Are fight descriptions of old fights in books really accurate ?

The credo for ol' scribes was: If fiction made for a better story, go with the fiction.

 

Dempsey was definately a bloody mess in the first fight and was banged up real good in the second as well. I have a really nice photo which Id post here if they hadnt disabled pictures, of Dempsey's face which looks like a nice raw slab of ground beef. I have another photo of Dempsey taken two weeks after the first fight showing him healing but still with cuts and bandages. Remember, Dempsey was in such bad shape after the first fight that he had to be led to Tunney by his handlers, which you can see in the film. See if you can see the pic of the second fight here:


http://i1184.photobucket.com/albums/z335/klompton/close_zpsc14f19c0.jpg

The Greb-Tunney 1 fight was a blood bath. Tunney was practically blind upon leaving the ring afterwards. He was suffering from several cuts which bled profusely and his nose was broken and flattened. On his way back to his dressing room Tunney passed out. In his dressing room his body was so swollen from the body punching that his trunks had to be cut off. When he finally left that night he was seen being supported by two handlers and stayed in bed for a week or two afterwards. The ringside reports are pretty consistent about how bloody it was.

 

Great photo, Klompton.

 

In Adam Pollack's books they are

 

Fight reports are written by fallible observers, and often contradict each other.

Wherever possible I would always compare multiple fight reports, if trying to understand what happened in a fight that was not filmed.

 

Sometimes there accurtate, and other times not. I think they called Dempsey Tunney I right though, Dempsey was pretty bang up, and as klompton said, had to be lead to think Tunney after the fight.

 

Here it is. I was wrong about the bandages but he has more cuts around the eye than I remember.

http://i1184.photobucket.com/albums/z335/klompton/dempcut_zpsed70f15c.jpg

 

It's absolutely impossible to know how accurate descriptions of an old fight are when the only frame of reference we have is the descriptions.
It doesn't matter much either.

 

surely this matters a lot?

watch the old fights that are available, read the reports and the writers whose reports match should be fairly trustworthy for unfilmed fights.
I'm no historian but its not hard to work that out

 

Not really. How exactly a particular prizefight went down in all its details 100 years ago isn't an important matter. Not to me anyway.

Hey, if that's your method it's probably as good as any. But it's flawed.
Sometimes you'll find two 'reliable' writers with differing reports.
Sometimes, those guys wrote under someone else's by-line or copied from someone else, or got someone else to write it up for them.
Not to mention the fact that being accurate some of the time doesn't mean they were accurate all the time.
Luckily, it doesn't really matter.

 

your right with both points, its not a science and in the grand sceme it doesn't matter, however it isn't absolutley impossible.
All power to you but if you dont care what happens in the fights how can you know anything about a fighter, results are worthless if you dont know the context

 

Yeah, but in those cases, even when it's probably fiction or very unreliable or likely embellished, it's still worth talking about if it's interesting and we have nothing else to firmly contradict it.