Ring magazine is officially lost it

Not really, no. Mickey Walker and Satterfield didn't nab the heavyweight title or even get that close to doing so. Nor did Moore.

It is more likely that every single one of Carnera's fights were fixed than that Goss beats Fury and Joshua on the same night. But both scenarios are silly.

We don't "know" how deep Napoleonic Britain's talent pool was in the same sense that we don't "know" the size of the amateur pool that produced guys who could beat McLean. Let alone the bareknuckle talent pool McLean fought.

 

Crouched by the standards of the totally upright fencing stance of the time, maybe.

But we also have illustrations by James Boyle O'Reilly allegedly taken from photos. They do not portray a man who crouched like Tyson. O'Reilly doesn't appear to have been an idiot either.

Nor does he look like he's crouching a la Tyson in the photos from the Kilrain fight. And he doesn't crouch in his fiddling around on camera before Jeffries either.

 

Walker arguably should have got the decision against Sharkey, which would have put him in the ring with Schmeling, in place of Sharkey when he won the title.

I wouldn't even know how to start working out which scenario was less likely.

I guess you could argue that the logistics of fixing all of Carnera's fights, are more implausible than Goss turning out to be some head to head monster.

There I would have to disagree.

The two events are not equally distant from us in time.

You could very easily work out the size of McLean's talent pool, but you could never know the size of the talent pool in Napoleonic Britain.

 

They're both unlikely enough that they don't really merit serious discussion, IMO.

Good luck figuring out how many unlicensed boxers were having surreptitious, illegal fights in 1960s and 70s Britain.

 

One observer describes him as "crouching lower than a lightweight."

Now what exactly do you think that they meant by that?

Two observations should be made there.

The Killrain fight was an LPR afair, where he had to be ready to deal with throws, so I doubt that he would have wanted to crouch too low.

That doesn't mean that he didn't do so in Queensbury fights.

Also, photos/pictures are snapshots in time.

A crouching fighter will often be in an upright stance, but assume the posture as they move in.

 

There are currently something like 18,000 active professional boxers on Boxrec. Only about one in eighteen is a genuine heavyweight by modern standards, but per your previous posts, all of them would have been competing at heavyweight back in Cribb's day. About 9k of these can drain down to Goss's weight or higher.

That is roughly as many people as Britain could muster to fight at Waterloo in 1815. (23k).

That doesn't count the innumerable amateurs, backyard boxers, MMA guys, or anyone else on the fringes of professional boxing's current talent pool who are not included in the Boxrec totals, but should absolutely be factored into the talent pool.

I find it very, very unlikely that Napoleonic Britain had the resources to support eighteen thousand professional boxers. Hilariously unlikely, in fact, judging from the fact that champions like Gully and Belcher could win the title in like four or five fights.

 

How "low" is a lightweight? Also, who is this person, what are his qualifications to assess boxing styles, and how familiar was he with Cus DAmato's work to invite the comparisons that you are attributing to him? How do you know he's not speaking in the flowery exaggeration that people of the time sometimes indulged in?

 

I am going to guess that a lightweight always crouched somewhat lower than a heavyweight.

How would you interpret that?

 

The population of Britain back then (by your estimate), was bigger than the population of Australia, for most of it's gloved boxing history.

That is all that would be needed to make an impact the sport today, in a country with a high uptake.

Now even if I am wrong, a great fighter can crop ,up anywhere.

For example what is the population/talent pool of Barbados, which produced one of our greatest welterweights?

 

Was he saying that he was crouching lower than a lightweight would crouch, or that Sullivan was crouching lower than a lightweight would normally stand?

I don't know what he meant because I don't know anything about the quote, the context, the author, etc.

 

We are talking about making an impact on the modern heavyweight division. How many heavyweight champions of Australia (a first-world country, BTW, with bigger and healthier people than Cribb's England) won the undisputed heavyweight crown recently?

Also, what is your evidence that Cribb's England even had the talent pool of Australia? I've still seen nothing as far as historical evidence goes that a country where guys could nab the title in three fights had the ultra deep bench you assume it did.

 

How many times has America?

The title goes to the countries that have the uptake!

 

Tyson, Bowe, Holyfield, Moorer, Old Foreman...

 

Since Lewis separated it from the incumbent?

 

And this is again what I'm complaining about.

As soon as the parameters are known (whether of a country's population, a fighter's abilities, or whatever), the search call goes out for the biggest statistical outlier that can be found.

Every old middleweight might be Fitzsimmons. Pre-industrial Britain's heavyweight scene might be equivalent to first world modern Australia's. 1-0 heavyweight Paddy Ryan is...what? Pete Rademacher turned up to 11? Except with even less experience?

Every item of minutiae is cranked as far as it will go, and yet here's poor Lenny McLean, ignored and maligned because Burt Sugar didn't write his name into the Roll of Champions that makes people into demigods. McLean and Gorman are not given the benefits of these argumentative gymnastics.