Did you like Bert Sugar

Larry said some good things, but at times during the interview came off as completely salty because Foreman never fought him. It was kind of killing the show, so I can see why Sugar got fed up with Holmes.

Also, Carnera would definitely beat Vitali, who was extremely overrated. Vitali was a sucker for a good uppercut and Carnera had a great one. Carnera isn't a stiff like Briggs or a guy with a 3 round gas tank like Sanders. Carnera would never quit against Byrd and certainly wouldn't run from a rematch.

Wlad-Carnera could go either way, since Wlad has more tools than Vitali and has a good straight hand, which I can see keeping Carnera honest, but at the same time Wlad has a very shaky chin.

 

Great entertainment and knowledge of the old days, always enjoyed listening to him talk.

BUT

He was ludicrously biased towards fighters pre 1940, his all time 100 list was ****ing atrocious, random contenders from the 1920's who never won a world title ranked above the likes of Roy Jones and Lennox Lewis for example. To be fair he apparently grew up listening to tales from old men who watched that era in person and no doubt over time the stories were exaggerated with each telling and unlike now when everything is recorded on video so much of the pre 1940 era wasn't filmed and so there's no way to disprove the legends surrounding those fighters that Sugar and others worshipped.

 

No cigar in his mouth?

 

I noticed a lot of that too, in his books. Way too biased toward the really old, pre-WW 2 guys. It's fine for me to be biased, but I'd prefer not to have that quality in my historians. A historian needs to be careful about theorizing too much, and he never drew that line.

 

Always thought of him as a bit of a charlatan, a non boxing person's idea of what a boxing aficionado looks like, the sort of guy you'd expect to see at a Joe Louis fight in 1940, which is why he turned up in so many boxing documentaries. It was irritating seeing him continue to regurgitate old boxing fairy tales (like Pep winning a round without throwing a punch) that he knew had already been debunked years before.

 

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I didnt care for him.
He just repeated stories out of books and magazines. Never came up with anything original that I recall. Always interrupting people. So no I didnt like him. Phoney

 

Spot on about Carnera/Vitali.

Whenever the filthy modernist's dare mock this view, then I show them this video. It is astonishing to me that a man of this size could resemble a frantic Tasmanian devil with the high speed, angles and footwork that would put any fighter to shame in today's climate. However, the most impressive thing is the way he torques away with violent combinations. You can tell he is transferring his full body weight into every shot - a real lost art. He is fully tensed to maximise his power output. Bare in mind, black and white footage can appear to make the fighter slower yet we still need to play this in slow motion to notice the nuances that Carnera is displaying. I've never seen anything quite like it.

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Carnera`s chin was far worse than Wlad`s and Tyson threw a far harder uppercut than Carnera could ever dream of, also aj showed a great uppercut vs Wlad, Carnera couldn`t punch anything like that at all.

 

My God, he was awful!

 

Pep knew more about boxing than Bert did though.

 

Wow! Great find. I never knew there was footage of Mysterious Billy Pickles sparring Carnera! He must have been about 40 years old by then and yet Old Pickles still had all of those familiar moves that baffled Greb years earlier! With priceless sparring like this it is no wonder Primo achieved such success as the first Superheavyweight of the modern era.

 

Yes but he’s Sparring Pickles here. Primo is up against Very advanced elusive moves whilst under heavy fire. To be fair to Carnera at least he’s firing back. You can’t knock his heart.

 

Anyone can spar with a visible opponent, challenging one you cannot detect is the definition of being in a “pickle”! Yes, that is the origin of the term!

 

My dear goofball, he's doing "isometric" punching exercises, not shadow boxing. There's footage of Greb training that has been mocked on the basis of similar misunderstandings. Isometric exercises were something of a "bro science" fad in the first half of the twentieth century, and they involved performing various motions with the muscles tensed despite there being no source of resistance. That's why Carnera (and Greb) look so comically stiff in these training films.

Carnera had his shortcomings to be sure, but he was not clumsy and he damn sure was not slow.