Deaths in the Ring as an indicator of punching power - Why?

In all fairness fans of modern fighter David Tua on these boards acutally use Ike's **** conviction as evidence of his dangerous punching power...yeah. Tua's power made Ike a ******. :nut

 

Considering relative non-punchers have also killed (Davila, Griffith, mcGuigan, all unspectacular punchers) I'm not sure how relevant it is.

 

I do not where you are going with this. Poor or lack of commissions, may of led to mismatches and ill conditioned fighters fighting and causing death. I would think it is hard to correlate punching power to ring fatalities per se. Most deaths of the Dempsey era would be down to a cumulative effect of a career and/or and unknown medical condition(s).

Now a days deaths are more down to weight making. As in the last 40 or so years I can only think of Regis (who died after a fight with Joe Bugner, who was not considered a world class puncher), and arguably Greg Page as Heavyweight ring fatalities. And I suspect that is in a large part due to Heavyweights not having the weight making difficulties of other fighters from other divisions.

 

I don't disagree with this , but McGuigan was a pretty good puncher.

 

You said yourself Mong, Tua made Ike see demonz & make rapez.

Besides, how exactly can you "****" all-expenses-paid prostitutes King sends to your hotel room? :think


On topic: Good point made.

 

It depends exactly how the ring death is caused.

If it is a brain injury caused by a fighter being dehydrated, then I wouldn't draw masive inferences about the fighters power.

There are however cases such as Willard Young where the nature of the injury is indicative of considerable power.

 

I don't think any doctor (let alone us) can presume to know exactly why a brain injury occurs for one fighter bu not another, or the circumstances surrounding it. The only thing that seems to ring true over just about all of them resulting in death hat I can think of is a stoppage occuring after many rounds have elapsed, which suggests that it isn't any one horrible shot that does the damage, rather an accumulation of punches. A true puncher is one who gets guys out of there early, and doesn't need to build cumulative damage in his opponent. They're already gone before that point.

 

It's not a reliable indicator at all. How could it be since it happens so rarely?

On top of that it happens for so many different reasons: preexisting injuries, weight draining, illegal blows, cumulative punishment, shoddy post fight medical care, and so on. It's next to impossible to correlate deaths or serious injuries to punching power unless the injuries involve crushed eye sockets and broken vertebrae coming as the result of a small number of punches. Brain swelling and the like are more often caused by repeated medium strength punches over the course of a fight, and are also the injuries most likely to cause serious after-effects.

The most reliable indicator of top class punching power is, and always will be, the one punch KO. After that it's clean KOs (knocking an opponent unconscious with more than one punch), followed by stoppages of increasingly lesser severity.

Whether or not you were once unfortunate enough to kill a man in the ring is irrelevant, IMO.

 

Good point.

 

I don’t think so.

For one, the great majority of ring deaths are below heavyweight, which suggests that cutting weight has to do with it.

Also, they are usually from a long fight with accumulated punishment rather than a quick KO.

 

When one considers some of the biggest punchers in boxing history never killed anyone.
Punching power isn't the culprit .
Mancini, Pintor, and Griffith do have one thing in common. They were aggressive, not devastating punchers.
Could it be repeated hard blows not the one punch ko blow that makes the difference?
The Gatti vs Gamache and Benn vs McCellean fights where both Gamache and Mccellean were seriously hurt were from a series of hard punches. Though Gatti came in looking two or three weight classes heavier than Gamache, which also should be factored in.
Other factors like dehydration, referee responses, past prime, or K'oed multiple times, and skills are more responsible than just punching power.

 

Obviously punching power has little to do with ring deaths - as these are just unfortunate incidents (that, fortunately, happen very rarely).

Relatively feather-fisted (22.4 KO%) former bantamweight champ Charles (bud) Taylor was involved in two ring deaths - neither of which had anyting to do with great punching power.