Written reports + Lack of Footage = Overrated?

I dont think there is any one silver bullet to determining a fighters greatness. People fell all over themselves over Roy Jones in the 1990s. Reports talked about how he never lost a round (which was bull****) etc. But what got lost in the hyperbole was that Jones couldnt box his way out of a paper bag and looked super human because his competition was dog****. He was essentially picking the wings off a butterfly. In 200 years Jones will still look super fast on film and dominant. Will his opponents be remember for the **** poor part time fighters they were? Not likely. A couple of generations from now Jones will be "rediscovered" and people will start reexamining him. Yet things like the Roycott will be lost as sites die and that information falls from the web. What we will be left with is film of Roy looking great but there will be no context to tell people how skewed that impression is. Some still fall for it and they lived it. In short, film can lie without the proper context provided by contemporary sources.

 

My thoughts in a nutshell

 

Toney, Hopkins, Griffin, Hill, Ruiz, and Tarver are not dog****.

I can't believe that people still think it was all reflexes and speed for Jones greatness, that he "couldnt box his way out of a paper bag" is such a lie.

 

I'm just amazed every time when I see this bull****. As if people, who should know better, have never heard the "old-timers were great, modern breed is poor" argument. People never change and never learn from the past.

 

This is so true!


Here are a few quotes, describing John L. Sullivan - from people who actually saw him in the ring:

“He can strike out with either right or left and knock a man down with as much ease and grace as an accomplished lady can gently and languidly open an opera fan”.

"The arm straightens out and the blow is with a suddenness which seems paralysing to the spectators, to say nothing of the man in front of him".

“The superiority of Sullivan lies in his extraordinary nervous force and altogether incomparable skill as a boxer. In what does this extraordinary skill consist? In hitting as straight and almost as rapid as light, in the variety and rediness of his blows, in standing firmly on his feet and driving his whole weight and nervous force at the end of his fist- a very rare and high quality in a boxer, in movements as quick and purposeful as the leap of a lion. He can duck lower than any featherweight boxer in America”.

“He can strike more heavy blows in ten seconds than any other man in a minute and watches with self possession and calculation".


This sounds like a pretty good description of..... Willie Pep!


http://www.boxingforum24.com/showthread.php?p=9238047&highlight=sullivan%26quot%3B%2B%26quot%3Bspeed%26quot%3B%2B%26quot%3Bstraight#post9238047

 

well said

 

thats true....maybe a little left of topic here....but i can't imagine a newspaper report like this one ever been written these days...

(this is from a book i have here in the house which is made up of only newspaper reports on big fights from 1910 onwards)

(click on this image to make it bigger and more readable)

http://i33.photobucket.com/albums/d100/dougm1970/1af66ea3.jpg

 

Just look how Mayweather supposedly didn't lose a round to Canelo.

One wing was named Toney and the other Hopkins?

I think you overstate the case of Roy more than a bit here. He certainly had stretches of less than stellar opponents but Toney, Hopkins, Hill, Ruiz, McCallum, Johnson, Tate and even Sosa run the gamut from great to very good fighters. There is enough of a top flight resume to substantiate the film.

To draw a parallel, I've been doing quite a bit of research on early athletics. Some runners would be christened the second coming of Mercury by their local press, and even supposedly wizened old observers of the sport, only to find that under the stopwatch and in ideal conditions they weren't even world class for there era.

I think, ideally, there is a balance of footage and first hand accounts, which makes guys like Greb so perplexing. His resume is just so overwhelming and as Burt stated, filled with great fighters that we have seen on film, that it is hard not to rank very high in an all time great sense.

 

Griffin gave Jones ten kinds of hell and finally beat him when Jones got so frustrated he fouled him. Hill was coming off a year long layoff and one sided loss to the guy Jones ducked for years (and was never that great to begin with), Jones was roided up to his eyeballs for Ruiz (who was dog**** BTW) and Tarver beat Jones 3 out of 3 as far as Im concerned. Toney and Hopkins are Jones' best wins. Hopkins was pre prime and chased a rematch for over a decade. Jones never wanted a rematch with either of those guys. When he finally accepted one against Hopkins he got his head handed to him. Essentially Jones made his career by living off two wins. Sorry but Im not getting behind a guy who ducked every top fighter of his era after those two wins and was so adamant about NOT fighting them that he tried to prevent HBO from even saying Dariusz name on air. He lived off his sweetheart deal with HBO to the point that even they got sick of him. Things like the Roycott dont happen all that often which tells you how bad Jones' level of competition was. The guy was an absolute joke and total media creation. You think he could box? I guess we can agree to disagree. I see a guy who walks around with his down or approaches his opponent with his guard way up and out in front at 2 and 10 like a little old lady driving a cadillac. I see a guy who moves straight back and jumps in (to this day) with hooks and uppercuts. I could go on and on but his fundamentals are garbage which is why he has had no longevity. There is a big difference between a classically trained boxer like Robinson or Pep being able to improvise beautifully and a fighter like Jones who relies solely on his reflexes. Yes, lets also not forget that all of these "superhuman" reflexes were enhanced by steroids. He got popped for that once and frankly anyone who thinks a ripped 160 pounder can move up to 201 (his fight night weight for Ruiz) pounds and still be ripped while competing in an endurance sport did it naturally can kiss my ass. From the moment he beat Toney to today Roy is poster child for everything wrong with the sport of boxing. The problem is that 100 years from now most people wont know this.


On the opposite end of the spectrum I dont think Greb would look good on film. He was awkward and often described as amateurish. Yet, does that detract from his accomplishments? You cant argue with results. We know Mickey Walker was a great fighter and could have competed successfully in any era. Greb whipped his ass. We know Tunney was a durable talented boxer who would have posed problems for most. We know Loughran was a great boxer. We know Mike Gibbons was a great boxer. We know Mike ODowd was a great boxer. We know Jeff Smith was a great boxer. Tommy Gibbons was a very good fighter. Larry Williams was a good fighter. Bill Brennan was a good fighter. Jimmy Slattery was very talented. Even a guy like Bartley Madden, who was not held in very high regard was a good fighter on film. Gunboat Smith doesnt look like much but Greb knocked him out in a round when he was past it. So even if a film of Greb shows up and he doesnt look good does that take away from his legacy? I dont think so. But the point is we know the fighters above were great/very good. We have context. We wouldnt have that just from looking at film. I always go back to Ricardo Mayorgo and Vernon Forrest. If you looked at Mayorga films and you looked at Forrest films you would never in a million years believe that Mayorga would beat Forrest. Hell I wouldnt even guess hed be competetive. But he did beat him, twice, once by KO. If film of Greb showed up and he looked bad would we suddenly start thinking "well gee, maybe he didnt really beat Tunney, or Walker, or Gibbons" ? No, of course not, because we have the reports to show that everyone agreed on those fights. Its all about context, one is just as important as another.

I'll give another example. I do restoration work on films for various collectors. A lot of these films were professionally produced films of guys like Joe Lous, SR Robinson, etc. Its not at all uncommon to watch these films and get an impression of the fight. Then when I start working on them I often use other media as guide. You would not believe how many films have rounds mislabeled and out of order. Or the action in a single round edited, chopped up, and rearranged. This was often done to make the fight more interesting to theater watchers. BUT it can at times give a completely different impression of the ebb and flow of the fight. So in those situations we have film of the fighters but when we watch it and then read reports we might think "huh, I didnt get that impression at all" the problem is your eyes are being deceived because what you are watching is not the same as what the fans saw when they watched it live. In that case which is better? Film or the ringside reports?

 

And Jones settled any doubt as to who was the better fighter by knocking Griffin down about 11 times with a single punch. Please.

And Tunney beat a Dempsey coming off a 3 year layoff. Yet, Burt Sugar still put him in his alltime top 10 heavies. And though all of us wanted to see Roy and Dariuz go at it, not a single active fighter I talked to or read or heard interviewed picked against Roy. Ask John Scully, a good pro and better than good trainer who knew both. More a shame it didn't happen kind of fight than an out and out duck.

And he tested positive after this fight? How do we know Ruiz wasn't roided? What legit and world class agency reported a dirty sample from Jones? Was it the same agency that reported an almost impossible result on his opponent? Everyone in that era was using Ripped Fuel, Andro and other precursors. If he was using these, he was in the majority not the minority of fighters, athletes and even gym rats.

And, by the way, those products, or even the best of PED's do nothing for reflexes. Those can't be faked.

So, Jones is punished for not giving rematches to guys he owned. And Hopkins, four years Jones senior, can be preprime in a fight with Jones, but Jones who was past 40, getting KO'd with regularity and not possessed of the weird genes of Hopkins was prime for their farce of a rematch?

Same stuff that was said about Ali, keeping his hands low, pulling straight back, no body work. You know how he got away with it? Off the charts reflexes and athletic ability, same as Jones. Later on, when Ali slowed, the hands went up, he went to the ropes and let his body take ridiculous abuse, something Jones wasn't able to do.

 

Dempsey should be considered the greatest, or at least one of the greatest p4p, if we used written reports as the main source...