Past versus Present: Why you can’t compare the old fighters to the new ones and vice versa: by Ared The heavyweight division sucks nowadays. All of the top heavyweights now will fall to any ATG from the 70’s. Which might be true, but the question is, does this notion hold true for all weight divisions? And does any fighter, by virtue of being born at a later date, be considered less than the fighters of yore? Logically, the answer should be no. For example, let’s say we put a fighter from the 60’s (a great decade in boxing) and let’s put him amongst the fighters of today. Supposedly, he came from a tougher era in boxing, so this would be a cake walk for him. Well, not exactly. First, he would have to contend with improvements in nutrition and training. Fighters nowadays get the benefit of better nutritionists and scientific training techniques, which in contrast to past decades, though not miles head, give them significant advantages. A good example to quantify this would be looking at other sports. Swimming records get beaten almost every three years. Running records get beaten other year or so. It’s not that these kids are more talented than their forebears, it’s simply because they get more out of their diets and training regimens. Thus, it results in much faster, much stronger athletes than before. Second, to many, it would seem that the talent pool has shrunk. Well, true, boxing is losing prime athletes to other more marquee sports, but now, boxing is more global than ever. Before, boxing revolved around the U.S.A. (to prove this look at your 100 ATG List, and count how many Americans are there), but now, more countries are getting into the picture. In the 90’s alone, we’ve had fighters come from different points of the globe, most noticeably in Asia (Korea, Thailand, Philippines and Japan) and South America (Mexico, Puerto Rico, Argentina). Europe has also experienced a resurgence in boxing as of late, with Great Britain leading the pack. In the American context, the talent pool may have shrunk, but in the global context, it is the biggest it has ever been. And after 2010, China and Cuba may be joining in the picture and that alone is a scary prospect. Now after reading this, people would immediately retort that boxers nowadays are actually chinnier and have less endurance. For example, fighters from before WWII actually had days jobs and fought every week. Surely, that must prove how much stronger and more resilient they were. I mean, they fought over a hundred fights in their lifetime. Well, not exactly. Take this into consideration, say you’re a fighter who has a day job and fights every weekend. In that era, of course you would also be fighting another fighter that also has a day job and fights every weekend. In short, you would be fighting each other without the benefit of conditioning and tra. You would not have a great advantage over another fighter as war torn and as tired as you. But put yourself in this era, with the same conditions. You fight every weekend and have a day job and you come against a well rested and better conditioned athlete in the ring. You would get absolutely murdered. About fighters being chinnier? The line of thinking is flawed. If you think about it, is there anything in this era that makes a fighter chinnier? (Vaseline, wink wink) Remember a good punch can take you out now matter what era you come from. A better line of thought to approach this would be that fighters are simply getting stronger. More strength = greater punching power and ergo, more knockouts. Now looking back, I’m not saying that fighters from this age are any better than the ATGs. It’s just that from a logical point of view, you cannot say that today’s boxing spectrum is any weaker than before. Now, if Roberto Duran had the benefit of today’s nutrition, training and boxing videos, you might well have a monster on your hands. As for now, stop comparing older fighters with newer ones. The context from which they come from makes the debate moot. In the end, you cannot compare apples and oranges, and when you think about it, that’s exactly what this is.
