Fight films

Well, this is speculation, but the Docusen fight was allegedly only in the possession of him and his family (where it was correctly rumored to have existed for years). When it surfaced, his daughter Patricia claimed to be baffled as to how it popped up on youtube, since it was supposed to be Bernard's personal property with a copyright. My personal suspicion is that he or one of his family was contacted directly about obtaining a copy by an enthusiast, and that's how it got out. Bernard passed away just over a year and a half ago. His kids and grand kids created an on-line presence on his behalf a few years prior to that, Myspace and Facebook pages as well as an official website.

The same sweetfights source which previously claimed to have all the extant footage of Robby in existence for sale on DVD uploaded SRR-Docusen onto youtube just over a year ago. Perhaps with his passing, another member of his family besides Patricia no longer felt bound by the copyright he held on that footage. (Now, that same sweetfights uplink is on www.bernarddocusen.com. Previously, his family was planning a DVD of their own to offer for sale. Don't know what the current status of that is.)

 

The Dempsey-Miske film is not in the ESPN archives. It was filmed though. I have a slightly longer version of what is known of this fight to exist but it doesnt show much. WWJ did broadcast Dempsey-Miske BUT I believe it has commonly been mistaken to have been a live ringside broadcast which unless Im wrong it was actually only fight returns broadcast on radio, in other words a round by round summary read from telegraph reports.

 

Yes, I have understood that broadcast to be a summary of returns, distinguishing it historically from Dempsey-Carpentier, but that this distinction has not been emphasized enough has led to some confusion.

The allegation that the film is in ESPN's possession is based on the claim that it was definitely in the Cayton-Jacobs collection which was sold by Cayton to the Disney Company in 1998. (If this was true, Tyson would likely know about it, and might even have a copy.)

 

kudos on the knowledge you guys have on these fight films, very impressive. From this, its quite possible that families of opponents of SRR to have films of the fights. I think there was a guy related to Hanz Stretz who was looking for his fight with Ray, the film (or highlights if it) were released on youtube by the the RareBoxing channel, so its possible that there is more footage of a prime Ray can be released, most likely some families of opponents have such films. Bill Paxton a lot of his stuff from Grebs family for his book.like you said Duo, they keep popping up, heres to being optimisic...

 

from a poster at cyber boxing:

"Regarding Fights 1 through 5 of Lamotta/Robinson some of those fights were televised starting in 1944 when The Gillette Safety Razor Company signed a contract with the NBC Television network to televise the 2nd fight between Willie Pep and Chalky Wright on September 29,1944."'

"As far as the tv listings of the time, the Robinson v Bell fight as well as the Lamotta fight was televised"

"Their were rumors that Kid Gavilan was in possession of the fights but that never proved to be true, and rumors that Fidel Castro and the Cuban government had them stashed away "Well I guess that might be true"? who knows.

What I can tell you that may hold some weight is that prior to the mid 1990's the Kid Gavilan vs Ali Ben Buker hadn't surfaced anywhere. A buisnessman from the west coast who has interest in fight films and happens to travel the world for his job located the Kid Gavilan vs Ali Ben Buker fight in Cuba. He was searching for the Robinson/Gavilan fights at the time and stumbled upon Ben Buker/Gavilan in surprisingly good condition.

After much research and many trips to cuba to locate the Gavilan/Robinson fights including questioning television stations in Cuba for information he is of the belief that the fights do not exist on film."




just some info i thought was relevant, here is the whole thread if anyone is interested. some usefiul knowledge here...

http://cyberboxingzone.com/cbzforum/showthread.php?t=4022&highlight=sugar+ray+robinson



what a shame about the gavilan fights.

 

Restoration gets real pricey....... Who's paying??? I have a shitload of classics on video.... But I ain't got the time or money to transfer it all to DVD.......... When I started recording fights for hobby back in 1982, nobody knew what a DVD was....... VHS was in the lead over Betamax.........

MR.BILL

 

I did this 2 years ago. Some lessons learned: Have more than one VCR if possible because the first one will probably crap out on you at some point. Also get good at cleaning VCR's (some alcohol and Q-tips or better yet something that doesn't lose it's fiberrs). I have a dvd which could burn dvd's. I'm sure there's a way to copy straight to a drive. Either way, there's no way around having to play the VCR tapes real time (at least not that I know of). I had about a hundred tapes and only lost 2 (eaten by VCR). It is time consuming but pretty rewarding knowing you're saving all that stuff you recorded and also very nostalgic recalling all the fights and old commercials. I seperated my tapes into 2 types: high quality stuff, and ordinary stuff. I usually recorded back in the day in 6 hour format. I'd start a 6 hour vcr tape in the morning and copy it to dvd set to 6 hrs. High quality tapes that I wanted in a better format I'd record at night or on the weekend so I could set the dvd to higher quality (2 hrs).
Go for it!!

 

edit

 

I have a lot of boxing films my dad and uncle had, and most of the ones my uncle had are not labelled. Evidently, for what it would cost me to get a film transferred and saved, since I'm afraid to run some of them, I don't think it would pay me to do it even if there was a complete Greb fight in there. I know my uncle was a huge Greb fan, but he wasn't well organized, and that doesn't necessarily mean he had Greb on film. To be honest, I don't know what the hell he had there. As I said, the films seem brittle and I'm afraid to run them. My uncle was very sick for a long time before he died and I think the films were stored in his cellar for quite a while. I don't know if any of it can be reasonably recovered. I have some money but I'm not filthy rich.

 

What reason would film be holder back for? Like with the collection espn have??

 

money, the longer its hidden the more value it has.

 

I wonder how some of the ESPN films are being stored. Maybe they have some problems with brittle films, similar to the problems I have, and can't or don't want to spend the money to try to salvage them.

Suppose someone had a Greb fight film too brittle to run. If that person had it saved and restored, could he even get his money back afterwards? Personally, I doubt if he could.

 

Thanks for the advice bud, I really want 2 get moving on this. I have so many tapes, I taped everything on SP as I am a quality freak, not that the EP recordings are not solid I just found tracking issues when moving from vcr to vcr when fights were recorded in the EP mode so that's why I always opted for SP.

 

djanders, you really need to get them films converted, would be very interesting to see what you have. I just wonder how people copy films? could they copy it without running it these days? If so how much would it cost?

Just throwing out these questions.

 

Yeah. I have the same questions. From what little I have learned, along with my gut instincts, I suspect we are talking about a huge amount of cash to get these films converted one frame at a time. In addition to that the frame images are probably faded, and, even with modern technology, I wonder what the finished product would look like. I just don't see how I could ever recover the money it would take to do such a project...even if there was Greb footage in there.