Charley Burley or Holman Williams?

You should get ahold of some more Steele footage if you can, McGrain. His two round obliteration of Gus Lesnevitch is a beauty especially.

 

Thanks. :good

Great stuff. These two look as good as I've been led to believe, maybe better even. Real class fighters.
Apostli was an animal ! :shock:
I've heard his fights with Billy Conn were brutal.

 

Maybe. But Apostoli probably deserves full credit for inflicting that injury. Must have been a punch that did it, although possibly a headbutt ?

 

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Billy Conn, after narrowly defeating Fred Apostoli.

 

I don't know if you guys have seen this already, but since you asked about middleweights, here is a history of the MW division with a lot of rare clips that I recently uploaded. It was from the Jones-Toney pre-fight segment on HBO.

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Great footage My2sense, thanks.

I never knew Graziano decked Robinson.

Glad to see some more footage of 1930s middleweights. I think they're the most underrated, most overlooked bunch. Probably because of the world title confusion.

 

Here's something else I've been meaning to upload for a long time, the first fight between Tony Zale and Al Hostak:

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Ultra rare footage that shows Zale at his peak (not the aging version that everyone knows of from the Graziano and Cerdan fights).

 

Holman Williams has a great resume, but there seems to be a lot of him fighting the same names over and over. That's good, they were top fighters, but are we to ASSUME that the top white (and some non-white) names avoided him, is there evidence that they did ?
I dont know any of the details.
Zale seems to have ducked him in 1946 and fought Graziano instead, but someone mentioned that Graziano was the NBA's nominated no.1, and besides, Zale probably "ducked" LaMotta and Burley too to fight Graziano, if he ducked anyone.
And Williams was on the decline then anyway.

Ross, Armstrong and Zivic were champions at welterweight when Williams was campaigning there. Was he definitely avoided ? Was he cleaning up the division ? I cant figure it out for definite. I think there was so much talent there, it's hard to know who should have been fighting who.
And of all the guys who held "versions" of the MIDDLEWEIGHT title in the 1930s, few, if any, appear on Holman's record. Did they all duck him ?