There comes a point when debating heavyweight fantasy matchups where I start suspecting that two fighters came from such different eras that it's hard to know where to begin. I feel OK comparing prime Johnson and Corbett, or Ali versus Tyson, or Bowe against Wlad. But when it's Tunney against Lennox Lewis, things get weird. You don't have comparable opponents, styles, training, rules, techniques, equipment, film quality, or even size anymore. Suddenly, you're shooting in the dark. If you had to lay down a rough guidepost, how many years between heavyweights would you say is long enough to make comparisons extremely difficult?
I think that we have a very clear understanding of every heavyweight champion, from Joe Louis to Tyson Fury. The film quality is excellent, and we know their game very well. We have an incomplete but still good, grasp of Tunney, Sharkey, Baer etc. With Dempsey we are getting into paleontological territory. We have to scratch together the evidence. With Johnson, we are well and truly there. With Jeffries, we are desperately scratching for any scrap of evidence. Sullivan might as well be a T rex.
On the off chance that I haven't missed a further joke: mrkoolkevin made a thread a while back on how Marciano didn't have the insane training regimen that more traditional posters had originally attributed to him. Everybody then fixated on the fact that the sources showed that Marciano ate large quantities of blueberries.
I have met people who know people who met John L he was more like a Gigantopithecus they used to cart him around in a large cage and let him out in the arena and when he finished eating his opponent they would chase him back into the mobile cage with pikes.
Thanks for asking on behalf of all of us who were simply too afraid. If someone said I like turtles. I might’ve had a handle on that. The blueberries had me stumped. I thought we already hit T-Rex territory when we only went as far back as Rocky.
There was a poster, once upon a time, who unironically maintained that heavyweights became modern on November 30, 1956.
I have it on good authority that Mike Tyson never ate a blueberry in his life, which is supported by the fact that Buster Douglas ate blueberry pancakes by the stack for breakfast and we all know how that turned out.
These words were uttered by Floyd Patterson. It was Ingemar Johansson who completed it by interrupting Floyd at the press conference to say … “Your blueberry I’ll smash “With my hammer of Thor”
