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

Discussion in 'Classic Boxing Forum' started by Mandela2039, Apr 7, 2025.


  1. Dorrian_Grey

    Dorrian_Grey It came to me in a dream Full Member

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    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.
     
  2. Dorrian_Grey

    Dorrian_Grey It came to me in a dream Full Member

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    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.
     
  3. George Crowcroft

    George Crowcroft He Who Saw The Deep Full Member

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    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 :lol:

    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/
     
  4. George Crowcroft

    George Crowcroft He Who Saw The Deep Full Member

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    Anyone interested in the UFC's performance institute and how they train their combat athletes in strength and conditioning should check this out. It's unbelievable.
    https://www.ufcpi.com/journal
     
  5. Vic-JofreBRASIL

    Vic-JofreBRASIL Obsessed with Boxing Full Member

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    No. Boxers today are not even actually skilled. They are athletic, which is different.

    They are physically more prepared today. That is all they have though.

    Skill in boxing is not about jabs, and whatever... it is about seeing things inside the ring and taking advantage of it... things you cannot see by looking at a footage... which is a knowledge you cannot have fighting 20 times in your whole life and barely even sparring

    Picking up with the Timing inside of the ring is the most important thing in boxing

    Getting to know the distance and distance judgment is something known by doing it.
     
    Last edited: Apr 9, 2025
  6. Dorrian_Grey

    Dorrian_Grey It came to me in a dream Full Member

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    But don't fighters today adjust their strategies and their techniques to the available footage they have of fighters? Thus helping them adapt their skillset to whichever fighter they have in front of them in a way not possible when footage was both scant and hard to come by for the vast majority of fighters? For a recent example, Lamont Roach Jr. appears to have studied Tank Davis extensively and used this knowledge of him to establish when he would engage and how. There's a good film study which breaks down how Roach judged what Davis was going to do next by his glove height, engaging him when he showed the high guard and staying put when Davis tried to bait him in with a lower guard or half-guard. Now, it's possible that Roach made that adaptation on the fly when he noticed a pattern but I suspect him and his team used film of Tank Davis to inform their approach in large part.
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    And some fighters just have a better sense of rhythm and have an easier time picking up on timing in all eras.
     
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  7. HistoryZero26

    HistoryZero26 Boxing Addict Full Member

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    In the 1800s they were much less skilled because the fighters were older than the sport itself and hadn't grown up with it. The sport was transitioning from bare knuckle to gloved boxing, it was underground in places and everyone was sort of figuring things out on the fly. Once fighters grew up with the sport and were learning from people with experience the sport quickly improved. I reckon this transition started around 1905-1910 and was complete by the 1920s. Its very hard to gague not just because the lack of film but because the film is so much lower quality than todays.

    Otherwise fighters were only less skilled smaller weight classes because the best small fighters could go up further in the food chain than today if they were P4P level while today they cannot. Even if they could tweener divisions provide a longer ladder for that sort of fighter to climb to reach a MW, LHW or HW. And this has all pushed the best fighters in the sport further south. Today P4P greats are fighting lower in the food chain because either the weight class they fought in is larger or they have to navgigate a more complex system of institutional barriers.
     
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  8. Vic-JofreBRASIL

    Vic-JofreBRASIL Obsessed with Boxing Full Member

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    Yes, I gotta say, I think gameplans today are obviously much more "scientific". And okay, the coaches can make it up for the lack of "adaptation" the fighters today have.
    I mean, you look at the way it is done in football today, and OMG it is a science ! Back then it was all done in a improv way.

    I think the amateurs damaged the game though, because it was all about how quick you could hit and how many times you could hit inside 3 min, with the point gloves... and that is a way of fighting that will be 90% atheticism... put in the numbers of movements and you got the round. That is not skill.
    Today you see guys that can put combinations, and have signature combinations... but if there was nobody in front of them, they would put the same combinations. You know what I mean ?

    I remember I was trying to come up with Jofre´s signature combinations... and I couldn´t do it ! Because he didn´t have it, it was done in whatever happened to be the best thing in the moment... he was just fighting, in a pure way according to what the fight presented to him.
     
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  9. Loudon

    Loudon Loyal Member Full Member

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    What do you find strange exactly?

    You’ve listed one example that you think favours the more modern fighter.

    Yet me, George and others could find many examples favouring the older guys.

    If we’re talking the average guy, then maybe so.

    But great fighters could fight in any era.

    And there’s many fighters from yesteryear that had more skills, and would be favoured over many modern guys.

    I’ve recently been studying Moore and Charles.

    There’s just nobody today at MW-LHW who possess more overall skills.

    We’ve also got to stop with this assumption that everything gets passed down.

    No. It does not.

    And the assumption that every modern fighter is fitter, and that they can study the guys if the past, because they have easy access to their fights.

    This is simply not always the case.
     
  10. Loudon

    Loudon Loyal Member Full Member

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    It boggles my mind.

    Because I’ve been studying the sport for over 35 years now, since I was around 9/10 years old.

    Yet when I was 13, I KNEW for sure that:

    1. Great fighters could fight and have success in ANY era.

    2. The sport doesn’t keep evolving in a continuous cycle.

    3. Styles make fights.

    There’s nothing to debate really.

    There’s modern guys who were superior to many of those older guys.

    There were older guys who were superior to many of today’s guys.

    That’s how it is.
     
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  11. Loudon

    Loudon Loyal Member Full Member

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    You could build your own tournament.

    You could have 5 fights.

    You could have 10 fights.

    You could literally put 100 fights together.

    200 fighters.

    100 modern day fighters from today and the last few decades, vs 100 fighters from various decades of the past.

    I could promise you two things for sure:

    1. The tournament would have yielded mixed results.

    2. The modern guys would not have been able to have won all of their fights.
     
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  12. Loudon

    Loudon Loyal Member Full Member

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    Great post.

    It can be tricky with hypothetical fights, due to the weigh-ins.

    But we can make allowances for that, and ponder what would happen if the more modern guys had moved up a division etc.

    It’s all good fun.
     
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  13. Vutcatus

    Vutcatus New Member Full Member

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    The so called old school (1880-1930) was different in techniques and tactics, because the equipment was different (gloves, mouth guards, ring, shoes ...) and the rules were different (longer durations, fight to finish, clinch allowed, outdoor fights, fights that continue even with serious injuries ...). The skills were neither better nor worse on average, just adapted to their time. In some things they were better: everyone knew how to work the body, which few do today; everyone knew how to fight in the clinch. In others they were less good, such as in two-handed combinations, because they threw fewer punches. They used the high guard less, the low guard more. Athletically, there has been improvement, as in all sports, obviously. But it would be wrong to say that a boxer of the 21st century is a better athlete than Jeffries, because he has nutritionists, trainers, maybe even drugs, that the old champion did not have in his time. Let's give Jeffries (or others) the same opportunities and we will have a better athlete than he was. Fighters of the past paid a lot of attention to endurance and conditioning: today, no one prepares to fight for 40 rounds, with multiple wounds on the body.
     
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  14. Loudon

    Loudon Loyal Member Full Member

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    Again, we can give examples from both sides, from any era.

    I could ask “Find me a guy today who could do this from the 50’s or 60’s etc”

    A knowledgeable fan would hopefully be able to engage you in an objective way, where the old guys aren’t mythologised.

    I agree with what you’ve said.

    No fighter is perfect.

    Simply because there’s too many different styles to encounter.

    Even Robinson and Floyd had issues with certain fighters.

    I don’t agree with you though, where you’ve basically said that if those skills of old were still needed, we’d see them.

    How many times have you seen a guy open to the body, where it’s not been capitalised on.

    Or a guy holding on for dear life on the inside, instead of using uppercuts etc.

    Just two very quick examples.

    To me, some skills have been lost along the way.

    Now I agree that the modern guys have access to better training facilities and video archive etc. 100%.

    Theoretically, everything is at their disposal.

    But again, these aren’t always put into practice.

    Now it’s this simple:

    From what you have said, it should make these modern fighters, more skilled and fitter.

    And to the point where it’s clearly noticeable.

    Yet that’s simply not the case.

    Things simply aren’t happening in the way that you believe.

    How can the current WW division be nowhere near as great as what it was 45 years ago?

    How can the current MW division be nowhere near as great as what it was 30-40 years ago?

    Why are they still many divisions today, that aren’t as great as what they were decades ago?

    How is that even possible??
     
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  15. FThabxinfan

    FThabxinfan Well-Known Member Full Member

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    You nailed it Don.
     
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