Did any fighter's ever boast the way Ali did pre-Ali?

Yes, Corbett and Sullivan being noteworthy examples. Very vocally cocky, making predictions while also kind of being assholes about it. However, like Ali, they largely got away with it by the public eye due to being charismatic and likeable.

I’d argue some late 19th-early 20th century boxers were a few of the most colorful and eccentric figures the sport has seen

 

Tony Galento was pretty good at whipping up a crowd with his "I'll moider da bum!" antics.

 

Jack Johnson is other one.

 

Max Bear was somewhat boastful, but in a more polite way than Ali...

 

Ali was inspired partially by Archie Moore, as well as Gorgeous George from TV wrasslin'.

 

I started a Thread years ago over on the CBZ, about this very thing, titled "Did Ali Ruin Boxing?"

which all that arrogant boast, mock and pomp, opened the door to what we have today, where the Weigh-in's are a 'money making' spectacle and so off putting, juvenile and embarrassing... All that said behaviour, worse now of course, we can thank Ali for!

did bad mouthing exist before, of course, but it wasn't so much a highlighted show case or an obsession for Fans and the Media.

We could do without it, likewise with all the B.S Media Hype over ordinary fighters, contextually speaking and bogus titles.

 

Ali made being a clown a business standard… even an expectation.

 

I’d say boxing was at a peak during the Ali years and maybe the decade or so that followed. Really fell off after he left.

He didn’t ruin it. He injected life into it. His boasts made people pick a side and get invested instead of passively watching to see who won.

 

I understand and agree to that part, but like any 'trail blazer', if we can call him that, their we're others before him for Style, Athleticism & Excellence... but I still think he set the platform for a lot of personality athlete showcasing, which has become a vanity show, with too much ignorant cutting behaviours. But I do hear you.

Similarly, Derek Sanderson set the stage for the High Profile, High Paid, Playboy, Media following athletes.

 

As you noted, there were flamboyant athletes before Ali. In boxing alone we had examples like Ray Robinson tooling around in his pink Cadillac and Georges Carpentier played up as some kind of high-society sophisticate and even Ingemar Johansson as a playboy with a supermodel in tow.

He certainly wasn’t the first to talk smack. Ty Cobb did it. Babe Ruth either did or didn’t call his home run shot in the World Series but regardless he was far from modest. Babe Didrikson was a self-promoter. I could go on and on. Jack Johnson was certainly no wallflower and John L Sullivan used to brag that he could lick any man in the house.

Ali more than anyone before him was verbally boastful in an area where television (and radio to a lesser degree) allowed those boasts to be broadcast into homes — here he was in your living room telling you how great he was. But he backed it up. It was shocking to white America to hear a black man running his mouth instead of ‘knowing his place’ and playing humble like Joe Louis.

 

Yes some very positive changes, but equally with all the Copy Cats the fallout has paved a demise. Duality I suppose has occurred in Sport, in part because of Muhammad. Still the 70's was a great time for Boxing, much in part because of him.

 

Jack Johnson. He's pretty much the biggest influence of Muhammad Ali's persona

 

Boxing’s downfall, such as it is, has roots far more self-inflected than one great champion telling the world how great he is.

Television was boxing’s best friend and worst enemy. It was bemoaned in the day when fight clubs dried up because people could get boxing free on their TVs every week — often multiple times a week — starting with the Gillette Friday Night Fights series in the 1950s.

That led to fewer opportunities for someone to make a living at it (below the championship level, where most boxers reside) and that led to lower participation numbers. There was a nice boost in the U.S. in the 1970s with “Rocky” and the 1976 Olympic team’s success leading the revival.

The Four Kings (should’ve been five with Wilfred if Marvin had only fought him) carried the sport for a while, but a funny thing happened — HBO came along and started taking what had once been free on TV and putting it behind the premium-channel pay wall. And PPVs proliferated — with closed circuit, people still had to get up and go out, but now fights were beamed to your TV for a price.

The convergence of those factors choked off the pipeline of star-making. HBO and then Showtime muscled the networks out of getting exposure for needle-moving stars to the masses. Ray Leonard grew up before our eyes on network TV. We saw enough of the savagery of Roberto Duran on the same conveyance. But we didn’t get that opportunity with Roy Jones Jr and Oscar and others — HBO and Showtime had growing subscribership, but not in the numbers that could really make a next generation of stars. There was now a price of admission to see hot young prospects who could have blossomed on free TV. We lost the entry point for the next generation of fans.

Throw in the inherent dangers of the sport — ring deaths like Duk Koo Kim on live TV and seeing fighters we revered fall to dementia — and the networks began to scale down and back out of boxing. It’s not a sport for the faint of heart, and many don’t have the stomach for it.

Along came MMA and boxing’s recession became a depression. More savage to appeal to the truly bloodthirsty and it caught on at the same time boxing was beginning to fade. MMA made its own stars and was for many reasons (not the least of which being economics — investing in an up-and-coming MMA star for UFC was a far lower price point than outbidding other promoters for an Olympic boxing star) it was more of a fit for the modern media as everything became niche and streaming became king.

There are a ton of layers to it. Ali ringing in an era of athletes who felt free to speak up and self-promote was the thinnest of those layers, like a single flake of a croissant crumbling.

 

Yes I know of all of that and yes, TV killed all the small hall shows & eventually the number of Boxers actually taking part in the Sport, also Post War prosperity giving many much more opportunity to earn a good living, other than getting you're head bashed in.

Yes, I know SP, and it is sad really, once a Huge and Great Sport/Business, more the Business now I suspect. Anyway, yes much in agreement. Cheers for now.