Dempsey's punching ability compared to the 90s heavyweights

No, but you need something else to compensate. Huge raw strength and a massive weight advantage being the obvious ones.

If you're small, slow and crude, well, you're a bit fcuked aren't you?

 

Are you serious ?
That goes against just about every ounce of "logic" you've been trying to push here.
In your own terms, are you insane ??

 

This is true to a degree, though a super heavyweight with power will always have the potential to hit harder than the smaller fighter if he so chooses. Wilder's a good example of a large full-bodied heavyweight who puts everything into punches and gets devastating results. He looked like absolute arse doing it, and leaves himself as wide open as a barn door, but when he lands fighters go to sleep.

Dempsey P4P could likely get more out of his shots than a larger heavyweight like Wlad, because he has to, but he's still badly undersized, and even when he lands with his whole body behind a shot there's still going to be a lack of heavy handedness there, as defined by his body's ability to follow through on a shot with minimal loss of momentum or structural stability.

I don't mind conceding that maybe Dempsey had average power for the 70s. I had in mind fighters like Foreman, Shavers and Lyle while deciding on my vote, which might have skewed things. He could definitely hit as hard as Quarry, Bonavena, Chuvalo and the like.

A fighter like Wlad chooses not to go all out on his punches in order to maintain balance and position and be in a premium position to deal with incoming counter fire. Lewis to a degree did the same thing, though every now and again he'd launch himself into a shot, usually ending up with his opponent a dribbling heap on the canvas.

To a degree the way you hit is trained in the gym and is part of your overall style, but there are numerous occasions of normally conservative fighters going for broke on shots to get a knockout when their opponent has been hurt.

 

There are always outliers in every discussion, exceptions to the rule. Dempsey didn't have the freakish combination of speed, explosiveness and raw power compacted into a tiny densely muscled frame for the comparison to make any meaningful sense.

 

I bet you haven't seen all the big (=bigger than Dempsey) fighters of that era so I doubt you're making an informed judgement.

Lionel Butler was a crude swinging caveman. Frank Bruno was tense and stiff as a board in his movement. I don't doubt they were hard punchers of the 1990s though.

So does Shavers hit the same as Marco Huck, is that your opinion ?

Apparently it is easy to spot in the ring .... and somehow a lack of athleticism is easy for you to spot on fghters from the 1920s who we have little or no film of !

 

Nothing magic about it. Just the reality.

 

But Dempsey was considered a freak. He is way beyond the norm. Extraordinary, exceptional, outliers. These exist among elite athletes in almost every era, almost by definition.

You make an exception of Mike Tyson only. You discredit your whole argument by doing so.

Tyson's physique is irrelevant. Freaks come in all shapes and sizes, some of the freakiest actually look very normal.

Almost everyone who witnessed Dempsey never doubted his explosiveness or raw power. It was evident.

 

No one alive has seen all the big men of Dempsey's time fight, so we have to use a bit of guesswork and observe the types of things being said and considered about the top fighters of his day whom we do have footage of.

Butler was no ring wizard but he was considerably more technically sound and explosive than Firpo.

My opinions on Shavers's punching power have been well documented elsewhere.

We have footage of almost all the major fighters of that era, and it doesn't make for impressive viewing. Firpo himself was considered an awesome punching specimen of a man, but video of the Dempsey fight (his crowning moment) shows a tremendously slow and cumbersome slugger that would never have passed muster in the 90s unless he had the size to overcome those deficiencies. In Dempsey's time he did. In the giant-rich 90s he didn't.

 

Desmpey was considered a freak for his time. Tyson was considered a freak for his. Difference is that Tyson's image still holds up to this day, while Dempsey's was eclipsed years ago. Tyson also had a good thirty pounds of muscle on Dempsey which makes it an even bigger uphill struggle for Jack to remain relevant.

I've no doubt that sometime in the future we'll look back on Tyson and wonder what all the fuss was about, but that time hasn't come yet.

 

You're talking technique, and you are quite correct on what you say.

I'm talking mass, and how that generates a power of its own.

What I'm saying is that mass can compensate for poorer technique to some extent. What I'm also saying is that a boxer can adopt an approach that is more conservative than that of a power puncher and still generate respectable power simply through sheer size. Vitali, for example.

 

*cough*marciano*cough*

 

Firpo was considered a crude and slow and cumbersome slugger in his own time, by people who knew boxing.
He was largely a hype job in his own time. He was a rated fighter for 2 years at the most.
His punches would hurt in any era, if they landed.
His main strength was relentless determination.

 

He was also considered a giant, though his stats are completely underwhelming these days. Guys like that can afford to get away with lack of boxing nous because they're that much bigger than their opponents.

I've no doubt that his punches would have hurt if he could have landed them, but then the same could be said for virtually any other decent-sized heavyweight in history. It's not exactly a ringing endorsement.

 

Current heavyweight fighters are 20-30 pounds of muscle bigger than Tyson. They are over 30 years more "advanced", and those 30 years have arguably and probably seen a more accelerated advancement in training science applied and PEDs than any other period. The 50 -60 years that separate Tyson's era from Dempsey's are probably no more significant.

Tyson was trained by old school methods and weighed 32 pounds less than Anthony Joshua.

If you truly believed in training and PED advancements and believed this stuff about size and power, you couldn't really defend your line on Tyson. He's small and from relatively a primitive era. He's the size of your rehydrated cruisers. His PED schedule was probably relatively pathetic. I doubt Cus D'amato or any other traditional boxing trainer of the time knew much about PEDs as they do know.

It is interesting that you state "Tyson's image still holds up to this day".
The image is just a subjective entity that exists in your head. An image of Tyson is no more validation than a favourable image of Dempsey, or anyone else.
Your doing with Tyson what you've been arguing against with Dempsey.

The cold hard facts of body weight, strength, size, PEDs either matter or they don't.
Unless you believe Tyson was some sort of "magical immortal" .........

 

The writers and promoters of the day might have ballyhooed and hyped Firpo as a "Patagonian giant" or something but you have to take it with a pinch of salt.
He was a bit bigger than Dempsey, a fair bit smaller than Willard, about the same size as Wills.
Firpo didn't really beat anyone in his own era so it's a strawman argument.
An old Willard was his best win, and Firpo was the smaller man.

Firpo was a big heavyweight in his day. Not a giant. In the 1980s he'd be average, and 1990s he'd been less than average.

Firpo wasn't particularly good. Not in his own time. That's the point.
He was the kind of fighter who could beat a couple of fringe has-beens, if matched right. That's what they did.