boxing was illegal in the 70s, but it was illegal in Jem Mace's time, too. Why do you dismiss the likes of the Guv'nor and the King of the Gypsies as being every bit as good as Tom Cribb?

It's relative. Boxing offered paydays, period, in an era without many options.

But you still need enough to train effectively on.

 

Why get your head caved in fighting much bigger fighters, if you can make enough money to retire on, fighting men your own weight?

I suspect that if we moved the heavyweight limit back to 154, we would start to see a lot of smaller fighters become bolder.

I make a clear distinction between what I know, and what is speculation on my part.

I think that Sullivan's era was weak, but I cannot rule out the possibility that it was not.

This seems to be a rather odd observation about a sport that has always thrived on poverty, and got almost all it's champions from the social groups at the bottom of the pile.

I think that it more reflects a single historian's efforts to research his career.

Not to my knowledge.

They were glorified hard men, at the top of a tiny talent pool, in a non mainstream sport, and they were only in that sport because they couldn't make their way in legitimate boxing.

Cribb and Mace were global superstars.

The best talent was nurtured than as now.

 

Why get your head caved in in boxing at all?

The heavyweight division attracts smaller fighters who hope they can win there. That's true even today. It's just that most of them can't.

If you don't think there's much of a chance of it being true, why bother noting it?

Imagine if I ended a post about Ali with the disclaimer, "Also, it's possible that Ali was actually a sasquatch." People would assume that I thought Ali's being a sasquatch was an arguable, plausible position. It would do no good for me to protest, "Oh, but what I said is technically true! I'm only 99.999999% sure Ali isn't a sasquatch!"

If Sullivan's era being strong isn't a live option, why note its technical possibility?

How many heavyweight champions has Thailand produced?

Also, boxing does not thrive on being illegal.

Your response avoids the facts on the ground, in favor of slogans like "global" and "non-mainstream."

Yeah, Cribb's sport was "global" in the ludicrously hypertechnical sense that there were two former American slaves competing in London during Cribb's reign. And Richmond was basically retired by the time he worked with Molyneux, anyway.

No other country in Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Americas sent professional fighters to compete in England. Not unless you count the random "gondolier" from a century earlier. Most regions WITHIN ENGLAND ITSELF did not compete. Boxing was a London sport where -- if Egan is to be believed -- you could get a title shot with one or two good fights.

Similarly, boxing was faddishly "mainstream" (tho illegal even at this early date, IIRC) in a mostly pre-industrial region with fewer people living in it than modern Philadelphia.

Lenny McLean's England was larger, richer, more populous, and funded his activities far better than Cribb's London could have. It even provided for McLean's retirement better.

(And even if it wasn't, what happened to the supposed concern for fairness, not begging the fighter quality question against certain eras or divisions...? I mean, Lenny and Bartley were champions of their sports, too. It's "possible" that they were every bit as good as Ali...)

EDIT: It also occurs to me that if we want to take a spin on the talent pool / unrecorded fights merry go round, you can't get a better example of having a good excuse for unrecorded fights than the fact that most of McLean's were illegal. Heck, he claimed to have had three thousand of them. Why do you assume it's a tiny talent pool just because the fights weren't on Boxrec? Maybe there were tons of unlicensed boxers having zillions of fights under the radar. They were certainly a pop culture phenomenon. The burden of proof you use is really selective.

 

I suppose this also touches on one of the worst aspects of the fantasy fight format / debate format for appreciating boxing history. It encourages people to do incredible feats of research, but unfortunately, there's a tendency to max out a fighter's or era's quality for the sake of argument.

The actual Tom Cribb, or John L. Sullivan, or whomever, gets lost and replaced by an artificial construct. That construct shares Cribb's name, and the names of the fighters on his record, but he's a fighter with modern abilities, capable of slugging with the likes of Lennox Lewis. The actual facts of the real guy's life -- which make perfect sense in the makeshift, informal world he actually boxed in -- have to get reinterpreted until they fit the cookie cutter mold of the competitive, modern, global sport.

Cribb's training regimen transforms from a product of the deranged musings of Barclay Allardice (which Cribb had to overcome to beat Molyneux, IMO) to a strength and conditioning program on the same level as you see today. Sullivan's opponents become a division of Julian Jacksons. Sullivan's efforts to make the heavyweight title marketable are swept aside on the tide of revisionism. After all, if boxing was already globalized (just like today!), how much could Sullivan really have done? Even Sullivan's style gets reinterpreted as being like Tyson's, because he was said to have crouched by the standards of his day. Or Foreman's. Or whomever's. Corbett doesn't throw lead lefts anymore, or use fencing footwork. He jabs just like a modern fighter.

This is absolutely a distortion of reality, IMO. If we care about the past, we shouldn't impose anachronism on it.

 

I can guarantee you that more would do it, if they couldn't make decent money at middleweight, or if there wasn't a suitable weight class for them.

I think that the evidence for even the most likely scenario, is weak enough that a disclaimer is appropriate in this case.

They have produced their share of muthai champions.

Thailand has an enormous martial arts scene.

I would dispute your assertion that boxing was a London based sport.

Boxing matches seem to have take place on village greens, in barns, and at county fairs all over the country.

I would also say that a number of cities, such as Birmingham and Bristol had big boxing scenes.

Given the following of the sport, and the rewards for those who got to the top, you could potentially be looking at an enormous talent pool.

Do you think that they would have bothered with their underground sport, if they thought that they had a chance against Brian London, never mind Ali?

 

There was already incentive enough, IMO. Adding more might get you a few more Satterfields, I suppose.

There we disagree. There is basically no chance that Joe Goss and Paddy Ryan would make the heavyweight top 10 today.

Yup. I chose my words very carefully. Third world country, plenty of desperation, tons of fighters, massive talent pool.

No heavyweights.

Also, I note again: boxing is not illegal in Thailand.

Later, maybe, but take a look at the amateur hour mess that happened when they tried to stage a fight in Scotland during Cribb's era. I don't recall the bout, but it was clear that the idea of boxing was foreign to the area.

Cribb never had to face Brian London or Ali. So there is no equivalency here.

Besides:

1) Maybe McLean just wasn't "desperate" enough. He was making bank just fine...even got a movie role. Just like the middleweights.

2) McLean and Gorman issued challenges to Ali. They were being ducked, clearly. Ali was frightened of their sport's potentially "enormous talent pool."

3) McLean was denied a license for being a crook.

 

If we had moved the heavyweight limit down to 154lbs, to you think that Andre Ward would have just gone and sulked?

For all you know they might have beaten Fury and Joshua in the same evening.

We have a very clear idea what every heavyweight champion from Schmeling to Fury was, adn before that it becomes increasingly uncertain.

There are a number of legitimate interpretations of what Jim Jeffries was.

When it comes to men like Paddy Ryan, we just don't know.

I think that there was a very deep British talent pool by the time of men like Sayers and Mace.

Probably much deeper than in John L Sullivan's America, hence an ancient Goss winning the title.

You probably understand the early 1800s scene better than I do.

McClean fought as an amateur boxer, and I understand that he lost as many as he won.

This implies that he was unlikely to be a world beater level talent under LPR rules, and that men like Ali might have had considerable success, had they turned their hand to his sport.

 

Of course not. He probably would have tried to compete at heavyweight and performed roughly at the level of Bob Satterfield, or Mickey Walker, or the other good middleweights who tried to go up to that level. Maybe a bit better, since he has steroids available.

For all you know, Ali was secretly an alien Bigfoot.

But he probably wasn't. And Goss (an elderly, overweight junior middle who wasn't even that good in his prime) probably doesn't beat Joshua and Fury in one evening.

If your standard of proof for believing something is that low, you should probably abandon your defense of Primo Carnera. "For all you know," every single one of his bouts was fixed.

McLean's performance as an amateur boxer in 1960s Britain tells us almost nothing about McLean's his chances of beating fighters in Napoleonic London.

What are you even using to determine the size of Britain's talent pool in the early 19th century? Or Sullivan's, for that matter? You've thrown out Boxrec as a rough guide to bout density in Sully's era, so that's a nonstarter. What's left, other than -- forgive me, but -- wishful thinking?

Britain's population as a whole was something like 11 million people. That's about (EDIT) six times less populous than modern Thailand, a third world country that itself produces exactly zero top heavyweight contenders despite relatively massive numbers of enthusiastic fighters and fight fans.

 

This could be taken as you conceding my point, that necessity was the mother of invention, back in the ye olde days.

You seem to be trying to make my brain explode here.

The issue is not that my standard of proof is low, it is the opposite.

I suppose that I cannot assert as a matter of absolute truth, that Muhamad Ali was not an alien, but I could provisionally dismiss the notion unless some evidence emerged.

I think it extremely unlikely that Goss would have beaten Joshua and Fury in the same evening, but I would have to consider it more plausible than Ali being an alien.

In either case, I would place the burden of proof upon the person asserting it.

You might make a highly plausible case that Fury should be the runaway favorite over Goss, but you could never prove that he would win the fight.

Yes, for all I know every one of Carnera's fights could have been fixed, and for that matter every fight in history, but I submit that it is unlikely.

The best that we can do, is find the answer that is the best fit for the evidence, and sometimes it will not be overwhelmingly so.

Now there I would have to disagree.

If a man is fighting at that level, it doesn't take much talent to dominate them, even by the standards of the smallest talent pools.

We could easily have found a boxer in Uganda who would have dominated McLean for example.

The point is that I don't know how big the talent pool is, and neither do you.

What we can say however, that the deepest talent pools in the sport's history, often resulted from high uptake in one country.

I could flip that argument on its head, and point out how many top fighters Australia has produced.

Given the media coverage of bare knuckle boxing in the UK, we might potentially be looking at a very deep talent pool.

 

I have done some detailed breakdowns of Sullivan's style, based on contemporary testimony.

Yes he undoubtedly crouched, unless you assume that the observers were idiots.

People who say that Louis fought in a weak era, tend to forget that it contained Louis.

You could say the same of Sullivan, and his era.