Are the Old Timers (X Date-1960s) less skilled than the Modern Boxers?

I consider the modern era from the 90s onwards. So by my definition the 60s 70s 80s is kinda old timers by my definition.

 

Brilliant post.

Here's the thing for me - when I watch a Barney Ross and an Armstrong, the clash of styles and the abilities of the fighters is as good as anyone that you'll see.

How can anyone look at Canzoneri's head movement and reflex and think this guy is unpolished? I repeat what I've said in the past, you cannot judge yesterday's grainy, poor camera footage by today's 4k almost smello-vision standards. The head placement of Joe Louis when he throws his jab and is off centre, Pep's balance and footwork as he slips, slides and spins his opponents, plus the fluidity of his combination punching, double, triple, quadruple jabs, hooking off the jab and then pivot, slide, bounce out of distance and then back in again - up there with anything from Mayweather or Crawford.

Look at Benny Leonard taking away the southpaw jab, bouncing back and then timing the right uppercut that they're walking into, the educated jab, ring generalship, excellent right hand.

Fitz knowing where and how to hit a man with a single blow and stop a fight - not by accident.

Then there's SRR who could do pretty much everything you want a great fighter to be able to do.

I'm not even so sure that modern fighters are so much more explosive other than juice. In most sports the advancements have been made partly through belief once barriers are broken - think Bannister's 4 min mile, but reality is that most advancements are predominantly due to improvements in technology/equipment.

If you put most fighters of the last 30 years into the living and training conditions of 1920s - 1950s, I don't see how a Floyd Mayweather's hands hold up under the schedule of the 40s and the more liberal refereeing. However, put an Ike Williams or a Robbi in today's era, with time to train/prepare for a fighter and no restrictions, they'll murder them to death!

 

This is also a pretty good take somewhat.

@Mastrangelo had a point because of many different training tech modern fighters use, it's a bit hard to compare em to old schools.

And while I thought boxing never evolved as a whole sport,the fighter just adapted to the current and some gets a chance to evolve a bit,but maybe not so much.


Louis's and Mayweather's hook is your perfect example when it comes to "boxers adapting to the meta",while i thought Louis telegraph motion at times were not so bad as he mostly punched it after a setup, Mayweather threw that right hook like that because boxing had evolved into more of a scoring sport,atleast from my observations with recent boxers.


The wheat being kept with the chaff tossed away is pretty true from what I see too, b-hop liked those low lead hands when he got confident enough,but mostly kept it high first until he secured all is fine,taking notes from his ancestors, Duran mixed Angott's glue holding clinch with Armstrong's strong uppers and got a good vicious style in results.


Indeed,boxing is a sport where it could adapt,yet not truly evolve.

 

I hear what you're saying and I'm certainly not a proponent of older is better but some of these things are arguable.

Angle shifting and pivotting has been around for centuries. Fitz used angles and pivots to land KO blows that fighters thought they were safe from, as did Langford. Ali used shifts and pivots to draw leads or open up angles to land the right hand over a retreating jab. Pep used pivots both defensively and offensively. RJJ used very extreme explosive movements to create explosive punching angles that had us all thinking he might surpass Robbi's greatness if he gets the career management right.

I would expect someone like a Floyd to have tighter mechanics than Louis as he's smaller and diminishing returns rule of physics when it comes to athletic prowess in boxing. That said, I will watch some more Louis tape and look for this telegraphing and if there, it is there. Still, when I watch Joe throwing in combination, I can't think of 5 better punchers than himself. That's not what you expect from a HW fighter as the better everything should theoretically come from the lower weights.

Robbi likely struggled with these fighters on the inside in the same way that most taller, longer reach fighters struggle - leverage on their shots is negated somewhat and they are much closer and playing percentages in favour of their opponents. When you're taller why would you give up reach/when you're not as physically strong/robust, why would you get into a wrestling match? Robbi found a way - he had that wicked right hook to the body and fought back viciously in combination to body and head when dragged into the trenches.

You rightfully say, every fighter has their flaws and whilst today's fighter has the benefits of standing on the shoulders of giants and fixing mistakes, the lack of relative competition, good trainers, other sports for gifted athletes to gravitate to, even the rise of MMA means a) are you seeing as deep a pool of talent compared to yesterday? And then, b) no matter how good your sparring or training is, nothing beats the experience of having a proper fight. Greb did more in 18 months than most fighters do their whole career - the experience and honing of skills that this makes for is invaluable.

Boxing is like any other martial art, the more elite the competitive nature of your practice the greater that you become and also the more likely that you suffer down the line health-wise for your greatness.

 

At the top level? No.

But there are more top level fighters, and your average journeyman has gotten more skilled.

 

Yes and no.

When you've watched enough film, have shared the ring/cage with fighters who have been good enough to compete for titles or come from a family that has several boxers in it, you know what you're looking for.

I would hope that at least some of us Classic forum fans have eyes to see what is there and hopefully mouths to speak truth to what it is.

Floyd Mayweather, for example, shows the greatest skillset of defence on film as he's consistent with all four facets of defence. However, I wouldn't argue that he's top of the tree outside of maybe 130lbs H2H and think there's a few that he would lose to from 135 - 147 lbs especially.

 

Watched enough film is an oversimplification.

I suppose that I mean studied film to the point where you've analysed a fighter's career, often slowing film down to anywhere between 0.25 - 0.5 of real speed to understand what you're seeing. There's no benchmark of what constitutes sufficient knowledge but I feel like I can generally tell when the person I'm speaking with knows something of what they speak or when it's not worth my time going back and forth as they speak from a place of ignorance or are so tied to their belief that it's not worth showing them alternative perspective/evidence.

 

Did Witherspoon get banned/lost his acc's password?

 

Out of the alphabet boys he was the easiest to contact with,had plenty of socials.
I think he's just been busy,same to his yt channel at times.

 

The point about shifting that I'd like to make is that there's now a better understanding of how to cut angles and how to use angles defensively and offensively with the added understanding of how these angles play out in open-stance match-ups due to how southpaws have becoming more acceptable and well-taught. Fewer fighters are less up-and-down or straight forward in their approach nowadays then there was a century ago. The pioneers who had some grasp on angles were outliers for their times for the most part. But these skills then proliferated and have been developed. Roman Gonzalez, for example, uses angles on the inside just about as well as any older fighter I've seen with subtle changes in posture, foot and hand positioning, and the physical pressure he applies in the clinch are mostly the same techniques you might catch glimpses of Langford doing from the scant film we have of him.
And to the point about Louis, he himself was one of the first HWs to really throw combinations. Even plenty of lighter fighters before him became off-balance after single shots due to them putting to much weigh behind their punches, the canvases they fought on, and the shoes they wore among other reasons. But nowadays you'd struggled to find a single world-ranked fighter in any division who can't throw a 4-punch combination on a heavy bag with proper balance and technique. Again, with passing down of techniques (and thanks to the internet), we see a proliferation of the techniques which were once the rarities of an era's pioneers. The jab wasn't even all too in fashion or well-understood until about the early 1920s or so after Gans, Corbett, Leonard, and Dixon made it more well-known.
And with a growing population that is more international and interlinked than ever, there are in fact more professional boxers than there has ever been in history. And more than ever, these fighters have readily available footage of the champions and trainers of yesteryear and today to learn from. As well, it's become more fashionable for fighters to have extensive amateur careers for them to develop their skills and ring IQ with hundreds of amateur contests for them to ply their trade. Amateur boxing itself has become more organised and focused on as part of careers in recent decades as well. While it's not the same as professional bouts every fortnight, it does mean that fighters get to learn a lot and they probably learn more fighting multiple times in a week at national and international amateur meets than older fighters leant fighting guys with losing records on a regular basis to keep the lights on and drew crowds. Admittedly, it means we get to see fighters less and it makes it more likely that their skills regress or possibly don't develop fully, but for the sake of fighter safety I think that's a more than acceptable trade-off. It should also be remembered that these older fighters fought in no-decision fights where their reputations and records couldn't be damaged unless they got KTFO, so it was an easy way to make cash against club fighters without any real stakes for your own career. It's also much harder to organise these events than it was in the 1910s.

 

Well, it depends on how far back you wanna go and what you class as average. When I said average, I'm really not talking about average in regards to the general population, but to those who are/were professional fighters. I'm also saying this in respect of the other group I mentioned, those being the very best in the world now and the very best of all time.

I think when you include the sheer number of guys who went pro in the US back then, then the average fighter has to be a little bit worse but the best a bit better, if I'm remembering my statistics classes right.

 

I disagree with these parts, mate.

The things fighters learn from previous generations is basically a non-factor imo, as if they're learning from the previous generation, then the previous generation could obviously do it as well. And while the rules remain the same, I fail to see why those techniques would need tinkering with after they've come acclimatised with the ruleset. Techniques aren't tinkered with to improve their effectiveness on the whole, they're tinkered to be improved for the individual fighter.

Boxing getting more efficient as you put it, it a bad thing imo, not a good thing. It's not getting efficient in the sense it's creating new, better ways to accomplish the same goals; it's simply losing other methods of accomplishing those goals - which would indeed be a good thing.My examples would be:

a) How Jim Driscoll spoke about the decline in what he called the straight lead - a punch thrown as a power shot, different than a jab. Almost like a cross from the lead hand.
b) how the infighting in the modern era isn't remotely close to what it was say 50 years ago.
c) how the prevailing wisdom now is to counter the jab with a cross, but it used to be to counter it with the left hook.
d) how when fighting southpaws now, we are taught to go to the outside to better align the cross; rather than moving to the inside to better align the lead hook and jab.

These things aren't 100% gone, and probably never will be, but their prevalence in the modern game is gone and it'll probably take another loop round the cyclical nature of the sport before they come back.

Also, I actually think how modern sports science works in the pro game is a bad thing, not a good thing. It's also not really new, as it was truly researched properly by the soviet union's masters of sport for Olympic weightlifting. But it's really been around since then, and there's ample evidence of fighters from prior to this following advanced practices such as overcoming isometrics, training the stretch shortening cycle, serape effect and how to import their force through the floor with ankle stability work.

The real difference now and then, is A) information. Obviously now we know how it all works, not just that it works. And B), boxers today do long periods of peaking their strength and conditioning. This is an advantage in a lot of ways, for sure, especially as the sports promotional side likes to drag out the build ups, but imo, it's worse for the overall development of an athlete over the course of their career.

They spend months peaking their athleticism for one event, and the week after, all of those adaptations to the nervous system are gone, and being in such a big caloric deficit with the water cut, just guarantees that their athleticism doesn't improve. It just gets as high as it can be for one event, then falls back to what it was (or sometimes, even lower than what it was). The additional downside of this is that it takes time and regimen to peak, time which in all honesty is not needed to prepare for a boxing match. If a fighter didn't spend 8-12 weeks peaking for a camp, they could fight more often, and if they fought more often, their skills would improve.

The proof of this being a less effective way to train is also extremely simple, as you just have to look at the amateur systems. The way that's done in the amateurs, instead, is to gradually improve their athletic base and no time is wasted with peaks because they have to fight often. Sure they'll peak for the Olympics, or tournaments but it's handled very differently than to a single pro fight.

Anyway mate, I'd love to see a break down if who you think is the most skilled fighter from the past.

 

Had to cut this up into two parts due to the word limit:
I think boxing is becoming more efficient in terms of how easy it is to teach and how the way it's getting taught conforms better to the ruleset of the times. Someone like Canzoneri, though an incredibly talented and accomplished fighter, simply doesn't have a very teachable style and he flamed out young for a reason. His complex system of feints, reactive head movement, baiting punches to counter with his hands low and a variety of his unorthodox, delightful toolkit just isn't something most fighters have the athletic ability for in the first place, and it doesn't establish a style that will keep them safe and in winning ways when they start to lose the athleticism a style like that requires. Plenty of fighters have replicated this kind of hands-low, reactive style that was more popular among champions due to smaller gloves making it harder to block punches with the more common high guard. Calzaghe, RJJ, and Sergio Martinez have all had success using a similar style to Canzoneri, but it's a hard style to teach en masse.

The Cubans developed an efficient way of teaching boxing in an effective way for the amateurs by focusing on movement, feet-first defence, and scoring points and keeping it. They've adapted this style over the years to accommodate rule changes to make it more effective but it's mostly been a focus on these things. This then gives a solid base for the coaches to develop these fighters and add nuances and new tools for these fighters. The Cubans borrowed the techniques and training methods used by the Soviets and have developed this ad taught it for decades. I think this is a fairly clear example of the type of evolution of boxing technique I'm trying to talk about.

The issue with so much of boxing training for a long time is how disjointed American and British training systems are I think. I don't really think too much is lost from this but it does lead to more fighters who lack versatility they might've had if boxing were taught in the sort of syllabus style it is in East Europe and Cuba. Kenny Adams was the last great coach who really brought the best out of the U.S. amateurs and kept them well-schooled. The U.S. national team has struggled to develop talent especially when so many of them are chasing stardom and are convinced they're the next Floyd. But the infrastructure and funding has been drying up for years now, even though the talent is still there, it's just being forced to grow in a different way I think.

Conversely though, trainers used to traditionally stick with only a single fighter because of how often they fought and because they were usually that fighter's manager as well. Which of course limited how much they could spread the knowledge they did have for decades. It's easier for the top trainers today to develop a stable they can spread their boxing knowledge to on top of being able to spread it online I reckon.

Certain trainer's lineage have been kept alive though. Freddie Roach was taught by Eddie Futch who was taught by Jack Blackburn, each man has passed on their knowledge of the sport onto the next generation and much of it has been implemented and added upon over generations of fighters these trainers have worked with.

 

Sports science (and PEDs) have meant that fighters can train more, train more efficiently, get injured less, and recover more. I think it plays a sizeable role in how the longevity of fighters has increased so much on average in such a short amount of time. More sports science articles were published from 2009-2020 than there were from 1960-2001 iirc, but I'll need to check that. Sports science has meant increased knowledge of the human body, how it's affected by different sports, the different nutrients needed and used for expending energy, reaction time can be trained better, hand-eye coordination can be built up more effectively, vision training has become more popular among top athletes, and how psychology impacts athletic performance. Among elite athletes, things like this can make a tremendous deal of difference and can impact how well boxers perform.

Something I'd like to touch on which has become quite interesting about the Mexican champs of recent years is that they've began to stray away from traditional the pressure fighter in the mold of Chavez (which is who most Mexicans have replicated for the last 20 years or so) to more gangly, awkward aggressive counter-punchers. Guys like Julio Cesar Martinez, Venado Lopez, Emanuel Navarrete, and Canelo Alvarez all break fundamentals to get their opponents to open up to give themselves punching opportunities. Not to say there haven't been Mexicans who haven't done this (Canelo himself has talked about how he's studied film of Napoles at length and you can see the inspiration in his style) but it is interesting to see how it's being developed and popularised. While it's not always the most pretty style, it has been made effective because of how hard it is to predict and how unique these styles are. The aggressive, cut-throat gym culture in Mexico forces experimentation and has always led to a diverse range of styles and tricks. Fighters will always try things out that work and don't in every generation, but the way boxing is being taught means they're more likely to have a sound base on which to experiment on and figure out what works best for their style and attributes.

Modern fighters fighting as occasionally as they do of course isn't great for fans and has led to wasted talent and the decline in skills for certain champions in recent years. The only places which really have their fighters fighting on a regular basis akin to what used to be the norm is in Thailand and Mexico afaik. For the most part, putting on events featuring high-profile fighters is both a costly and hard-to-arrange affair. I think I remember reading A. J. Liebling writing about how the introduction of fights being televised would lead to the decline of grass-roots boxing, reduced gates, and how often fighters would fight, turning each fight they have into an event that needs to be both entertaining and meaningful. For fighter safety and a logistical perspective though, it just isn't viable to have fighters fighting ten times a year even if that would help them develop.

 

Two excellent posts, mate.

First of all, I absolutely agree. The way modern fighters train definitely does help longevity, particularly PEDs boosting recovery, the more common methods of using low impact cardio methods such as swimming and the obvious factor of having less total fights and a lower frequency of fights. I would say about articles and papers though, that a lot of stuff like that is just confirming what was already known to work. Either confirming that it works, or explaining why it works. That's obviously not to say we've learnt nothing since 2009, but we have learnt a lot less than the number of articles would indicate. I'll try and find the link, but the UFC has an incredible recourse on how to best train a martial artist both in terms of strength and conditioning and skill acquisition. I got one for free in about 30s which is 486 pages long

I didn't know Canelo had studied Napoles, that's interesting. Thank you.

Not sure if you've ever seen any of this stuff, but if you're interested in the Cuban and EE amateur systems, you might wanna check out how long they've been doing it for. Some of these guys look really good and lay the foundations for the modern school of top amateurs imo.

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I would actually disagree, regarding the fighters safety/fight frequency. I'm not talking about going back to the 1910s method of having 50+ fights per year, 25 of them against ranked fighters and the rest against whoever you could get to show up. I'm talking more about what Chavez, Duran or Toney did where they take two to four big/title fights a year and fill the time between with ten round non title fights which keep them sharp and allow them to get real life practice in actual fights. The reason I don't think this is particularly dangerous, is because prospects all over the world do it every year, and have done for the entirety of the time which fights have been less frequent. I think the real reason this doesn't happen is because a promotor is gonna be hard pressed to create interest in a fight which is basically just a substitute for hard sparring.

Also, I think I've found the Liebling writing you were talking about. https://www.thefightcity.com/the-fight-game-has-changed/