Do you factor number of fights when considering and comparing a fighter's age and prime?

Hello, Boxing GOAT.
I factor in those you mentioned, the fighter's style, and the era.

 

Fighter A has much more wear and tear on him. Let's not forget about sparring. More fights more sparring, and against better fighter to prepare for your better opposition.

 

The answer is so obvious - by every meaningful metric other than actual birth certificate, B is the younger fighter.

Unless Fighter B has God-given elite all-timer talent and either spars with the absolute best in class or has access to an elite trainer with lineage/experience of teaching true upper echelon skills, they will be levels below Fighter A in experience and deployment of skill.

A will be a superior fighter but will have paid for that with wear and tear. Put them in a match-up, all things being equal, A should be expected to win but B might just catch him on that one night where he got old overnight and just couldn't operate like he did two years ago.

When all is said and done though, A will usually be judged to be the more accomplished fighter; strength of schedule, quality of opponent and risking more to achieve greatness.

 

Yeah, the tread left on the tires is a big consideration. Like the NFL running back, a boxer only has so many hits he can take before resistance diminishes. He can learn better to diminish impact but you always do get hit. It's very rare one makes it through a fight without getting tagged. Even Pernell Whitaker got hit.

 

Depends if they were knocked out ever…multiple KOs def hurt a fighter going forward but some fighters are just strange and age differently. Better to just see how they look on film atm. They still have snap? Explosiveness? Reaction times? Compared to previous fights.

 

For sure.

Number of fights and the quality of opposition therein count for a lot but there are a number of pundits who curiously refuse to factor same.

Specific boxing styles can also impact on how long or how relatively brief a fighter’s prime and just off prime years may be.

 

Honestly I'm not a big subscriber to the idea more fights=faster aging and less fights=slower aging. Just haven't seen proof of that. To the contrary if a fighter retires in their prime takes 5 years off and comes back they are usually much worse off then they would have been if they kept fighting that whole time.

Fighters age more or less quickly primarily due to their style and who they are fighting. Are their opponents younger and capable of taking advantage of the ways aging has effected them? Wear and tear is a real thing but if a fighter is doing well they are only taking damage in a small % of their rounds. In boxing if you aren't doing well your career is on the ropes regardless. What Ali went through in the 70s is pretty rare for a champion boxer.

The change from old training methods matters here and this is something that happens behind closed doors we can't look for trends for on boxrec. Some of that old sparring were ghost rounds and ghost fights.

 

I think that Oleksandr Usyk and Muhammad Ali are great examples of how number of fights as well as the age a boxer starts play into when prime was for each fighter. When Usyk had his first professional fight he was 26 years and 10 months old. By the time Ali was that age he was 29-0 and was 10-0 in heavyweight title fights. He would have had even more fights but due to his exile he was banned the last 10 months of this time frame. Ali was pretty much done by the time he was 36 while Usyk has showed sighs of slowing down over the last few years but has still looked very good through his 38th year. Add to that the fact that Ali had 61 total professional fights while Usyk had just 25 and it's hard to imagine you can base primes strictly on age.

 

There are no concise primery rules with which to evaluate on numbers directly, including number of fights, unfortunately, because you always have to take everything under account. Fighter B has had degenerative jejunum disorder that's gotten progressively worse throughout his career while fighter A has been healthy as a horse, despite suffering more cuts, bruises and shots to the head. Fighter B unprimed himself with coke and Jack Daniel's. His reflexes are not nearly as good as they once were. Fighter A has never done illegal drugs, smoked or drank, and grown up on wild fish from the purified waters of Lake Minnetonka, Apolloniacly. As grueling as his fights were, his reaction time seems nearly the same as he had at his best.

Fighter B's favourite pastime is huffing paint. He's starting to go 1-1 with Von Kaiser on Punch-Out!!. Fighter A eats spinach and kale six nights a week. Fighter B has PTSD from surviving a natural disaster that left him stuck in a well with some kid named Timmy for 3 days, finally being rescued by a telepathic dog. Fighter A is pretty laid back and has a Dean Martin vibe to him. Never really trains or fights stressed. Fighter A reprimed his shoulder with surgery. Fighter B had a botched enema while on PCP, with a garden hose.

 

In some cases, you can factor in amateurs.

Don Curry had like 400 amateur bouts. That’s a lot and he surely started very young.

When the bottom dropped out for him, it dropped hard.

 

It's how hard the fights were ,imo.
Tom Sharkey and Joe Frazier were both past prime at 29, due to their styles.

 

Getting knocked out matters. But some times it doesn't. Take Riddick Bowe for example. He was never stopped, but his skills diminished noticeably after his wars with Holyfield. And while Terry Norris had been knocked out before it's hard for me to not believe all those sparring wars with his brother didn't lead to an early decline. Jmo.

 

The style in which they fight factors in as well as their lifestyle. How much punishment do they take in the ring. How much do they punish themselves out of the ring, weight fluctuations? diet? Losing and gaining tremendous amounts of weight fight after fight.
Like a car has an odometer.

 

Think personally Bowe fell victim to losing the fire. Once you reach the mountain top many find it hard to keep up with training how they used too