Does size count even just a little bit?

Of course it is a huge obstacle between the weight classes. For many years however among the heavyweight class this was not so. There were always giants with huge size advantages yet they were not all dominant. They appear in every decade. The population has not grown that much in size.

It seemed boxing was a sport where under traditional methods to be as good as you could be as a boxer there was a natural limitation whereby there existed a point that a heavyweight would be "too big to be any good".

I would never pretend that a world rated fighter with a 30lb advantage does not represent an obstacle in any era. But it's just an obstacle. Right up until the Spinks experiment. After that point it became a huge obstacle.

No longer can we say a man can be "too big to be any good". And this is what I think IMO has changed.

 

Or perhaps that the giants of the past were suite compared to similar sized fighters of today.....

 

That's one way of looking at it, another way of looking at it might be to ask what changed to make the bigger ones more effective? Is it training?

There always were great trainers then as now. People often credit some of the masters of boxing like Joe Louis with their great trainers, well how come there was no Lennox Lewis or Riddick bowe sized Joe Louis in the Joe Louis era?

How is it that if there always was big guys around good enough to register (but not dominate) in the rankings was is it that all the Ray Arcels and jack Blackburns were only looking at 190 guys to train?

If size was always this obstacle in HW boxing how come it took so long for the top training gurus of boxing to seek such tall heavy men to train?

 

Well I am sorry if you disagree with my personal opinion that size became a bigger obstacle after the Spinks experiment than it was before it but I base this not on wild imagination but on all the copy Mackie Shilstone got when his revolutionary methods managed to transform Spinks in just months. It was doing the rounds for years that this 25lb of hard muscle in just three months could be applied whilst claiming it also made him 1pound leaner and faster. If it could do all that to a light heavyweight what is so fantastical about these methods opening up more possibility for the giants that nobody had been able to do much with before that point?

Low and behold, years later, after domination of heavyweights getting bigger and bigger we now have had Fury, Povetkin and many others failing drugs tests. Here is an example of what was said back in the day about the Spinks experiment..

• Spinks, the undisputed champion at 175 pounds, bulked up to fight Holmes. Pat Putnam of Sports Illustrated wrote: "Spinks brought in New Orleans nutritionist Mackie Shilstone, 34, a former Tulane football player, who put him on a 4,500-calorie diet sliced into 65% carbohydrates, 20% protein and 15% fat. It was mostly made up of vegetables and grains. . . . The challenger also ran sprints instead of doing traditional nonstop roadwork—800s with a minute between, then 400s, 200s, 100s—as if he were training for the decathlon instead of 15 rounds with Holmes. He even went on a weightlifting program, which raised the scarred eyebrows of more than one boxing purist."

Putnam quoted Shilstone as saying: "He put on 25 pounds but he's actually 1½ pounds leaner overall in fat content. His body fat dropped from 9.1 percent to 7.2 percent. That extra weight is all muscle. And he's faster."

 

I think this under estimates how much bigger people are on average today.
The pool to draw from of athletic guys over 6'6" is just huge compared to even 40 years ago.
Bruce Smith in the NFL in the 80s was considered an absolute freak at 6'4" 265lbs and that is under sized in 2017.

 

Or maybe giants were so few and far between their trainers didn't know how to teach them to use their size properly and fight big?

It would be interesting to list all the decent SHW fighters of the past and their trainers.

 

You say there was great trainers back then but how many of those trainers got to work with SHW fighters? Imagine how much better someone like Primo Carnera would have been if trained by Emanuel Steward.

 

Height and size of humans in the industrialised west is vastly exaggerated.

"Yet in some industrialised countries, notably the United States, the height gains since the 19th Century have actually levelled off. From the 18th Century Revolutionary War through to World War Two in the mid-20th Century, Americans towered above other industrialised folks. But today, American men typically notch about 176cm and women 163cm – approximately the same height as that of the average hippie who attended Woodstock 45 years ago, and well behind the modern Dutch.

"The average height today in the US is not appreciably different than it was in the mid to late 70s, even the late 60s," says Leonard. "We're talking about 40 to 50 years of relative plateau." -says William Leonard, a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University in Illinois.

• By Adam Hadhazy

14 May 2015

 

You are correct, the article did mention all of that but since the majority of boxing champions and heavyweights from modern history are American I did indeed copy and paste the part most relevant to boxing and the country most champions have historically resided.

Many people put the emergence of American SHW like Bowe, Grant, Briggs, truth Williams, tony Tucker, Mitch Green down to an increase in human size. I don't think The inclusion of Lewis the Klitchkos or other non Americans has exactly eclipsed the American super heavyweight explosion after 1985 if the human population of America had plateaued in the 1960s.

Are the Dutch going to dominate HW boxing? Let's wait and see. I imagine if it is just down to size alone they might?

You can search out the rest of the article if you want since I have posted the source now. William Leonard a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University in Illinois. The article is called "will humans keep getting taller"

 

Yes Size increased in the world and in America over the last hundred years. in America it increased right up until the 1960s. According to research after that, in America the human size plateaued. Why no boom in the size of heavyweights in the 1950s and 1960s then?

I am no expert, perhaps somebody is, but could this mean we should not have seen bigger champions from America after the 1970s?