A Faded Tyson vs. A Faded Louis

That really was an ambitious post. I'm gonna keep it shorter, but this will be the last thing I say on the subject.

Sure, you can't with dead accuracy say what part of the development is down to the athlete's progress and which part is down to the progress of equipment. But I feel pretty certain that neither Borg nor Hogan would be competitive today, even with the same equipment. Guys like Tiger Woods and Nadal are to begin with too superior physically (even if this development seem to have come in quite a late stage in golf), and they also has had the old legends to learn from.

In boxing you can say the same thing. The fighters today are on average physically superior to those of yesterday. Guys with the size of Lewis and the Klitschkos very not at all as agile and relatively fast 50+ years ago, or even 30 years ago. One important thing that has developed is the nutrion, which today is an integral part of an athletes program in a way it just wasn't back then.

Training methods has also evolved, with weight-lifting becoming much more important for example. Probably because with better nutrition and better training methods it seems like you can put on more muscle today while not loosing too much mobility and speed.

One more example. I don't believe that the Maradona of 20+ years ago would hack it at the absolute top today. The demands on physical fitness are much greater in today's game, and he never was the fittest specimen. His technique would probably still rank among the best. But it would not be as superior as it was back then for the simply reason that later generations of footballers have studied his tricks and developed them even more and also come up with new ones.

I don't think boxing is any different. With all the money and resources in the sport, the people involved have to be pretty dumb if they haven't been able to develop it in any way for the last 60-70 years. I just don't belive that to be the case.

(Sorry, I lied. This wasn't short at all.)

 

I think that most of todays heavyweight belt holders show the nutritional advances around their midrifs.

 

It was naked ambition. Now I'm wearing a towel.

Wel,, here's an interesting idea - why not ask some of the modern players to go a round or two with vintage equipment? Obviously we'll never be able to see Babe Ruth take batting practice with one of today's whip-handled fat-barrled ash bats, but could Alex Rodriguez swing The babe's 42-ounce thick-handled hickory club?

I'm a terrible golfer, but my first set of clubs dated from the 1950s and when I finally got my hands on a decent set of late-80s Titleists the difference was pretty obvious. Grab a modern driver and a Hogan-era driver and drop $15 for a bucket of balls at the driving range. You'll notice the difference.

And really, let's take a better look at golf - in most sports, you play against opponents, but in golf, it is said, you're playing against the course. Well, let's look at some scores for major golf tournaments and see how different eras did playing against that same course.

Ben Hogan, the very fella we're talking about, won the 1953 Master's Tournament with a course score of 274.

Jack Nicklaus, possibly the best golfer ever, won the 1963 Master's with a 271.

Now we'll jump to the modern era and use Tiger Woods and all of his fancy-dan custom-made high-tech equipment. Tiger has won the Master's four times. His scores:

1997: 270
2001: 272
2002: 276
2005: 276

Now I'm no golf expert, and I understand that you need to account for things like weather, but I don't see anything from Tiger's raw scores that indicate that he's in any way inherantly superior to Ben Hogan or Jack Nicklaus, or at least not so superior that you could attribute it to Tiger's "greatness" rather than his far-superior equipment.

Guys the size of Lewis and the Klitchkos (admitted steroid users, BTW), as I mentioned previously, train for 12 rounds at the most. Shorter fights place less emphasis on stamina and endurance; do you think they would train any differently for a 20-rounder? Would they want to carry that much muscle into the ring for a fight 40% longer than what they've spent their entire careers training for?

Jim Jeffries, arguably the greatest all-around athlete in the world during his championship reign, actually trained DOWN to 220lb because he felt carrying more weight would impede his ability to go 25 hard rounds. James Toney, another modern steroid-fueled heavyweight despite a physique best described as "doughy", held his own against ripped-up body-beautifuls despite being well over the hill. A nearly-immobile overmuscled Shannon Briggs, posessing the stamina of a your average "fat camp" participant, is a modern "superheavyweight" and even a recent titleholder, but any of the historic greats would have boxed his ears off.

I fear that the modern boxing fan has begun to adopt the pro-wrestling outlook when valuing boxers - if a fighter has that Hulk Hogan physique he gets bonus points over more technical, better-conditioned athletes. Muhammad Ali wasn't going to win a pose-down with Ernie Terrell or Cleveland Williams, but he could box their ears off, and that's what you really want a boxer to be able to do.

OK, let's assume that today's fighter have access to excellent weight-training programs and a cornicopia of nutritional supplements (all legal ones - yes, I'm a dreamer) that give them all the lean muscle they could dream of, as opposed to the old steak-eating, wood-chopping geezers of days past.

Who today hits harder than Ernie Shavers? Who could out-wack George Foreman?

I hate soccer. I consider discussing it to be beneath me, and all decent people.

Well, I just have to disagree. I think I've made a credible argument in my defense.

Geez, soccer? SOCCER? atsch

 

Hey! I like a healthy discussion as much as the next guy, but calling the beautiful game for the s-word is just way below the belt. I'm soooo out of here!

 

SOCCER? :barf

Hey, using our hands is what separates us from the snakes.

 

That sounds awfully close to masturbationpropaganda to me...

Hey, wasn't I supposed to get out of here?