Did the best heavyweight talent get to the top of the rankings in the 40s and 50s?

dont understand

throw us afew names of top fighters then throw us a few names of contenders

 

cheers for that janitor but i feel everyone deserving got a shot i cant think of anyone who never

 

Well I think the ring magazine did a good job of understanding how talented some of those top black prospects like elmer ray, lee q murray, jimmy bivins, harry bobo, clarence henry, nino valdez, bob baker, eddie machen, Cleveland williams, zora folley were...and these men usually always got high rankings. they could have been left off because of there skin color, but they always got fair rankings, sometimes even more than generous.


The shameful thing here...is that while these men were highly talented, dangerous, and highly rated...not one of the men i mentioned above got linear heavyweight title shots(except williams and folley when they were 35 on there last legs).....Such a Shame. Part of this is politics, none of those men were big draws, and some of them didnt have good connections with IBC. Such a shame.


Look at Clarence Henry, he was in the top 5 rated 3 years in a row from 1950-1952....I mean he couldnt get one measely title shot during that period? hell could he have at least been given a non title bout against one of the big names marciano, charles, walcott or louis? A henry-Louis bout was actually almost signed and dotted but it got messed up when marciano knocked out louis, cause louis then retired. his next fight would have been against clarence henry.


Elmer Ray got many exhibitions against joe louis, why not give him a real payday title shot...especially given his incredible run and high ranking. he could have easily been fit in a schedule of title bouts in 1946 or early 1947.


The War screwed over guys like jimmy bivins and lee q murray, these men surely had to be given title shots in 43-44 if louis is stil active.


Even a guy like nino valdez should have been one shot vs either marciano or patterson. baker should have been given one by either walcott charles or marciano or even patterson. i mean just give the guy one shot. zora folley C williams eddie machen? do these guys really have to wait until 1965 to get there first shot? Too many undeserving unrated white fighters got shots.

 

I guess one positive thing you can say about the proliferation of alphabet groups is that anyone who even remotely deserves a title shot gets one against one champion or another. I can't think of anyone from 1980 on not getting some sort of title shot. Seems like there has to be someone, but I can't come up with anybody.

 

Well, the RING staff in the '50s was pretty incredibly reluctant to rank top light heavyweights at heavyweight. Harold Johnson, who beat about half the name heavyweights of the era (Charles, Valdes, Henry, Satterfield, etc.) was never ranked in the RING top 10, apparently just because of his predominant light heavyweight status. Moore was a similar case, going without recognition in spite of having beaten pretty much every top heavyweight Marciano wasn't busy with until the Valdes match in '55.

 

"Did the best heavyweights get to the top in these eras"

I agree with Susie Q that the RING ratings, by and large, were decent. Most of the talented fighters did rise high into the ratings, with as Marciano-Frazier pointed out, the exception of the RING's reluctance to rate Moore and Johnson at heavyweight despite their excellent records against the big fellows.

Obviously, there will be disagreements in hindsight. Why was Maxim rated #3 at heavyweight in 1950. He had not beaten a top heavyweight in at least 2 years (if you count Tandberg) and a really top heavy since 1946 (if you go back to Walcott).

Who got a shot at a title and who didn't is a different issue and here I think there is much to criticize. Louis' bum-of-the-month tour was against exclusively white opponents, even though there were black contenders out there who probably more dangerous and more worthy--Roscoe Toles, Lem Franklin, Buddy Walker, Eddie Blunt--Abe Simon got two shots at Louis although Lem Franklin beat him twice, once by a knockout.

The war certainly robbed several top men of shots--Jimmy Bivins, Turkey Thompson, Lee Q Murray, and Melio Bettina. I don't exactly know why Tami Mauriello went to the head of the list in 1946 rather than Bivins or Bettina.

Elmer Ray certainly had done enough to get a shot, but Louis took off a year and a half in late 1946 to Dec 1947 when he defended against Walcott. In fairness, Walcott beat Ray to earn this shot, but Ray could have and should have gotten his own shot.

Ezzard Charles continued the policy of giving white fighters, and not necessarily the highest rated white fighters, the shots. Valentino was not a terrible choice. He had beaten Thompson in 1948. But Lesnevich was a lightheavy who had failed against top heavyweights. He was coming off losses to Mills and Maxim, and hadn't done much since 1947. Maxim had already lost three times to Charles and hadn't done much against heavies for years. Beshore and Barone were fringe types, Barone in the lightheavy class. There were a lot of tougher guys out there than Oma. Of course, Charles was fighting very often and he did defend against Louis and Walcott. It is also possible that the managements of Layne, Henry, and Baker shied away from a match with Charles until their men had more seasoning.

Marciano deserves criticism for fighting Cockell rather than the #1 contender Nino Valdes in 1955.

Patterson defended against #1 contenders Jackson and Johansson, but Rademacher, London, and McNeeley were simply unworthy of shots. Harris was decent contender, but no where near the class of Machen and Folley, who were diverted to a siding during the Patterson era. The veteran Valdes also would have been an interesting challenger in 1958.

The pattern is pretty clear. Mediocre white contenders got shots while tougher black contenders were avoided. This pattern endured for several more decades, with Zyglywicz, Daniels, Stander, Wepner, Coopman, Dunn, Frank, etc, getting shots while matches with tougher men were somehow never made.

 

You dont think after 2 fights with Walcott, than LarSarza, 2 wars with Charles, you dont think Marciano was entitle to a easy title defense?

 

Somebody discussed this earlier, I forget who, but he was absolutely right. These eras were greatly compromised by a calamity of unprecedented proportions called World War II.

Consider the facts, which I just checked out (I'm here in the public library right now). In 1940, according to the US census, males between the ages of 20 and 34 numbered around 15 million. Throw in 15-19 year olds and we can get the number to around 20 million. Of this 20 million, a much smaller number boxed (obviously). Since the average height and weight of a man in 1940 was around 5'8" and 150-160 lbs, the number of potential heavyweights was quite small.

World War II took more than 16 million young men out of the United States! Think about this number and then compare it to the 1940 census. It's an amazing statistic. Over a million US men where either killed or wounded, many of the wounded seriously so. Thousands came up missing.

The massive drain on the male population, simply by taking away the best years of a millions of men who could potentially box, was damaging to boxing overall, but especially so to the talent pool for heavyweights, since, as I noted, very few men are of the size and inclination to be heavyweight boxers. So between Pearl Harbor and for some time after Hiroshima, the heavyweight division was relatively devoid of talent. This is why a journeyman like Walcott could challenge for the heavyweight title by beating a journeyman light heavyweight like Joey Maxim.

I apologize for not remembering the name of the person who already noted this just the other day, but I thought I should put some facts behind his point because it's a damn good one.

 

I think for the most part the better men got the title shot...there were a few instances where the perfect senario would be for the Champ to fight every top contenders....Louis took Walcott over Bivens ( JJW earned it) but I would have liked to see Louis/Bivens....and I would have liked to see Marciano vs Valdes but Valdes did lose 4 in a row in 53 and then lost the elimination in 2 fights to Moore, I still think the match would have been made had Nino beat Bob Satterfield but Bob dominated him dropping for a 9 count in round 10.....There was not a big enough payday left for Rocky for # 50

 

we lost a lot of good men in the Viet Nam war and the drug revolution in the 60's and 70's as well....JJWalcott was a skilled and experienced fighter...much like 44 yr old B-Hop is today...I dont think calling him a journeyman would be the right terminology

 

Jack Dempsey and World War I?
We always had 1 war or other. WWII is nothing new.
Nam as said before.

 

Well, causilties in Vietnam was not much more than a tenth of those in WWII and WWI, so that's really not that valid a comparison. Fewer were called up as well.

I agree about Walcott, though. Janitor made an excellent post in another thread as to just to why his record seems to be patchy in some parts. You just have to watch the film to see the guy's talent. Watch him and then Wepner, and it's clear that one of them deserves to be called "journeyman" and that the other doesn't.