In most sports the current guys are better than previous eras, why would boxing be any different?

There's probably no other sport, where innate qualities plays as big a part as in boxing. Qualities that can't really be measured. If you're 7 feet tall and athletic, there's a good chance that, if you're dedicated enough, you could become a good basketball player. Not that this is a certainty, of course.

In boxing there are so many "hidden" qualities, that need to be there - qualities that will only reveal themselves, once you take a crack at the sport. Durability (chin), and heart probably being two of the most important. Without these you won't get very far. Also hitting power, for some weird reason, seems to be something you're either lucky to have - or unlucky not to have.

You're of course not born with skills - but your ability to learn the finer points of the sport, is highly individual. Even if all other qualities are there, not everyone can be taught to become a master boxer. Sometimes, on rare occasions, it all mesh together, and we get a Robinson or a Leonard - or, more recently, a Mayweather.

I don't believe exceptional talent is era specific. Over the past 80 years or so, there have been great fighters that stood out. From Robinson, Louis, Pep in the 40s, to Ali in the 60s to "the Fab Four" in the 80s - right up to more recent times with Mayweather and Pacquiao.

In other words, I don't believe boxers today, in general, are better than 50 years ago. Nor do I think they are worse!

 

Interesting thought in boxing as well. Does the megawealth of the top fighters and change in societal views mean they don't have the resilience of the past era.

Either way as you say the size and strength gap is massive.

 

The problem with this theory is that natural skill ('talent') has very little to do with achievement and almost everything to do with long-term process (exercising discipline, training methods, repetition, health care and injury prevention).

You could take the top 100 'most talented' marathon runners from 1900 and put them in a race with a competitive highschool amateur runner from 2020 and today's runner would destroy them based on knowledge, training methods, nutrition and discipline.

There's a million books about this topic, such as
- The Talent Code: Greatness Isn't Born. It's Grown.
- Outliers: The Story of Success
- Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

 

Why would it be coached out of young guys? Keep in mind I know almost nothing about the game.
And...In baseball the picther only appears every 4 games max to save the arm-& less often than in years past.
Do they bowl MORE than in the past? They pitch with equal frequency but more total games in the season?

Also, even if they often paced themselves, hard to believe many would not often enough find circumstances to throw their hardest, no?

 

Boxing has a lot more variables than something like weightlifting or sprinting, where there are clear, measurable targets to strive for and surpass. If boxing were just how hard can you punch this bag or how many punches can you throw in a minute then I don't doubt modern athletes would have surpassed guys from previous eras many times over. But when you're comparing something that involves so many factors there's a lot more guesswork involved. Personally I think HWs have got more athletic relative to size overall compared to the 70s/80s crop (minus outliers like Ali and Tyson) but the skill level appears to have plateaued sometime in the mid nineties and devolved from the 2000s onwards. Not sure entirely why that is but I don't suppose it can be narrowed down to one thing alone.

 

standards in the heavyweight division have undoubtedly improved as a result of the population getting taller over time.

but in the other divisions [24 hr weigh-ins, which badly hurt simple comparisons at a given weight class, aside] the population getting bigger doesn't help at all in the way that it does for most other sports.

also, boxers at the very top level have for a long time been exceptionally fit, meaning that there's not been all that much scope for improvements in professionalism in the way that we've seen in some other sports. e.g. compare the physiques of a top 1980 [i.e. 40 yrs ago] soccer player [e.g. Brazil's Socrates was just about the best midfielder in the world but smoked 40 cigs a day, similarly most of the best British players at the time were prodigous beer drinkers] with the guys at the top level now [Messi, Ronaldo, etc], the difference is night & day, because the 70s/80s soccer guys weren't even nearly living like athletes. but look at a hagler/leonard/hearns physique circa 1980, in those old photos they still look great by modern standards.

 

The thing that makes boxing different to other sports is the level of toughness required. Seems clear that you needed to be a lot tougher in the 60s/70s to make it than you do now. You can get further on talent alone these days. The first thing you notice when watching old fights is how much more the ref lets go during each round, and how much more punishment boxers take before fights are stopped (plus they were 15 rounders). Couple that with more people boxing back then, and the strong likelihood is that many modern boxers simply wouldn't have made it. In a nutshell, survival of the fittest was much less forgiving back then.

On the flip side, take a boxer who was tough enough and talented enough to make it to the top in the 60s/70s/80s and have him start his career in today's era, and it appears very likely he would be massively successful.

In other sports there have been the same advances in the science, conditioning, nutrition etc. and athletes are much fitter and faster. The end result is that much more talent is required to compete today. For example you look at prime Lionel Messi, the speed in which he played the game, and the tiny spaces he operated in were just a different level to anything that came before (still does this stuff I know, but 6 years ago just wow). The defenders would all be so fast, so strong, so well drilled.. and of course so fit, that he would be having the smallest windows to shoot, no time on the ball, but somehow he would still bamboozle them and be incredibly accurate with passing and shooting. You would need to slow down videos to watch how he managed some of it.

Some people still try to argue he wouldn't have been able to take the kicks back in the day, that he wouldn't have been 'tough' enough. But it's a feeble excuse in football. However in boxing it's incredibly relevant.

 

It's not, older fans are delusional.

I think there is a point where it doesn't matter as much. In 100 years, UFC fights won't be much different from UFC fighters in 110 years. That said, UFC fighters 10 years later are FAR better than UFC fights a year 1, and even more so 20 years later.

So I do think the likes of SRL, Tyson, Hearns, Duran etc. wrecks everyone today as hard as they did back then. SRR was a bit like Bruce Lee, ahead of his time, but SRL beats him and many others IMO.

Don't get me started on the likes of Pep, Sullivan, Dempsey lol. Ali would destroy the current CW but gets wrecked at HW by Fury.

 

Bowling at that speed puts a huge amount of stress on the body. Stress fractures in the back are a fairly common injury for fast bowlers which tell you a bit about how unnatural the motion is.

The game has shifted to more matches but with less bowling. A fast bowler would bowl 60 - 90 deliveries in a day - in the new shorter form that is becoming more and more popular that's down to 24.

 

Why would fighters from 100 years ago be "tougher"? you speak of hard times? It's not like Tyson grew up soft, or Duran, or Mayorga, or GGG. You relate it to how soft men have become in the U.S, but boxing is a global sport, and the toughest areas of the US still produce very tough fighters.

Also better nutrition can make tougher fighters. Better bones, muscles to absorb punches, better technique to grow muscles in the right areas (neck exercises) and if you would believe Roger Mayweather, A-side meth that allows flyweights to walk through WW's punches.

 

I didn't say 100 years ago. Boxing is safer now than it was 30 years ago. Referees don't let fighters take as much punishment, less people take up the sport and there are less rounds. These things combined mean boxers don't have to be as tough these days.

You compare most sports from now and the 70s and the main thing you notice is how much slower they were back then. Wtih boxing the main thing you notice is how much more brutal it used to be. This is why people think previous era boxers would have more luck these days compared to other sports people. I can see why..

 

No, there weren't more boxers back in the 60s/70s... quite the opposite. There are far more boxers, from far more countries, taking part in far more fights today.

There must be thousands of boxers today from Africa, Asia, Latin America and (not least) the former communist countries, who grew up in tough conditions. Why would these boxers automatically lack the toughness from previous eras - just because they are "modern"?

 

a lot of this whole debate is caused by americans that have a hard time accepting that they are by far not the top dominater of the sport anymore.

us logic= if we suck at a sport then the sport must suck.
Cw division sucks, hw boxing sucks, soccer sucks and so on

 

Boxing was once a much more popular sport meaning many more people were involved.

 

We're talking about the 60s/70s era… where the talent pool was much shallower than today.