Why Didn't Larry Holmes Ever Unify The Title?

I am not so sure we are raising the bar in boxing. It is hard to say the middleweight division has improved from Harry Greb, SRR and their peers I think the only division where we can say weight is unlimited would be the heavys and as far as height we have always had tall men and Heavier men out of all of them today I would have to say Lewis, and the Klitschko's are impressive because they are fit and may have been competitive in any era but the rest were just big guys who were less than fit that could hardly fight for 12 rds

There are always standout fighters like SRL, Roberto Duran, Ken Buchanan, Joe Calzage

In every other division, guys like Willie Pep, Henry ARMSTRONG, Benny Leonard, Benny Leonard, Archie Moore and Greb with over 100-290 fights will never be found again. The bar may have been raised back then and has been lowered in many ways since.

 

But Lem Franklin was lined up to fight Joe Louis instead of Simon, but he got knocked out the month before by Pastor. That's no way to build up a fight with Louis. I guess Pastor was passed up because he had been beaten twice by Louis before.

Abe Simon wasn't a good opponent but he'd had some months off since losing to Franklin, so it wasn't as fresh a memory, and he'd gone 13 rounds with Louis previously. Joe Louis was in the army, there was a war on. The top rated contender at the time was Billy Conn, and that was being hoped for for the summer, but Louis and Conn ended up having to wait until 1946.

 

I dont see much raising of the bar in boxing.
The fighters fight less often, fight shorter championship fights, fight in "safer" conditions (bigger gloves, less bleeding, quicker stoppages), have more "titles" to share around, more weight divsions. And there are far less hungry fighters than there used to be.

 

:good

 

Some of it was politics, Holmes was WBC's main man, Don King was running things with the WBC, and Bob Arum was the WBA's main man.Plus King and Arum hated each others guts;like oil and water, there was no mixing.Plus, after 1983, Larry was about getting his green-on, so in order to do that some people were not to be fought.

 

Okay that's a fair statement.. I was referring to better conditioning, and stuff along those lines, but your points are well taken... Fighters made far less money, had to hold jobs on the side, fought in longer bouts, took greater beatings, and had a far lesser chance of becoming a champion.. I still don't see Marciano, Dempsey, Schmeling, and those guys being champs in a later era thought, but that's a road that I have ventured down too many times to want to revisit.