Bob Baker, James Parker, and Nino Valdes leading up to their 1st fight with A Moore.

I have seen the Valdes fight.

No matter how you cut it, Valdes was losing to all kinds of other people around the same time--Moore, Satterfield, Machen, Folley. Valdes lost more decisively to Satterfield than to Baker and Satterfield also blew out Baker in one.

 

"Furthermore many of those who populated the top ten were ko'd too often"

Well, lets check it. I have the Ring Magazine with the yearly rankings for 1951 (Feb, 1952)--They were 17 heavyweights rated in order before going into class A.

Here are those rankings and the number of ko's these fighters had suffered to that time (Jan 1, 1952) in their careers.

1---Jersey Joe Walcott (4 ko's in 68 fights)
2---Ezzard Charles (2 ko's in 79 fights)
3---Rocky Marciano (0 ko's in 38 fights)
4---Clarence Henry (1 ko in 32 fights)
5---Roland LaStarza (0 ko's in 49 fights)
6---Joe Louis (2 ko's in 71 fights)
7---Bob Baker (1 ko in 27 fights)
8---Cesar Brion (0 ko in 39 fights)
9---Rex Layne (2 ko's in 39 fights)
10--Hein Ten Hoff (0 ko's in 27 fights)
11--Joe Baksi (1 ko in 70 fights)
12--Johnny Williams (2 ko's in 54 fights)
13--Jack Gardner (1 ko in 26 fights)
14--Omelio Agramonte (6 ko's in 57 fights)
15--Karel Sys (1 ko in 126 fights)
16--Gene Jones (4 ko's in 53 fights)
17--Jimmy Bivins (5 ko's in 101 fights)

Total 32 ko's in 956 fights or 3.3% total

This is the current ratings and records taken from boxrec yesterday

1---Vitali Klitschko (2 ko's in 39 fights)
2---Wladimir Klitschko (3 ko's in 55 fights)
3---Ruslan Chagaev (0 ko's in 26 fights)
4---David Haye (1 ko in 22 fights)
5---Nicolay Valuev (0 ko's in 51 fights)
6---Alexander Povetkin (0 ko's in 17 fights)
7---John Ruiz (1 ko in 53 fights)
8---Eddie Chambers (0 ko's in 35 fights)
9---Juan Carlos Gomez (2 ko's in 47 fights)
10--Alexander Dimitrenko (0 ko's in 29 fights)
11--Samuel Peter (1 ko in 33 fights)
12--Tony Thompson (1 ko in 34 fights)
13--Chris Arreola (0 ko's in 27 fights)
14--Oleg Maskaev (6 ko's in 42 fights)
15--Denis Boytsov (0 ko's in 25 fights)
16--Lamon Brewster (1 ko in 39 fights)
17--Hasim Rahman (5 ko's in 55 fights)

Total 23 ko's in 627 fights or 3.7% total

So the rated contenders of today actually have a slightly higher percentage of ko defeats than those of Jan 1, 1952.

A. Vitali and Wlad Klitschko have suffered 5 ko defeats in 94 fights, or about 1 every 19 fights. Walcott and Charles had suffered 6 ko defeats in 147 fights, or 1 every 24 fights. Walcott and Charles on the whole were slightly more durable than the Klitschko brothers.

B. The worst chin on either list belongs to Oleg Maskaev with 6 ko losses in 42 bouts or 1 every 7 fights.

C. There is one area in which the modern fighters have an edge. Seven of them have never been knocked out, with Valuev leading with 51 fights. The seven average 30 fights each. The 1952 crew has only four who were never knocked out. They averaged 38 fights each.

Just as an aside, because I noticed it, three out of the seventeen 1952 fighters were over 35--Walcott, Louis, and Sys. Eight out of the seventeen current fighters are over 35. The top man in each case, Walcott and Vitali, is 37. The average age of the current crop is 32. The average age of the 1952 group is 29. If you take the soon to retire Louis out and replace him with the next to appear contender, Coley Wallace, the average age drops to 28.
Of the current top 25 contenders on boxrec, 12 are over 35.

 

Great Statistics. Your very good at that.

 

I'm glad I'm not on the opposite end of this argument because I think you just scored a killing blow:good
You have the facility of being able to present facts to their optimum advantage,I take my hat off to you!

 

Clarence Henry not a dangerous puncher? Film tells a different story as do contemporary reports. John Garfield once described Henry as a "electrifying heavy puncher with a knockout blow in both fists". I think he also incorporated Lightning in there to describe Henry as a puncher.

Also Rex Layne deserves to be mentioned as a dangerous puncher

Heres what John Garfield had to say about Layne

"Throw out the record book on

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, he was a rugged brawler with a quick, very heavy right. As he got shopworn and discouraged, more and more, he got outworked and beaten down.

But, when he first raged out of Utah -- full of

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and

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-- he'd have been a handful for anybody. He could crack with that right."



"

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looms as the outstanding prospect west of the
Mississippi.

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...

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has what it takes to be developed
into the next world heavyweight king. He can hit and has an abundance of
courage." - Nat Fleischer wrote in 1951



If your going to list Oleg Maskaev and Dennis Boystov, surely you can list these men.

 

"You think I get the point by now"
You arrogant pompous piece of ****

You include Walcott, whose last two fights were against all time puncher Marciano,and whose career was over by 1953.
Charles who was effectively finished as a top liner by 54.
Layne who like Charles was ruined by Marciano in 51
And Baker who hit the skids after a strong run up to 55.
Your selective date picking is like you, a ******* joke .
And all done to bolster up a challenger, so your current hero Wlad looks good if he blows him away.
Same as inflating Corbett's record changing exhibitions over 2-3 and 4 rds to actual fights to try and make Jeffries look better.
You sad sack of turd.
You distort the truth so much you wouldnt recognize it if it jumped up and smacked you in your smug conceited face.

 

Its pathetic isnt it Mcvey? What do you expect though. I have spoken to others...he has been repeating the same stuff on this and other forums for the past TEN years!

 

Well my opinion of him is no secret, but when other posters take him to task , you would think he would drop the spin and tell it like it is I think I'll sit the rest of this thread out ,the condescending *** * winds me up in spite of myself.

 

There seems to be more heat than light here and I don't have much time right now to post and none to do statistical studies, but I want to say I did not "cherry-pick" a date. You just have to accept my word that I did January 1, 1952 because I had the Ring Magazine with the extended ratings for that date and could go down further than the top ten. That seemed to make sense to me. I did not have the extended ratings for any other year at hand.

I will try to do the top ten for some other years when I get the time. Doing the old guys is time-consuming because I have to look up what their records were and how many times they had been stopped at a given date. I will arbitrarily pick a year from the 1920's, 1930's, 1940's, 1950's, etc and see what I get. I may try to do their positive KO percentages also while I am at it.

 

This is a bit of Revolver-style "historical fighter assassination" on your part, here. For the most part, your statements (shallow and superficial as they may be) are accurate, but there are some errors, and some of your conclusions are questionable.
As you no doubt know full well by now, nearly all historical contenders (pre-1960, let's say) had blemished records, in an in which fighters were not corporate-backed brands the way they are now. If you're really going to indict all these guys for their blemishes as "only contenders in a weak era," you'll have to throw nearly all the contenders of that era and earlier under the bus along with them- you want to count the blemishes on Sam Langford's record and tell me these arguments couldn't apply just as well to him?

Second, I'd like to point out that Valdes did not simply "vault" to the #1 spot with his win over Charles. He was promoted to #3-4 in the NYSAC and RING rankings as a result of that victory, then rose to the #1 spot by the end of the year as a result of his win over Heinz Neuhaus (German champ and top 10 at the time) along with the coinciding floundering of another top fighter or two.

With regards to Baker, you are framing matters misleadingly as concerns his record. Baker lost one split decision in five fights against the (*gasp*) 27-12-2 Gilliam, who was a pretty fair fighter- an experienced, skilled, durable full-sized heavyweight- and beat more than one other noteworthy name in his time. And as a matter of fact, following Baker's record with a method other than scanning for red marks, you'll see that in his prime he gave as well as or better than he took against most of the other contenders around, with wins over Valdes, Bivins, Layne, Brion, Baksi, etc., even a UD while over-the-hill off a young George Chuvalo.

As for Parker, his wins over Arthur and Neuhaus in his last two fights before facing Moore both represented legitimately noteworthy scalps, those guys being (recent) former top 10 fighters. I believe Parker only peeked into the top 10, achieving a career high of about #9 in the RING rankings, but he was at the least a solid gatekeeper in his own time, and was a full-sized, powerful heavyweight.

These guys were not legends, but they were legitimately good fighters (particularly Valdes and Baker), and I do think the fact that Moore handled them so consistently and typically so dominantly is significant in weighing his standing in comparison with a guy like Chagaev, although I acknowledge Chagaev is likely better than any of these men.

 

You're correct that the 1952 ranked fighters would go on to suffer more KO losses by '55, but they also tended to drop out of the rankings as they did so- for example, Walcott did suffer two subsequent KO losses, but he retired and was not ranked by 1954, just as Layne suffered four more, but accordingly dropped out of the rankings for most of these years. "Yeah, let's take the fighters ranked in 1952, but we'll look at their records through 1955 to judge their standing in 1952" is hardly a sound argument. Certainly we aren't looking at the top 10 of today and projecting how many KO losses they'll have three years from now (when they likely will not be the top 10 anymore anyway).

Rather, we would have to look at the fighters ranked in 1955 and the composition of their records at that date, rather than where the guys who had been ranked in '52, who were a substantially different group, were by '55. In fact, upon a cursory examination of the 1955 rankings as compared with the aforementioned '52 ones, out of the 11 fighters (champion and 10 contenders) comprising the main standings, only three of the same men were ranked in 1955 who had been in '52- Marciano, Charles (who was hanging onto a #10 spot by a thread at this point, and may not have merited that) and Baker. The other eight were different.