Absolute prime is not the same as best he looked on film

This is a thing that bothers me a bit, I was just thinking about it.

There's a sense that people want to match guys who look best to them on film, that this is their selection of the prime version of a given fighter for whatever purpose, usually a fantasy fight, but other stuff too. IMO this is a genuine failure of imagination.

The best example, I think, is Joe Louis. Joe Louis looks fabulous in his 1935 match with Max Baer, he exhibits a more commonly modern ideal of excellent footwork, it is the best manifestation of his left jab (albeit against the best imaginable opponent given the other factors, dearth of speed etc.) and as a punching display against a granite-jawed fighter, oh boy.

But it was before this rarely shared, uncomfortable photograph was taken:

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That was in 1936.

"“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places." - Ernest Hemmingway.

Before the first fight with Schmeling, Jack Blackburn wished that result into existence. He literally said to press in a published interview that he sometimes wished for Joe to be beaten because Joe had started to believe what the pressmen said about him and was no longer listening to Blackburn. Joe himself indicated this might have been true in later discussing the first Schmeling fight. That he had become caught up in his own hype.

Nobody knows what might have happened to Joe Louis had he beaten Schmeling by KO1 in their first meeting, and it might have been nothing, but recognising his own mortality definitely mattered, Blackburn knew it and Louis later acknowledged it. It probably made a more tempered, careful fighter but it also helped to develop a fighter that arguably remains the most lethal counter-puncher in history, a man who learned art to bait his opponent onto a series of power punches arguably yet to be equaled.

I make a distinction between Schmeling II and Baer II in identifying Louis's best performance, his real best performance, which I consider to be Baer II by distance. Schmeling he defeated by force, Baer by excellence. Unless one fighter is able to overpower another clean, because of size or because he can't be hurt, technical excellence will always overcome force. All things being equal.

There are numerous other examples (mostly at HW), Roy Jones against Thomas Tate looked otherworldly, but it's inarguable to me he got better for all that he might not have looked better, as he learned more and more about himself and types of fighter he might and did meet. Roy said "show me a man in charge of his emotions and I will show you a dangerous man" in summary of his own excellence and it's interesting to me that a man of Roy's astounding athletic genius should hone in on emotional maturity - earned, never taught - as key in expanding upon his greatness.

Sometimes you can't just look with your eyes, I feel.

 

Yes, it's even more complicated than that of course but that's the gist of what i'm driving at, yes. Especially where temperance is involved, it's notable - whether it's guys insisting that Pretty Boy was better than Money or that once the Manilla Ice was in, Pacquiao was finished, these ideas are much more complex. Especially given, for example, that Manny's "weak" hand was meant to be introduced to the world in the first Morales fight, in which he got his ass soundly kicked...but yeah, where a fighter becomes notably less explosive, or expansive, or aggressive, especially, the temptation seems to be to run them back a bit as far as prime arguments go.

Hopefully you can draw something from examples even where you disagree with them, or explain why you disagree if you do.

 

Ali is a really good conversation piece I wanted to stay away from because people do get really emotional about Ali! If we take Ali pre- and post-exile, what do we see? We see most of his most important and impressive wins come in the post-exile period of his career. But people wouldn't hesitate in picking pre-exile Ali as the prime version, almost exclusively they want to pick that Ali in an instant and - important to me - i'm not saying they're wrong.

But what I am saying is that "prime Ali" probably manifested himself in three performances - Williams, Terrell, Folley, two of them past-best, the third hopelessly out-manned and terribly confounded. You might add Patterson I aswell actually, tbf. One of my favourite pieces of Ali-lore is that he had the rope-a-dope on tap for the first Liston fight. That suggests that a prime-Ali is indeed a pre-exile Ali because he was already doing some deep thinking about the Liston fight and he already knew that he couldn't move for fifteen rounds like he did for half that first fight - he knew he couldn't do that, or he suspected it at least, or he felt that it might become more and more dangerous to try it when tired.

Anyway, the Ali that came down of his toes was a genius, who tried to knock the iron-jawed Foreman out with one adjustment in round one then volunteered for the meat grinder not in round 8 through necessity but in round two out of a different kind of necessity, a perfectly calculated one. The question is: if Liston was what Liston had been or if he never had been, if Liston was what Ali feared he was ("the devil"), could Ali have come down from his toes in round ten to rope-a-dope Sonny Liston and survive for five rounds against a battered bear? Did he have that strength and faith, or did he need extra weight, gravitas and experience?

I may be reaching a bit here but I literally feel like the smarter, older, more emotionally mature Ali, who had a perfect grasp of his weaknesses was maybe a better match for Frazier than the younger version was. Maybe. That's not to say that Ali couldn't have blasted Frazier up so badly early in his earlier incarnation that Frazier wouldnt' have got rolling midway anyway, and I hold up my hands there, but the older Ali knew himself in a way few fighters did IMO. That was the value that would bring him victories over Frazier, Norton, Foreman and all the others, for all that he might not have needed it only a few years before.

That's another bingo pick for me. Lewis looked an absolute beast in Rahman II who applied learning to control distance and pace absolutely for a perfect general's performance that saw straightforward deployment pick-apart the rest. The idea that this fighter could have been outboxed by Bruno for a stretch is laughable - then again, Lewis nearly killed him that night anyway.

That's sort of the drive here, how complicated and difficult the problem is.

 

I hate to so early in the thread, but disagree. I see more fumbling with primes than almost any other general topic other than weight-making and catchweights moreso next door that second one...Hopkins has proven especially difficult for folks, definitely, there have been a number of people chosen Baer as Louis's peak performance, Bert B most notably but others. Ask people to pick out the peak performances of flyweights and bantamweight and it can prompt an out-and-out malfunction.

But it's not everybody, that's for sure.

 

Armstrong and the likes can't be counted upon here because there isn't a meaningful amount of film of him, but yeah.