Life Spans of Heavyweight Champions

Great boxers are like great composers.

They tend to live short lives and die unhappy.

You have identified a pocket of longevity (Jeffries thru to Sharkey), and part of this might be due to the fact that the fight game got a bit more civilized but there were not so many life destroying influences outside the ring.

 

Excellent thread...very interesting apollack! I wish that the same can be done for the other weight divisions.

 

Ali's parents both died at 77, so he may simply be hard wired for a specific life expectancy. Holmes is fat (and occasionally a happy drunk), while I can't see Holyfield and Bowe having an especially long life with the neurological issues both seem sure to eventually have to deal with.

Leon Spinks is in a state of deterioration, while Buster Douglas is probably lucky to be alive after that diabetic coma which hospitalized him before his improbable return to competition.

Foreman and Lennox seem to be the best candidates to reach 80 among the current crop of retired former HW Champions. (I've omitted Terrell, who was never close to Ali as the best in the world, but if you want to include Ernie, be my guest.)

 

Great insightful stuff Duodenum:good...I really like this thread..

 

Very good thread. I have heard similar discussions on other boards - with the overall theme being that the champion boxers receive a genetic "gift" that may have helped them along.

I would like to make one observation and ask one question:

OBSERVATION: The life spans for Sullivan, Corbett and Fitzsimmons were not that short, when you loook at the average life expectancy at the time. Their bodies took a terrible beating, but that had better nutrition, healthier working environment (training camp verses a poorly ventialted factory), and at least while they were in training, less or no, alcohol and tobacco.

QUESTION: Having read Pollock's books on Corbett, Fitzsimmon and Jeffries I know that they all came from large families:

Corbett one of 10 children
Fitzsimmons one if 12 children, and
Jeffries one of 8 children

Such large families were common then, but so was a high rate of children dying before they reached adulthood. I know from the book on Jeffries that his sibings alll seemed to live to be adults (family picture on Page 6), but what about Corbett and Fitzsimmons? Did most of their siblings reach adulthood, or did they have a mortality rate more in line with the norm for that time.

My thought is, that if an unusually high number of their siblings lived to adulthood - this might support the genetic "gift" theory. That the heavyweight champs started out with exception physicality that they further developed through hard work and hard training.

Thank you

 

Adam I think you need to do your sums again.
Sullivan was 59 when he died.
D.O. B 15th of Oct 1858 . Death 2nd Feb 1918.

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N. B.This gives Sullivan,Corbett ,and Fitz an average of 59.6 years.
The average life expectancy of an American male in the year of Sullivan's death, [1918,] was 36.6 years.

 

Is Sullivan's drinking and weight gain any more "natural" than Marciano's plane going down?

 

Frazier certainly wasn't among those endowed with genetic gifts of longevity, and he may well have never gotten out of his 40s (or even his 30s) if he'd never been an athlete. For him, getting into his late 60s was a highly respectable achievement, so that's at least one heavyweight champion in recent years who extended his life span beyond what it otherwise might have been. Sullivan drank himself into an early grave, while Smoke was able to surpass Louis and Corbett. (Gentleman Jim also died of cancer. Is this a cause of death shared only between Frazier, Corbett and Patterson among the heavyweight champions?)

 

One little known fact about King Henry VIII

He actualy had 11 children, but only three of them made it past the first few months!

 

Interesting fact. It must have taken a lot of "mental toughness" to deal with something like that.

 

More like a fatalism borne of the knowledge that high infant mortality was just a way of life then. The three out of eleven wasn't really that unusual then.

 

Yes, Henry was known for keeping his head in adversity,unlike several of his wives.

 

One of my Grandmother's had 14 children ,only 7 survived child birth.

 

Damn.......that'll age a person quick, that's for sure.