Well, first of all - gloves were much smaller back then. This made high guard basically useless in long fights. Secondly - duration of fights, which were much longer than what you are used to. Body shots were much more important then and you had to keep your hands healthy for 40+ rounds. I still don't get criticism of Fitzsimmons. He moved laterally well, he countered Corbetr masterfully, he used body shots (one of which stopped much bigger Corbett), he had good head movement and his power was real.
The strength and conditioning was MUCH better by the mid 80s, guys from the early 1900s pretty much just did a lot of running, sparring, shadowboxing, and bag work. Judging by these old timers’ physics on fight night their training likely wasn’t even close to the training the guys from the mid 80s had
I’ve read up on this kind of rationale, but I’ll have to ruminate on it regardless and do some digging. It’s been a long while since I’ve given it the time of day. It does seem to make sense, though. With that said, it kinda proves my stance in a way. The sport was so vastly different in its makeup that it needed a completely different set of techniques to what we see in modern boxing. So how do you even compare these fighters or try to envision them in the ring together?
I’m sure it’s not completely accurate but that was what most of their training revolved around. Would you care to fill me in on the other training methods they did?
You can research this forum for training methods of fighters from that era. Training with weights was common back then, although it's true that they focused more on conditioning than power traning. They fought for much more rounds, so it's understandable to focus more on roadwork than in case of 12 rounds fighters. Fighters from 1980s were probably more powerful on average, but they certainly weren't better conditioned.
If I recall correctly, title fights could be 15 rounds up until late 1987, so I think it’s a much better combination of conditioning and power
I think that's a very overlooked point. I'm not certain anyone could do well just dropped in the deep end 100 years before or after they competed.
It’s not like those were all three minute rounds, though. Nor were they paced anything like a modern contest. There isn’t even a consensus on what constituted a round in that era.
Depends, watch Nelson vs Gans for example - they had higher work rate than most modern fighters in 40s rounds!
You're talking about bareknuckle then, because in gloved boxing it was well established that a round was 3 minutes long. I think that you confuse 1880s with 1900s a lot!
Yes there was. 2min rounds were fairly common in the UK but it's pretty easy to find out when fights were 2min rounds, LPR didn't have consistent rounds, but LPR was dead by the time Sharkey was fighting. There were some weird hybrid rulesets etc. or exhibitions with shortened rounds, but you can check the times they were fighting and clearly see they were fighting 3min rounds much of the time. Some of the longest ones were discussed here. https://www.boxingforum24.com/threa...ngest-gloved-boxing-matches-on-record.651354/
You never did get around to answering Klompy’s question. Fair enough, though. I was probably confusing eras. Or, to be frank, not really even making the distinction between eras fought around or before the 20th century. That time frame is a blotchy spot for me.
