Is there another sport where a consensus of experts thinks the players 50 years ago..

In baseball, I don't know what you are talking about. Take Mays' catch in the 1954 World Series against Vic Wertz, for example. NOBODY does that today because no park is 483 feet to center field and that hit would be a home run with no chance to be caught today.


Ted Williams---players are hitting .406 all the time today?


Joe DiMaggio---players are hitting in 56 straight games all the time today?


Bob Gibson---Pitchers routinely have 1.12 ERA's?


Mickey Mantle---name the major league players who can run to first base in 3.1 seconds and also routinely hit homers over 500 feet.

 

This reminds me of a caller to the Rick Barry talkshow in San Francisco. The call was about 2005 or so. The caller maintained that the Oakland Raiders of that time, who had a losing record, were a better team than the 1960's Green Bay Packers because football players had improved so much over the years. Barry replied that greatness can only be measured within one's own time and it doesn't make a lousy team "great" in any meaningful sense if they could defeat a very successful team from the remote past.

That call clarified my thinking on greatness in sports. The only meaningful measurement of sports greatness is one's success and accomplishments in one's own time under the conditions of one's own time.

If someone has to argue that so and so is "great" because he could have been great generations ago if somehow taken back in time, you are only telling me that he in fact was not so great when measured against the standards of his own era.

 

I dont know much about other sports, or what was happening 50 years ago.

But I think it's safe to assume that the quality of Real Tennis, certain forms of fencing and stick-fighting, and tournament jousting has declined in the last 100 - 1000 years !

 

Maybe Horse racing.

 

Is there another sport like boxing?

 

What consensus are you referring to? Perhaps in the Classic section but apart from that ... :?

 

Baseball would have been my pick

 

Football to a certain extent.

It's similar to boxing as the older generation might have Best, Pele, Eusebio, Cruyff, Maradonna, Beckenbauer, Platini etc in their best ever players list whilst the younger generation who didn't live through those era's may have some of the modern players in there.

 

Not sure on that, the breeding of horses have improve. Man Of War would not be the speed demon he was from the 20's if taken into the 40's and up.

Hell its all about getting the better breed in raceing today. Though one must say, many of the champions that follow Man of War was his off spring or in his bloodline, since the bloodline of Man of War is a hot item in the raceing world.

 

I will say this. Boxing is not a sport, its a FIGHT. Its gift wrapped as a sport for legal reasons. No sport requires the fight or flight instincts that boxing does. Its an emotional, mentally challenging simulation of life and death.

And a Spartan Hoplite would laugh at our athletes, with their fake tan, shaven chests, gelled hair and deodorant. Then he'd walk the length of Greece in some shitty sandals and 200lbs of equipment, beat the **** out of a million Persians like he doesnt give a ****, because thats just how he rolls, its nothing to him.

And hes not running on PEDS, hes running on some rock hard mouldy bread and raw wolf meat

 

MMA , apparently the superstarts of yesteryear were far better than today :rofl

 

i believe this question has come up before, but no mattters.

i think it goes for a lot of endurance sports.
for example cycling. not a big sport in the usa but very big in europe.
old timers like merckx, coppi, hinault won much more and are much better then the athletes of today. for almost the same reasons as that the old time boxers are better.
they competed more and the matches where more difficult
Boxers fighting more rounds and cyclists riding longer and tougher races

 

NBA

"The greats would be special in any era." is something I've heard quite a bit from announcers and broadcasters.

 

chess, Fencing, jousting, golf maybe with the exception of tiger woods.

 

plus boxing can be viewed as more like an expression/mastery of art form in which case writers, painters, and musicians could also be made a comparison of. most of the greats in those fields are from the past.