Boxers who were known as sparring partner's in the beginning of their career.

The right attitude for all of us.

 

Or maybe he just wasn't that good.

 

That's fine ,but I asked you;
When Griffin was a spar mate for Fitz?
When McVey trained Carpentier?
Can you ,with the aid of your sources,respond please?

 

I actually have a decent one, I don’t think it’s been said. Jimmy Young was a sparring partner of Joe Frazier’s since Jim was a teenager. I think those sparring sessions beat Jim into being a certain type of fighter and funny enough it resembled JF’s greatest rival making him I assume very valuable for prep.

 

Bob Fitzsimmons sparred with Joe Jeannette,for 44 years old Fitz's abortive fight with Jack Johnson.

 

I’d love to know more about some of the sparring encounters at Stillman’s Gym in NYC back in the day when so many great fighters trained there.

Circumstance would have to dictate that certain guys in or around the same weight class would end up pairing off regularly, especially in cases where they were managed and/or trained by the same guys.

 

The thing is, when you’re good you don’t need excuses. And boy people come up with a lot of them to basically explain away 20 or so losses for Walcott that scream ‘he was a talented fighter but not a consistent one and maybe not as good as you think’ and they look for a narrative to say ‘nah he was great all that time he was losing fights.’

 

Johnny Nelson after a disastrous start to his pro career 0-3 went and worked a lot in Germany as a sparring partner to many of the good fighters based there or using camps in Germany at that time, most notable being the Klitschko brothers.

 

In the end, the mental gymnastics they must go through allow them the opportunity to claim some higher intellectual ground, when it's just a case of Occam's Razor... the simplest explanation is the correct one. He just wasn't that good.

 

The Wild Card had a couple of eras like that- for awhile it was super middles, then junior welters. A bunch of guys in those weight classes relocated or traveled to train there to get 'free' sparring. These guys were fighting on TR cards and, even if they had their own trainer, etc...Freddie got a cut when they fought and got paid.

 

Thanks, Mac!

 

LOL .. no disrespect to Steve, just funny.

 

Listen very few minority fighters ever had an even partially paved lane to proceed in ... Many took losses long the way they would not have absorbed with a level playing field .. a terrific article from the Sports Illustrated Vault .. this one about Jimmy Ellis but could be about hundreds of talented black fighters :

"To be a black fighter, even the least carnivorous of managers will agree, is a "stomped down life, a stone-hard road." Few pamper the black fighter. He has to fight from the moment he steps in a gym. It is an axiom among white fight managers: "You have to find out early if the black boy has any dog in him."

A few had opportunities like excellent management out of the gate like Joe Louis and Ray Robinson but they were both exceptions and exceptional. Far more Walcotts out there ..

 

Joe Walcott mobbed up. That’s documented very well. And maybe that was the only way HE could get to the top, but every fighter who made it to the top in that era was not mobbed up. Some took the more honorable route and kept working at it until their breaks came.

If you’re suggesting all of Joe’s losses, or a significant portion of them, were all crooked affairs where he was cheated by paid-off officials or he allowed himself to be defeated because his mob handlers demanded it … I’d have to see some credible documentation on that.