Comparing heavyweight eras

But he twice fought the #1 of the era and was competitive, straight after the Ngannou debacle.
If a fighter took a year off from fighting contenders in the 1970s or 1980s and came back and struggled with a wrestler in a 10 boxing match, he'd be dropped from the ratings. None of the fans would take him seriously as the "top dog". He'd be cited as another tragic end to a once promising boxing career. In this era, he still passes as a "top 2".
Ergo, a weak era.

 

An exciting era with interesting character is a good era for me. 70s, 90s, even 2020s were all good eras with exciting matches and drama.

 

I'm going with 1 and 4.
Also, for me it's all evidence of a weak era.

Correct. But I'd strongly suspect that those eras might have to be re-assessed as weak.

Unless we are going to say there are no weak eras, we have to find examples of what constitutes a weak era. I think boxers sitting around inactive and then performing very poorly against nobodies and still passing as "top" fighters is a good starting point.

 

I think its hard to compare era just because eras are too different especially something like the 30s vs 2000s. HWs in the 30s were mostly small dudes while HWs in the 2000s are massive usually 220 and up. Even if you can make the argument that the 30s were stronger I don't think its debate that most fighters in the 2000s would beat most fighters from the 30s unless their name was Joe Louis.

 

Its complicated.

All I know is the 30s would wreck the current era very easily.

 

Hey, you asked.

 

The issue with Fury and AJ or Wilder is not that they didn't fight the best HWs but that we really never identified who they were because almost no one got title shots. Thats the main takeaway from Fury v Ngannou and Dubois v Joshua fight many are missing. How many HWs could have done that to Fury and AJ if given the chance? Was Dubois special or did he just happen to be in the right place at the right time?

How many HWs could have beat AJ and Fury easier than Usyk? We don't know.

 

The 80s had Larry Holmes, Mike Tyson and to a lesser extent Michael Dokes, Gerrie Coetzee and Mike Weaver and many good fighters.

But there are a couple of other things the 80s had, like Colombian cartels, Pablo Escobar and the Orejuela brothers from Cali....

Holmes, Weaver and Coetzee avoided their products...

 

This era and the past ten or so years have been exciting.

Too bad PPV and DAZN ruined it.

 

I’m of the opinion that an era is only great when the best fighters meet each other regularly. Not just the top three but the top ten have frequent fights against each other. If there isn’t a ton of ranked men fighting then how would you even know who’s great?