Whew!! these guys are wildly underestimated. How many modern fighters with a time machine could go back and win those style fights?
Loved that video. Can't find it now, but I once read a decent article saying you rate Sullivan top five or not at all. I can see that. Cheers for the post.
Did he make "millions" in his career? The big purses in his career were like $5,000. They said he fought 400 times (if you add up every time he punched someone). He'd have had to average $3,000 for each of his 400 fights just to crack the $1 million mark. Forget more than a million. Doesn't sound very accurate.
I imagine most of those fights looked like these, just with a couple hundred people standing around and not as many jabs. This content is protected
This is a pretty fair assessment. He was as dominant as any heavyweight champion in history. It comes down to whether you are sold on his era, and whether you are prepared to commit to comparing it to others. Once you accepted some element of equivalence between his era and others, you would not be able to justify rating him as your #17 all time heavyweight say.
I don't know if the millions claim is accurate, but nit would not just be down to his fights. He was constantly touring, and giving exhibitions, in front of packed audiences. He could make money just from a public appearance.
MSN wrote a story last year that said he earned 1 million actual dollars during his career which would be 25 million today.
Give me a fence, and I'll sit on it, lol: 16 Bowe 17 V Klitschko 18 W Klitschko 19 Fitzsimmons 20 Sullivan BTW, I found the piece about ranking Sullivan. And I believe it is actually one of your old threads, sir https://www.boxingforum24.com/threa...or-leave-him-off-your-list-altogether.474910/
They may have written it, but it doesn't seem likely, given the outrageous purses he was earning at the time were like $5,000. And there weren't many of those. Just a couple.
The problem is that you either have to treat Sullivan's opposition as being comparable to challengers from other eras, or decline to do so given the uncertainties surrounding the era. If you assume that his best challengers would have been world class in say 1900, then you would have to rank him above Fitzsimmons, and you would probably have to rank him above Jeffries to be honest. If on the other hand you thought that his best opponents would not have been world class in 1900, then you would probably decline to rank him in your top 20, as comparisons with the other fighters listed would be nearly impossible. My best guess (which is probably not very good), is that Sullivan's era was the weakest of the gloved age, but that it was still what we would call a weak era in the conventional sense. That is to say that his best opponents would have enjoyed success in other eras. You have the added complication that he fought under two rule sets, defeating the best gloved boxers of his era, and the best bare knuckle boxers of his era, sometimes under both rule sets.
Very interesting film, thanks for sharing. I liked seeing the sites where the fights happened. I recall seeing a documentary on Johnson - Jeffries with Barry Tomkins standing by a plaque, on the site of the fight, attached to a gate in front of a car disposal yard. The stills of Sullivan - Kilrain are very sharp, pity none exist of the Corbett fight as we have to make do with the pen and ink drawings. Years ago I saw on TV, the biopic "The Great John L." aka "A Man Called Sullivan". It was a colourful Hollywood version of his life, much like the Corbett one with Errol Flynn. Neither of these show up on the schedules now.
