If This Forum Had Being Around...?

There would still be a large amount of Rocky Marciano haters. A 180-some pounds guy who was 49-0 as a heavyweight does that to people.

 

Rocky fought in the 1950s. This thread is about what the general forum would like if it were around in the 1970s and what they would be saying about 1970s boxers as their careers went by.

 

If boxing had been more popular, that sounds like something we would have done in our word processing software class.

 

Sounds like a college level course. People would have thought we were crazier than people thought when we were in the ninth grade.

 

High school.

 

I was in college around the time of Hearns-Leonard 1. I had a professor who looked like The Hitman. I remember telling one of my classmates that. He said you should tell him. I didn't. Boxing was so mainstream in the 80s. When they introduced Diet Coke it featured a commercial with Sugar Ray Leonard. Sure boxers do endorsements now but none as big as that.

 

Ali's decision not to serve in Vietnam, would have been a lot more polarizing than it is today, because the wounds would be very fresh.

Then as now, a fighter would only be as good as their most recent fight.

 

A lot of people who professed to love him hated him then, and then there were those who continue to hate him, nine years after he left us. That being said opinions really changed after the Rumble and folks saw the folly of our involvement in Vietnam's civil war. Of course I wanted the South to win, but we couldn't do for them what they couldn't do for themselves.

 

Man, what an intriguing question. Just rolling it around in my head, I'm thinking of the letters pages from Ring Magazine, World and Intl. Boxing, Boxing Illustrated and now dialing them up to 100. You would have had one helluva website with back and forth real arguments of the time such as...

-Why was Carlos Monzon ducking Jose Napoles and Tony Mundine? (Hard to believe in retrospect)
-Was Jorge Ahumada robbed against Bob Foster?
-Was Armando Muniz robbed blind in the first Jose Napoles fight?
-Was Roberto Duran ducking Ken Buchanan, Rodolfo Gonzalez and Alexis Arguello?
-Why did Bob Foster duck out of the Galindez fight in '77?
-What happened to Olivares against Herrera, Arguello and Kotey?
-What round was Ron Lyle and Earnie Shavers going to dispatch Quarry
-Was our 'Enry robbed against Bugner?
-Did Benitez duck the Cervantes rematch?
-When are these proposed unification matches going to take place?

These were all viable subjects going on in the aforementioned letters pages. Can you imagine what this Forum would be like at the time?

 

It would be an interesting art/fiction project to read a fake forum made out of the types of topics in the letters, modernized and with smileys.

 

I guess it also depends on how this thread is translating "us" (the forum) into the 70s.

If we're still similar to the people we are in 2025, then there are probably a fair number of forumites who would identify as "mixed race" back then. Ali might get a lot more flak for his stance on anti-miscegenation from people on this forum who are literally the product of Ali's side losing the culture war on racial segregation.

 

Ali lived long enough to repudiate the NOI race stuff. A lot of NOI members embraced conventional Islam when Elijah Muhammad passed.

 

Yes, but if we are in the 70s, we don't know that, yet. It's still in the future. Ali hasn't softened into a sympathetic public figure yet.

 

The biggest wound to boxing is MMA competition. The young men into combat sports? They're watching UFC, etc. They're not watching boxing. I'm in my late 40's -- I grew up watching boxing, so it's always been natural for me to be a fan and watch it. But some 20 year old who had parents who only watched football? Bro is going to end up watching UFC if he watches any combat sports.

 

On the bright side, boxing is latched into the Olympics, and MMA itself depends on boxing to provide some of its striking training. Institutionally, the sport will survive. And maybe thrive, if the Saudis keep force-feeding it.