Dempsey as a modern fighter-

They don't, remotely, but they do look odd.

Then, as i've said, they go in and produce absolute world class combat performances. Josh Taylor looks unwell at the weigh in:

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And then fantastic 30 hours later at bell:

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Better colour, and literally thicker - a thicker body. That's the refuel.

It doesn't matter "how they look". It matters how they perform. And basically every fight that you've watched below cruiserweight over the last 10 years have done a cut (unless they're moving up) of some description and they've turned in whatever world class performance you've watched.

Dempsey would perform, too.

But your "concentration camp" post will meet with some approval. Because despite the fact that most of the above is knowable and verifiable just with some taps on your google machine, for some reason, people don't want to believe this is true. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why.

 

These are NOT extreme things I am describing.

At least the effects are not extreme. Nothing is "wrong" with them because of the weight cut, most of the time.

 

Moved up from where?

 

It definitely, definitely was. The thing is, there's some research saying the 24hr weigh in may be more dangerous to the brain than the 8hr weigh in, but the cat is out of the bag now. If you wound it back you'd just end up with the cut the morning of the fight and less time to refuel. So we're stuck with it the way it is.

 

Well it depends. In a serious discussion about boxing where the discussion is of Dempsey getting down to a healthy 175lbs and thrashing his opponents, as has been laid out fo you in some detail, is probably of some value.

Postulating about Fury at 200lbs isn't.

Probably that would be the most serious difference I would name.

 

No we didn't, or at least I didn't. I wrote on page two:

"Maybe he'd be in that minority of weight-cutters who it really didn't disagree with, that's possible, and he might, for some other strange reason, decide that 200lbs is the weight division for him, there's no way to know. Fighters always have choices."

Fighters do always have choices. But I have the same problem with Marciano. People want to say that Dempsey "Trained like an animal" and "had a mean streak in camp" and was "totally concentrated" but when it comes to cutting weight - like 80% of fighters do - he somehow would find it hard, or would find it disagreeable, too tough, make him too miserable, so he would take the decision of the tiny minority and turn pro at a weight at is "comfortable".

It's possible. But it's far more likely for him to turn pro as an MMA fighter.

 

At 6'1 he's absolutely tiny. I wonder how many challengers 6'1 or shorter have fought for the lineal title since Mike Tyson. It's late, so i'm not going to bother checking but I bet the forum will have a few shouts.

Dempsey was extraordinary, but IMO, honestly, the fighter we saw boxing as Jack Dempsey would have turned pro at 168 and was good enough that he might have been able to get a belt before moving up. All things being equal, he'd have unified and done the bulk of his business there. There was a very good batch up at CW recently, which probably would have discouraged him moving up given that there's no extra money division to division and as an American pound-for-pound genius on attack he'd have been extremely rich boxing at 175, very possibly unbeaten. By the time he can "fight who he wants" he's seeing Scarlett Johansson and worth the best part of 100m.

Nothing about this screams that he will go and box men who could kill him to me, but you never know.