Excerpt from a June 30, 1942 Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph article discussing their second fight. "Burley was in better condition at a lower weight than for their first meeting, and he started out to make a boxing match of it, but Charles chugged away too steadily with both fists in counter blows and the fight soon resolved itself into pretty much the same sort of a bout as their first one, and, after it was over, Charley readily conceded he had met his maters in the Cincinnati Negro. 'He's a good fighter, " he agreed, "and he's too strong for me. He outweighed me a dozen pounds tonight. He's a full-fledged middleweight, while I can still make 147 pounds. Maybe I can lick most of the middleweights, but he's beaten me twice now. So I guess that's conclusive enough." Burley said Charles is not as hard a hitter as almost everybody seems to think. He hits well, he said, but not dangerously so. He hurt him only once last night."
I'm sure it was a combination of size and Charles' brilliant boxing ability, as size alone didn't work, even in combination with slightly less but still great boxing ability, as with Archie Moore and Lloyd Marshall. In fact if wager to bet that Moore is physically stronger. And of course Burley fought Heavy/Light Heavyweights Any chance you think Burley was making excuses?
Charles had a 6-1/2 lb. edge in their first fight and 9 lbs. in the second fight. All other things equal in their abilities, I think it would be reasonable to argue it was a deciding factor in their series. So, maybe an excuse it was, but it was reasonable for him to raise it as an explanation. Burley was a tailor-made junior middleweight in an era when there was no such weight division. Thus, he would have been at a disadvantage against both legitimate welterweights and full-fledged middleweights for most of the prime years of his career. This presents another factor to consider along with the racial, World War II, untimely loss, poor management, and lack of crowd-appeal issues raised on previous threads which discuss why he didn't get a title shot. Just off the top of my head, other great fighters caught 'twixt and 'tween the welterweight and middleweight divisions were Jock Malone, Mike Gibbons, and Holly Mims.
