Chang v. Yuh: Clarifying the non-"super fight"

I see a lot of Jung-koo Chang v. Myung-woo Yuh threads in American boxing forums, both in the forms of "fantasy" match-ups and historical questions regarding why it never happened. Typically, the threads are rarely informed and engage in a lot of science fiction-like wild speculations. So I thought I would compose a rather lengthy answer, as I actually do know a lot of people who have direct knowledge of the affair, including people on both sides of the camp.

Here was the actual post that prompted me to write. As you can see, I was initially going to just write a "reply" rather than a separate thread, but it became too long.

Oh, no, not this silly Chang v. Yuh (non-)"fantasy" fight again.

To begin with, it would not have been "one for the ages" in any form.

Let's say two possibilities for this fight happening time-frame-wise. First, if this fight happens during Chang's prime (let's say before middle of '86), it would have been a non-competitive, one-sided beat down. No junior flyweight who ever lived beats that version of Chang (provided Chang shows up trained), and Yuh is not coming close. (I don't want to divulge private conversations overmuch, but let's just say Yuh himself agrees with this; he'd be the first to tell you he couldn't beat the best Chang.)

Second, if this fight happens after Chang let himself go, say, late '86 or '87 and onward, Yuh could make it a competitive fight, but it would be an ugly fight and not exactly "one for the ages." That version of Chang fought only in spurts, because he was never in condition to fight the full 3 minutes and 12 rounds. So it would have been a lot of clinching and fouling and painfully sporadic action.

Now, there is much speculation outside Korea about why this fight did not happen, but this fight was never ever even remotely considered in Korea. Let me point out a few basic considerations.

1. As general matter, unification fights between Korean fighters simply never happen.

The primary reason is, because domestic boxing powers want titles kept in the country, and unification fights lowers the number of domestic titles by 1, even though technically both titles are still kept in country.

Relatedly, unification fights mean that a domestic fighter has to lose, and this consideration is exacerbated when both fighters are undefeated for much of their career, as Chang and Yuh were for most of their careers. If a loss were to come, Koreans want the loss to come from foreign opponents, rather than have it come as "self-inflicted" (the "us v. them," ethnocentric mentality is a ubiquitous bane of Korea, and this used to be worse 30 years ago).

A better illustration of this aversion to domestic unification fights is Chan-hee Park v. Tae-shik Kim. Now, here (unlike Chang v. Yuh) is actually a fight that could have been competitive and the boxing public and cognoscenti both wanted. But neither camp seriously ever considered it, because they both believed that their fighters could go on to have a long, Hall of Fame-type of careers, and they did not want to jeopardize that possibility.

2. As I hinted above, the time-frame is a bit off; although Chang and Yuh were contemporaries and less than 1 year apart in age, their primes and therefore career trajectories were not in sync. Chang peaked around age 19-20 ('82-'83) and declined thereafter largely due to his lifestyle choices; Yuh didn't win a title until he was almost 22 (end of '85).

So during Chang's prime, Yuh was a completely unproven fighter. And Chang started declining steeply as Yuh came into his prime; and by the time Yuh started becoming well-known, Chang was spent and looking only to hand-pick weak opponents to at first set and then prolong his record-breaking title run.

3. I absolutely cannot emphasize this enough: That Yuh was a great fighter is not widely accepted among the Korean boxing cognoscenti. In particular, nobody in Korea considers him Chang's competitive peer, and probably the majority of domestic experts would put him below Chan-hee Park. His career is marked by a series of undistinguished opponents (compared to the other Korean greats and even near-greats), and his won-loss record is deceiving, as he had lots of close calls against mediocre fighters. To put it starkly, he is a great fighter largely only outside Korea, because folks outside Korea generally will only judge Korean fighters by the raw won-loss record.

So by extension, simply no one clamored for Chang v. Yuh fight, because the boxing cognoscenti in Korea and both camps considered Chang a far superior fighter, and the outcome a foregone affair if the two ever met before Chang declined. I have yet come across a single respectable domestic boxing expert who thinks Yuh could've beaten a prime, committed Chang.

To use an American analogue for you to understand, the idea that Chang and Yuh should've fought, and that Yuh could've won is about as outlandish and anachronistic as the idea that Leonard and Pryor should've fought, and that Pryor could've won.