At what point did modern boxers surpass old ones?

Foreman made me rethink some ideas I had. He was old and out of shape and decent contenders like Briggs and Morrison couldn't put a dent in him. I too am anti-nostalgia but he did change my mind a bit.

 

Ali was 6'2". 79 inch reach. 201-215 pounds prime weight. Smaller than the likes of Usyk and Gassiev. They are at minimum still 220+ pounders.

 

If size was everything Valuev would be the goat.

Size is a big advantage but it's not a cast iron certainty that the bigger man will win.

I looked at this once with lineal HW championship changes, about 50% of the time the title was lost to a bigger man.

 

Yes and no. I think that art, music, and storytelling have actually been pretty consistent for thousands of years. The actual genre of expression goes through fashions (Epic, Romance, Drama, Novel, Short Story) which wax and wane but the overall level remains about the same, with the exception of a few outliers: Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Firdawsi, Tolstoy, Homer, Valmiki, Goethe, Aeschylus, Ovid, Virgil, Euripides, Sophocles, Tasso, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Rumi, Hafez, Vayasa, Racine, Aristophanes, Rabelais, Hugo, Dickens, Hemingway, Du Fu, Li Bai, Bai Juyi, Wu Cheng'en, Cao Xueqin, Luo Guanzhong, Murasaki, Melville, Flaubert, etc. And there always appears to be at least one of them, one Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Donatello, Van Gogh, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Rodin, Bernini, Turner, Monet, Durer, Dore, Ingres, David, Dali, Picasso, Vermeer, Velazquez, Rubens, Van Dyck, El Greco, Titian, or Van Eyck per generation.

I really hate most of the twentieth century's art and music, but even I can find a ton of good things therein. I like Dali, Magritte, Rivera, Lempicka, Prokofiev, Copland, Shostakovich, The Beatles, Led Zepplin, The Rolling Stones. When it comes to film, I think things just kept getting better up to the fifties or sixties and then plateaued. Sure there's no more Fellini, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Bergman, or Tarkovsky but we still have Scorsese, Tarantino, Spielberg, the Coen Brothers, Del Toro, Anderson, Fincher, Yimou, etc.

I can't always find as many good artists currently working today as I can from previous periods, but that's because I'm not an expert in all of those fields and it's going to take me years to sift the wheat from the chaff. That work has already been done for us by historians for previous periods. However, guys like Michael Triegel and Stelios Faitakis are no slouch in the art world. Jack White and the Black Keys can both rock. So I have confidence that if I can still find one or two great current artists then the rest of the iceberg, which lies 90 percent underwater, will be revealed to me in time.

 

Maris Bredis is 6'1" with a 75" reach who happened to run Usyk close and who one-shotted the current WBA champ while weighing all of 213. So, a fighter who is naturally larger, like Ali, isn't excluded from competing at heavy strictly on the basis of size.

 

Personally I think Ali's speed and movement, keep him in position to beat any heavy weight champ, past or present. Not saying he beats them all, but hangs tough.

 

I've entirely refuted the talent pool argument, but there is no talking to someone who yells "fake news" and refuses to listen to facts or reason.

Your response to talent pool is mostly incoherent goblety gook. Nothing that counters what I say. You do make artificial distinctions between boxing and javelin throwing. You could also distinguish between javelin throwing and sprinting, talking about all the myriad differences between those two sports. But both have seen the same type of progress, and at their highest levels, progress from the same type of larger athletes that have taken over HW boxing.

The skills you argue have declined you prop up as unassailable facts, trying to compare them to the facts I rely on. Yet they aren't, they are just opinion. In particular, the jab has never been used so effectively before. It makes in fighting at HW less meaningful. You can debate this, but that is the point. It is debatable. My argument doesn't rely on debatable points. That's where you fail.

Finally, if you actually listen to that Ted talk, it supports everything I say. He talks about how sports have become more evolved in countless ways, among the, the specialization of unique body types to certain sports in the most effective way.

 

The problem people always forget with this is that Ali relied on his size. He relied on movement and on being larger or at least the same size. He never beat anyone who was both A a top 10 hw and B who was more than an inch and more than 5 pounds heavier than him.

His style would be worse for today than Frazier's style.

 

That's a very good point. But it misses the bigger picture. Smaller fighters CAN beat larger fighters, but the central question is which fighters have had the MOST success at hw? Going back through history, dominant HW champs have either been bigger than their peers on average, or harder hitting. Usually bigger.

 

Have you actually looked at the statistics to justify that claim?

 

Exactly. Ali was the Tyson or Hughie Fury in terms of style from his era. Chisora. Miller. Takam. Povetkin Etc is the Joe Frazier of this era. When even the stocky preassure fighters of today outgrow outside boxers from the past the nostalgica becomes clear.

 

Yes, compiled it long ago on another thread.

Of the top of head, of the arguably best champs since Ali: Ali, Foreman, Holmes, Bowe, Lewis, both K's, Fury, AJ were all larger than average to huge. Frazier and Tyson small but hard hitting. Holyfield was the only exception, and he was arguably 0 for 5 against the two best SHWs he faced.

 

Well said.

 

Heavyweights started to resemble modern fighters from around the 60s onwards. Prior to that there was a certain crudity of technique and general lack of athleticism in the vast percentage of top fighters compared with later eras. There were always outliers, but that's when they started to become the rule, as I see it.