Prime Riddick Bowe vs. prime Sam Langford

Bowe has all the tools to win but running head first into Sam Langford has never ended well. He’s almost certainly going to ignore his great jab and physical advantages and take the fight inside where it will be BRUTAL.

However, Bowe also likely has the toughness and heart to recover and stay in the fight long enough to hurt Sam himself and make the size difference count.

 

lol

 

This

 

Langford takes a stiff jab, realises the mismatch in power, size, technique and everything, and does everything to survive, keeps trying to hold, and if unsuccessful, keeps falling over, occasionally attempting a big overhand right, but unsuccessfully, Bowe ragdolling him in the clinches, throwing him into corner, and whenever it looks like Bowe is in a position to land, Langford lunges to clinch, and falls over if unsuccessful.

This happens until either the ref ends the fight, or Langford stops doing it and gets KO’d.

If Langford fights normally, he’d likely get stopped in 1 round, but he’d try the tactics I mentioned to stay in the fight as long as he can, occasionally attempting a single haymaker to give him any semblance of a chance.

 

I could see how someone would favor Bowe and hes not a good matchup for Langford. Meaning compared to other people not so far as hes a lock to win. The only large opponent that Langford failed to beat was Fulton. Fulton got Langford out right away. If Bowe fails to do the same Langford can make him pay for that. Langford knocked out two 6'6 superheavys that year and knocked out Godfrey 4 and 5 years after that. Langford also only got two cracks at Fulton that fight and a 4 rounder that went the distance. Fulton had a fallible chin and perhaps Langford could have beaten him earlier in his career.

Langford wasn't far removed from his prime in 1917 but at the same time Langford wasn't the best he'd ever been. Langford through early 1916 had a tied H2H with Harry Wills with 2 KOs to none. After this he was unable to beat Wills. Its hard to say a Langford who could beat Wills couldn't beat Bowe. Holyfield was good enough to hang on with Bowe 2/3 times but Holyfield didn't have the power to knock Bowe out even with the assistance of drugs. Langford has the power to take out Bowe. Unlike Tyson he can remain a threat the whole fight and has an excellent chance of winning a decision.

Bowe could beat Fulton and might be better then Fulton but as a power puncher Fulton hit harder then Bowe IMO. Fulton was the closest thing to Liston and Foreman before Liston and Foreman. Fulton was a softer target and who would have lost a battle like the Lyle fight but before Lennox and Wlad peak Fulton really had a case to be the best 6'6 and up HW H2H ever. And Fulton would have a better chance of knocking out Lennox and Wlad then the people that actually knocked them out.

Langford has 37 fights with larger HWs(6'2 and up) and is only 12-20-5. However these fights were very slanted towards the end of his career. Only 7 happened before 1916 and he was 3-2-2 with one of the losses to Gunboat being considered a robbery. All 37 opponents were at minimum a top 10 caliber HW. And Langford was only stopped 3 of the 37 by Wills twice and Fulton.

 

I think people are overlooking how dangerous Sam is here, even when he’s chubbier and close to 190 in the Jeannette footage he still shows that same slipperiness and deadly accuracy though slightly slower. Not like he’d be too slow to miss Bowe here though, and I see no reason to think Sam did not at the very least have comparable power to Holyfield and Hide given his track record.

Bowe will not fight like Fulton, who largely jabbed Sam from the outside. Bowe has the tools to do it but he just won’t, he also had the tools to not get landed on and stunned repeatedly as he waltzed onto the inside against Holyfield and Hide either.

That said, I think Bowe’s toughness and recovery saves him here in the end.

 

Questions like this always make me reconsider my humility / open mindedness about the opinions of other people on this forum. This fight wouldn't even be sanctioned out of fear of Sam Langford ****ing dying and it's being treated like a sensible matchup lol.

People love pretending two things:

1. Old school super heavies WEREN'T trash boxers that represented a tiny talent pool of the extraordinarily small number of 6'5 beings on the planet in the early 20th century. Therefore, you can pretend like defeating Primo Camera or Baer is the same thing as defeating Vitali Klitschko or Lenox Lewis.

2. That being a smaller fighter is a complete non issue if they're black and white. If you were to make a thread called Sugar Ray Leonard Vs Larry Holmes H2H you'd get called a dumbass. If you were to make a thread called Sugar Ray Robinson Vs Larry Holmes H2H, now all of a sudden its no longer silly and warrants discussion. Beterbiev vs Wlad is silly, but Marciano vs Wlad isn't, (in fact Marciano destroys him in 3 rounds). HW Usyk vs LHW Kovalev is silly, but Usyk vs Floyd Patterson isn't.

Bowe wins because Bowe is an elite calibre heavyweight H2H that has a 12 inch height advantage, 9 inch reach advantage and a 50-60lbs weight advantage with an elite jab and elite brawling ability, who would obviously dominate the 5'7, 185~lber who's way too small to compete with him.

I think Bowe is actually very overrated both H2H and all time but he obviously takes this match up and it's very annoying that, again, in a sport where we know for a scientific fact that size and weight advantages are causatively linked to win percentage, people just pretend like absolutely ****ing monumental size differences are meaningless and don't even need to be addressed, to the point that you can go multiple pages without someone even bringing it up. And if you do bring it up, you get accused of being a modernist (which isn't even what the word modernist means). It's 4am and my insomnia has kept me awake for hours, rant over.

 

Langford fought under LPR rules?

 

I’m thinking it was around the era of London prize yeah but I don’t have the knowledge of the period.