This is the greatest era of boxing fandom. The casuals are there, sure. But the good outweighs the bad. We have so much access to archives and fight tape. The 1% knows a hell of a lot more than the typical boxing convos that used to go on in the barbershops and boxing gyms.
Here's one: The oft-repeated myth that boxing trainers and/or training were better in some romanticized past era is complete and utter bunk.
Trainers were better at one time. At one time you had multiple major boxing gyms in every major city and they were populated by great trainers. Go into the gyms today and you find many young punks who could not teach how to throw a decent left hook. I see it all the time all over the country. Boxing was once a top sport that drew the best talent both in terms of athletes and trainers. Not true today and it shows.
Since you are implying that you've observed this first hand, can you please name some of these gyms in major cities today where trainers aren't good enough to teach people how to throw proper hooks? The more the better. People always think trainers used to be better, as if the knowledge of past trainers dies with them and their countless proteges are left in abject ignorance. Doesn't make any sense-- that's not how knowledge works.
What reason would you have to think that they weren't some of, if not the best athletes of their time?
True...some of our top trainers have shifted over to MMA and boxing does not seem popular as it once was...who is the real champion in xyz division would be the usual confusing issue? And the mushrooming of the alphabet champs still continue despite the rot.
There's no cardboard box labeled "knowledge" in the closet of the gym with all the formulas of training fighters. Boxing training is not just about what you know, or what information has been passed down to you. It is equally, or perhaps more importantly, an art. No amount of knowledge can make you paint like Picasso. And no amount of knowledge can make you cultivate a fighter like Cus D'Amato.
Is there any reason why we should think they were? For starters, Marciano only turned to boxing because he wasn't a good enough athlete to play catcher on a minor league team. Then as now, the most athletic children pursued sports that didn't involve getting punched in the head hundreds and hundreds of times. Also, Frazier doesn't strike me as the same caliber of all-around athlete as a Gale Sayers, Jim Brown, Wilt Chamberlain, Elgin Baylor, etc. There were probably dozens of men in the NBA and NFL who were faster and more agile than Holmes and just as big, by the early 1980s.
You're making a completely different argument than your pal Perry but one that I find no less baseless than his. What makes you think that the top trainers of today are any more lacking in this art than their counterparts of yesteryear?