Why should it be held against current fighters? Boxing is probably the only sport where people think that the participants from the 70s are better than now. It's kind of like the Jordan-LeBron debate. People think LeBron is better solely on the fact he has been able to play at the highest level for a lot longer than Jordan.
Nobody incorporated illegal holding into their game as much as Wlad. His whole gameplan centered around the clinch. Never said he didn't beat Jennings. He was once again clinching in a fight so much to get a point deducted. Reality doesn't show a guy who was a master of distance control. In Jennings next fight he was surgically stripped apart and stopped by old man Ortiz who never clinched once.
All good mate it's hard to follow everything in here at times. You made decent points on topic. Getting aggressive and taking risks in his last ever fight didn't make up for much, really. He stated beforehand he was going to be more aggressive, I'm sure of it. At least it made for an exciting fight.
I think he said something along those lines. Either way I think he had to fight like that in the fifth round or get stopped glad he did the former. Shame he didn't finish it off in 6th round but then again glad AJ started a new era we needed something fresh tbf.
Yeah imagine being silly enough to think a guy like Roberto Duran could match it today hahaha. Or Wilfredo Gomez, or SRL, or Hagler, or Michael Spinks or Sanchez or heaven forbid, a dinosaur from the 40 in Sugar Ray Robinson. They wouldn't be fit to carry a spit bucket today, as boxing has improved so much. Jeez.
There’s many fighters from the 70’s and earlier, who are undoubtedly better than many of today’s fighters. By any metric. And if you don’t realise this, it’s really time for to leave the thread and gain some much needed knowledge.
If a guy is seriously saying that a fighter from the 70’s can’t be better than a fighter of today, then I’ll have to start with Lucozade and ecstasy.
On a serious note, it honestly boggles my mind that there’s people out there, who genuinely believe that none of the older fighters are better than the guys of today. If he continues to be a fan and gain knowledge, he’s going to be so embarrassed when he realises how he used to think. It makes me cringe.
Bigger is better. Today's fighter weighs more, punches harder and has more access to knowledge and film study than ever before. What's often lost is that skill is developed through repetition to the point where the practitioner can pinpoint what is useful for their stylistic nuances and what doesn't work for them. Here's where it gets deeper - when you remove the highly competitive environment that a single champion, longer fights, same day weigh ins, a loss doesn't curtail a career and the very best fight each other several times, plus have tune up fights in between, this environment is conducive to a high level of skill and more importantly the very best develop an internal meter for knowing exactly how hard they need to push or when they need to draw upon their intangibles to repeatedly prove greatness. Today's boxing climate just doesn't encourage that kind of collective greatness. We don't even see a plethora of great coaches capable of training multifaceted fighters - a lot of traIning is more focused on conditioning and athletic output as opposed to boxing skill development past what is a professional version of ABA amateur point scoring. What we usually see is a few standout fighters who are undoubtedly great but so relatively untested that when you question their credentials comparatively in hypothetical H2H fights, the mere thought that the modern great is elite unproven seems to be taken as a personal attack and thus, you actually get accused of bias or romanticising old timers, when all you're doing is putting more faith and weight in the demonstration of the older fighters' superior résumés as well as acknowledging their undoubted skillset on tape. In most athletic endeavours improvement has primarily been brought on by better technology/body mechanics as opposed to complete evolution of the human species or the athletic pursuit. That's just not the way that evolution works. Greatness achieved outside of the cauldron of war in the boxing ring will always be questioned. There will always be an asterisk and that is fine - there's no shame in admitting it or recognising it. It does trouble me to think that anybody would genuinely believed that heavier and bigger automatically means better when the sport is littered with many a great who routinely proved that to be a simplistic generalisation.