Benny Leonard calls Primo Carnera's defense "Marvelous"

Now you're responding to a reply I made to Reznik!
It's surreal!
Have you any idea how seriously f*cked up you are?

 

Until they learn how to resurrect the dead, I can't see him being a good boxer, either.

 

You can do what you want .You know I won't be making any more threads here ,just commenting on what interests me.I haven't cursed you, just told you a couple of hometruths in response to you calling me:
dumb ,lazy, thoughtless, ignorant. and a flinger of sh*t.
As I said you always resort to personal insults ,and that's because you get so frustrated that your inarticulacy gets the better of you.

 

It's interesting that you lay the blame for peoples perception of Carnera on the book and film that was based on him.Interesting because this was his comment on it in later life.

Those in the fight game who have read Budd Schulberg's best-seller, The Harder They Fall, recognize it as a thinly disguised novel of Carnera's life. It etches a sharp and sordid picture of conditions in Cauliflower Alley in the '30s. It throws a harsh light on the thugs who, through violence and skullduggery, made this helpless giant the heavyweight champion of the world. It shows how they then cheated, befouled, and degraded him, and left him at the last a battered, paralyzed wreck, friendless and without hope.

Everyone connected with the ring knows the shameful details. No one knows them better than Primo. "That book, yes, I have read it," he said, nodding his huge head. "It is all true." Then he spread his tremendous, ham-like hands. "But I wish he had come to me. I would tell him so much more."

 

mcvey, Yes indeed ,when are they going to produce some primary sourced reports that will add to our knowledge of this subject?

This content is protected

Because I haven't seen any so far!

This content is protected

All I've read is Benny Leonard picks Carnera to beat Baer because he has better defence. Well we know how accurate Benny's forecast was!

This content is protected

Max Baer said Carnera would do well with Louis again how did that turn out?

This content is protected

Its incredible that that's the sum total of their argument!

This content is protected

 

mcvey,Now you're responding to a reply I made to Reznik!
It's surreal!
Have you any idea how seriously f*cked up you are?

This content is protected

Neither Deluded 1234 or yourself are two of them!
You always lose it and get personal it's a recurring habit of yours .

This content is protected

 

mcvey, You brought up the dreadnought division not me.

This content is protected

You're just annoyed you were wrong and I was right.

This content is protected

Bottom line you made a statement that was incorrect,I corrected it with facts,ie the names of 21 other super heavyweights that Carnera had previously fought.

This content is protected

I've called you neither a dimwit , a nitwit , or a half wit .I said if you had more braincells you would be a half wit.
You haven't and so you aren't , i e, you are some way below that level.

This content is protected

You've got a fixation about me now,that' s okay,

This content is protected

it gives you some focus and you certainly need it! I'm neither whining ,nor crying,denying, or hiding. I'm on here daily in plain sight.

This content is protected

Anyone is welcome to critique my posts and steer me right when I am wrong.

This content is protected

TBH .I think you would actually prefer to have some friendly rapport with me, why I can't think ,because I would not go near you with a ten foot pole.

This content is protected

I sincerely and truly believe you are mentally unstable.

This content is protected

 

I am confident that your regular referral to the opinions of “the real fight people” is both overstated and selective. Add to this your entirely dismissive attitude towards the columnists of the day, all of whom you tar with the same brush, even going so far, in a previous post, as to state that their work “would only mean anything if these writers were boxers or trainers or fight people of the day rather than some mut with a typewriter” and the very best that can be said about your attitude is that it is abnormally dogmatic.

There are also the individuals in the fight game, just as qualified, who do not give Carnera marked praise. But, you generally ignore this and plainly won’t accept anything Joe Louis had to say, which would indicate how little he thought of Carnera, as a boxer - not in a mean way; more, as a ‘matter-of-fact’. Moreover, there are question marks over Carnera’s career record, which seem to have been swept away from the discussion; met with your quite feeble attempts at rebuttal.

Does any of the above read like the description of a balanced and impartial approach, taken to debating in general, let alone on this topic? I can tell you that it is a long, long way from being so.


The new information is, as you suggest, the increased accessibility of Carnera film footage. However, to my mind and that of others, the more widely available film, if anything, has actually confirmed the view of those sports writers of the day and in no way endorses the polite and politically correct commentary on Carnera. Every cited facet, deemed as a positive attribute of Carnera and his game, seems to have little in the way of consistent examples to back it up.

A reevaluation of Carnera (or any historical figure, for that matter), in light of new information, is to be expected. However, it seems fairly obvious that some reviewers are exploiting the opportunity to introduce unrealistic parallels between Carnera and the Super Heavyweights of today, based on a few seconds here and there of anything that looks remotely better than expected.

To argue against the validity of this type of slim-to-nothing evidence is not at all paranoid, especially when claims are being made, along the lines that Carnera could compete effectively with the Super Heavyweights of today. Quite oppositely, I would say it is a natural reaction, rooted in common sense, to oppose this quite controvertible idea. One swallow does not a summer make and there simply is not enough seen on the available film to push the conclusions of any ’reevaluation’ over the finish line. Nowhere near enough, to be true.


So, all-in-all, electing to lean towards the minority is not rational; being emboldened to do so on the basis of the new/improved footage is highly suspect; ignoring patently apparent weaknesses in the footage, while failing to acknowledge clear weaknesses in Carnera’s career record, collectively smacks of extreme bias.

It is impossible to debate against such sacrosanct favoritism, towards such flimsy beliefs, entrenched in what has presented itself as little more than blind faith.

 

Ray Arcel considers Primo Carnera to have been a ''accomplished boxer'':

''Carnera could box, jab and move, and by the time he fought for the title he had about 80 fights."

 

Exactly. Somebody asked Primo if he read the book. "Yes it's true" (that I read the book) he was not saying "the book was true". That's why he sued the studio for goodness sake!

Another time, when he was in a wheelchair, he was asked what he thought of the people who cheated him out of his money. Primo said "that life has a way of evening things out, what did they get out of it? most of those gangsters were killed by their own kind or in prison now. Or living as forgotten panhandlers" which is exactly true. Those characters all had a sticky ending. but nobody ever mentions that part of the story because it's less sensational than that of Primo being a broken fool.