Could old timers have been as successful if boxing was truly global?

I don’t think it changes history — who did they not fight from other countries who ever proved themselves in anyway really worthy?

Holyfield was supposed to fight Damiani and he got injured in training.

Heavyweights is a smaller pool as there are few bigger men in some parts of the world. It’s genetics. And who knows how history would be different if communist countries had let their fighters turn pro, but on the whole the ones who defected didn’t dominate the sport or anything.

 

Excellent question. Battling Siki was the first African Champion in 1922(?) but was really raised in the French Army. In the 50's and 60's we had Hogan "Kid" Bassey and Dick Tiger as World Champions from Nigeria, Eder Jofre from Brazil, Australians Johnny Famechon and Lionel Rose and the rise of Thai and Japanese Fighters such as Chartchai Choinoi and Fighting Harada.
It's hard to think of an era when Boxing wasn't open to anyone from anywhere but the fall of the Iron Curtain and the opening of the professional sport to the thousands of talented Fighters from the former Eastern Bloc makes you wonder.
I guess the question that we will never be able to answer is what could Laszlo Papp have done in the pro's had he been able to turn over as a young man.

 

If boxing infrastructure magically sprang up across the colonized world in 1900, then more people from the colonized world would participate in boxing, yes.

Conversely, if more boxing infrastructure sprang up in the United States today, more people from the US would participate in boxing.

 

I don’t think EE fighters have ‘dominated’ the world scene. How many heavyweight champions since the USSR broke up? How many in all the other divisions? Some, for sure, but they haven’t dominated.

The decline of the U.S. in boxing has to do with declining participation, which has to do with a lot of things, a few of which I will address:

1) Lack of TV exposure. Television was a driving force behind both boxing fandom and participation at the amateur level, which feeds the pro level. (Now streaming is more of a thing but boxing was already niche by the time that became more widespread.) When boxing was on one or more of the three networks nearly every weekend in the 1970s and early 1980s, lots of kids wanted to become boxers. Throw in weekly shows on USA Network and ESPN and it was a highly visible sport.

Now if you polled say 1,000 kids from across America and asked them to name 10 boxers I doubt any of them could — and the boxers they could name would probably be Floyd Mayweather (retired) and Jake Paul, lol, because they saw him on social media.

2) Heavyweight boxing especially in the U.S. has declined because big men can make money playing football and basketball. WAY more money than in boxing, unless they happened to become a widely recognized world champion. When Muhammad Ali was pulling down millions for a single fight, NFL players were making low six figures … maybe a few mid-six figures. Basketball was similar. Now the guy at the end of an NBA bench makes more per year than Ali did in all but a few of his championship fights — and that’s the worst in the league compared to the biggest name in boxing.

Boxing is a sport where 1 percent of the athletes makes 99 percent of they money, so playing football or basketball offers way more opportunity. Heck overseas basketball players make more than a lot of world boxing champs.

3) Relative poverty. There’s a definite correlation between poverty and people going into boxing. When the sport offers maybe the only chance to get out of abject poverty — like not being able to have food on the table poverty — it’s worth a shot. In America today, all but the poorest families have cell phones, probably have a car (even if it’s a junker) and relative luxuries as compared to the dirt poor did the way boxers of a few generations ago in the U.S. came up.

4) MMA’s rise. Now UFC is the thing that appeals to the ‘fight crowd’ in the U.S. It has supplanted boxing, and talented athletes who once might have become boxers are now tapout boys.

That’s not to say nobody has it hard in America but they do have it far better than the poor in a lot of other countries, Eastern Europe included.

Boxing interest and participation peaked in the time of and soon after the 1976 Olympics and the movie “Rocky” being released. Boxing was cool. Even if a U.S. fighter wins a gold medal in the Olympics now, nobody sees it because it isn’t even shown on network TV — it’s relegated to the 19th streaming service with badminton and bocce ball while swimming and gymnastics and track are being showcased.

Go count how many boxing gyms there were in New York and Philly (anywhere really) in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s vs. now. You’ll see a decline. Russel Peltz’s book outlines how many venue in Philly had regular fights when he started and how it’s basically down to nothing now.

Heck, in the small town in Alabama where I grew up there were two and when I was training amateurs and working with a few club-level pros there were probably a couple dozen. Now there’s like five or six.

That didn’t happen because Russians and Uzbeks started turning pro. It happened because boxing in America was just no longer popular.

 

I wonder how boxing would look if China dedicated as much effort to it as they do say weightlifting. Look for the most genetically gifted and grinding them down by the thousands till we have a guy for every weight class If you look at the Thai's for instance they are facing a trial by fire since about age 8 and they are the most dangerous people on the planet (of there weights) in the domain of open striking and they draw from a massive well of talent no SC guys just pure practice pretty much.

 

Some of that is about as meaningful as the WBA or WBC having pet countries and making sure that Koreans or Venezuelans or whatever get rewarded for the bags of cash that are passed below the table. Ibragimov and Chagaev, lol? That just means somebody got paid, not that they were dominating the sport.

And there’s more than one division, of course.

I guess they had their day and now the UK owns the division. Whatever.

They’ve had some good fighters but to act like since they were able to become professionals that former USSR states have dominated the sport of boxing is a pretty far stretch. They’ve had some good fighters and they’ve had some belt holders, but they haven’t taken over anything.