Why is there an anti-recency bias in boxing?

Compared to fandom in other sports, boxing has a peculiar characteristic - anti-recency bias. If you ask who the GOAT is to tennis fans - most will say Federer, Nadal, Djokovic or Serena. Put the same question to football fans and the usual responses are Messi and Ronaldo. But in boxing - especially heavyweight boxing - current fighters are shunned, dismissed and spat at. People will say Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis etc were the best. More informed fans might say SRR. Some ignorant ones may say Mike Tyson. Generally, a boxer has to wait to earn recognition. Lennox Lewis was underrated during his time but is now considered one of the best heavyweights ever. The Klitschko brothers were dismissed as boring can-crushers throughout the previous two decades. Now, they are slowly earning respect. There are so many boxing fans out there who say that the present era is the weakest in heavyweight history - Wilder crushes cans, Joshua is a loser, Fury is a chicken etc. This is not entirely limited to heavyweights. Floyd Mayweather was hated and continues to be hated among a section of fans.

Why does only boxing possess this anti-recency bias? Is it because boxers fight too few fights and the overwhelming subject of discussion is about the past? Or is it because the fighters of the past were indeed better?

 

Mayweather is hated?

I question what kind of boxing fan one can be and not appreciate what he could do in the ring.

 

But it is a fact that he had a lot of haters. Opinion about him is slowly changing - for the good - but until recently there were so many out there who would say - SRL would mop the floor with him, he is the master of running away etc.

People will realize what kind of a gem of boxer he was in the coming decades. Mayweather was so great that it is difficult to find his 'prime'. But he certainly took time to earn his respect.

 

boxing is also a sport that has changed a lot over the years. obviously they all have, but with sports like Baseball of Football i think it's indisputable that the sports have become harder/more competitive, wheras theres a debate around boxing as to whether the old timer fighters were tougher. they certainly fought busier schedules, longer fights, and were less protected.

basically nobody is going to be able to replicate a SRR or Ali's career in the current sport because even if they wanted to the business would not comply. even just the fight length difference is huge. how different would Ali or Chavez or Rocky Marciano's careers be if they fought 12 rounders 1-3 times a year?

that's why so much effort is spent trying to like translate and extrapolate these fighters from different eras into mythical matchups, but none of it means anything.

 

Heavyweight boxing is not nearly as competitive now as it was. A blind man could see that.

 

You're doing what a lot of people do........assuming that the rate of improvement is the same for all these things. I would question that. Not everything improves over time. Some things degrade. Boxing has proven to be that.

 

There are obviously a lot af Mike Silver discibles around... who think they sound cool, if they can badmouth today's boxers.

Things like all the great trainers have died out, feinting and body punching are becoming lost arts, etc. If you can say silly stuff like that, you show that you know your boxing history.

 

Respect for those who've gone before is one of the glories of boxing, there is, as far as I'm aware, no other sport where those who predated film/television get serious consideration as all-time greats (including chess, amusingly.)

I can't remember the last time The (acknowledged) Best Tennis Player Of All Time wasn't an active player for instance. Football's not much better these days.

 

Or it could be an opinion as worthy as yours.

And I have no idea who Mike Silver is.

 

A couple of points!

1. Regarding Mayweather and other fighters whose reputation quickly improves after retirement. While Floyd was active I was disappointed in every fight for 10 years because it wasn't Pacquiao. After he fought Pac, I was able to reevaluate and see that he did fight a pretty decent schedule during that time.

In modern times fighters tend to save their best matchups for the end of their career, as we're (hopefully) seeing with Crawford and the HWs. So we're justified in hating until they retire.

I will say in prior generations many of the legends fought their rivalry matches early and spent the later years crushing cans (or being a can to crush) and I think that's a better way to do it.

The second point is the old saying, "be careful what you measure because you'll get more of it." In baseball there are mediocre pitchers who would have had famous fastballs 20 years ago (post steroids even!). Technology and sports science can optimize a metric to previously unheard of degrees. But they can't measure the art of the game like hit and run plays so those are basically dead.

I bet that boxers who have the resources for high tech training setups can throw a single punch much harder than they would have if they came up in the 70s. But boxing is notoriously hard to measure. Even in slow motion we disagree about what landed, what's effective, etc and there's no computer that can analyze the art of boxing (the feint you used in the first round set up a good counter in the third, etc). A lot of the stuff that gets you a new tennis GOAT every generation just isn't affecting boxing.

 

SRL would beat him though.

Few would deny he is an all-time great and one of the best boxers in history.

He just isn't the greatest or best, despite some claiming he is.

 

Can you cite any sports that have degraded? Not arguing; just curious. It would be interesting if there were.

 

None really, except boxing. One could well argue that baseball isn't what it was but I don't agree really. It's just that the landscape there has changed and more specialty-oriented, at least with pitching. There's more expansion of talent worldwide there but the key there is that the rest of the criteria is the same. They still play the same amount of games a year, they still filter through similar farm systems, etc. That allows something to build on when worldwide expansion starts and therefore possibly improve upon. I would argue boxing has no such infrastructure.

 

That's not a bad point; scoring is subjective in boxing in a way that scoring a goal largely isn't, so "artistic" considerations come into play. (In that respect, the parallels would be to stuff like gymnastics, figure skating, etc.)

Boxing is nonlinear. It's not easy to figure out who's better at something, which arguably means that people haven't been able to apply scientific methods to improving performance as rigorously as they can in (e.g.) weightlifting.

Boxing isn't a pure athleticism sport, either. It's a fight, ultimately, and that means the fatter, smaller, older guys can sometimes win. Mentality, savvy, experience, and the like go into it.

There's also the fact that boxers have been training professionally for a very long time, which means you have a big historical field to choose from.

So, consider what happens when somebody wants to know whether Usain Bolt is the best sprinter ever. Answer isn't too hard: look at the sprint times. Everybody was asked to do pretty much the same thing. We don't need to balance a million variables. At worst, we need to adjust to account for dirt tracks. And most of Usain's historical competition was probably pretty recent; I don't think sprinting was big business 80 years ago. (There were professional runners and pedestrians in the 19th century, admittedly.)

Okay. What if somebody asks whether Robinson is the boxing GOAT?

Welp, you've got problems. Do you have any hard numbers comparable to sprint times on official tracks? No. Can you compare the effects of gloves, opponents, whatever numerically at all? No. Do Robinson and Mayweather even share common opponents? No.

Ah, but it gets worse. You're not just comparing two guys' ability to inflict damage on different opponents. Still less are you asking, "Who can run this set distance under Bolt's time?" Nope. You're measuring their ability to meet subjective scoring criteria by judges. And judges' tastes change over time.

How are you going to compare Robinson and Floyd, exactly? Modern standards? Robinson wasn't playing to modern judges. 1940s standards? Floyd wasn't playing to 1940s judges. Oh, and that's leaving aside the issue of whether you can imagine yourself into the shoes of a 1940s judge to accurately score Floyd according to those standards.

Yeah, ok, but there are still some solid leads, right? The judges in Robinson's time didn't score Robinson all that radically differently from the way we do.

Besides, Floyd was still using better training. We know they tried to build cardio in Robinson's time. Right? Well, Floyd's era could do it better. Clear advance! Floyd wins.

Unfortunately, this doesn't settle it. How much does modern cardio improve a fighter's *boxing performance*? We don't know, exactly. We've just got subjective guesses. We don't even know how fit most of these people are. And besides, look at how well an obese James Toney did against much bigger, heavier, fitter opponents. Why? Because he was a better, psychologically tougher, more experienced boxer, that's why. No way to tell whether Robinson was of the same ilk without actually putting him in a ring with Floyd and letting them get it on.

Yeah, but don't we have a bigger talent pool today? Yes, compared to *most* eras. No, compared to the grand sweep of human history. How do you know Robinson wasn't just a genetic and environmentally nurtured anomaly, in a way that no current boxer is? You don't.

Also, even if we had Robinsons around today (we probably do, honestly), it would be hard to tell, because people don't fight as much.

That said, there are also less reasonable reasons that boxing looks backwards:

There's the irrational psychological bias for the flashy fighter near your own youth. Instinctively, most generations believe that they could beat the crap out of the pansies in younger generations. And this instinct is almost always true, since modern people are wimps. But this reasoning probably doesn't apply much to boxers, so the instinct is one we should avoid, IMO.

Plus, boxing is just a tradition-centered sport that loves its own history. Partly because it has so much of it.

 

It depends what is meant by degraded.

The knuckleball and bunt skills in baseball have surely degraded, the fun they brought has degraded, but modern era players may be at or near the peak in terms of winning games.

It could be similar with boxing.