Gerry Cooney V Jess Willard ?

Do you think that how good a fighter looks on film, is a reliable indicator of how they will fare head to head?

 

What do you think, would be a more reliable indicator?

 

Results against the best.

 

A better question, would be whether Cooney could beat Frank Moran!

That is what he would likely need to do to get the fight, and it would be a step up from his previous fights!

 

An objective appreciation of the level of the best, and second best, in a given era. The acknowledgement that all eras are not equal is a good place to begin.

 

Imagine if film had not yet been invented… and you only had results to go by!

How would we then rate someone like Buddy Baer, for example? 6'6", 240lbs, huge puncher, ko'd Galento, Simon, Mann, etc. We would probably think he was a pretty decent fighter. We would have no idea how awful he really was!

Especially when comparing fighters who were active many decades apart, it's important to know, that good results 100 years ago can't be compared to good results today… and we only know this, because we actually have film of several of the top boxers back then.

 

Tell me, does this look skillful to you? Because the first time I saw it, it literally looked like a couple four-year-olds rolling around on the floor fighting over a toy.

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Boxing was obviously quite different in Willard's time, allowing for much more grappling and extended infighting. There's footage of Corbett "sparring" with Tunney in which he literally shows how to pin an opponent's arm with one hand and hit him with the other. You know, holding and hitting.
And as I said in another thread a few months ago, quite unabashedly, Willard looks to have hand speed at least equal to Vladamir Klitschko.

 

It was a shock to me when I saw some of the old boxers on video. When I was young I thought boxers were boxers, then I saw the video. The video was an eye opener to say the least. Glad you mentioned Galento, he looks worse than Toughman level, he doesn't look like the guy who wins the contest, he looks like the guy who loses his first fight. I had only seen highlight video of Joe Louis and for years thought he must be a monster, then I saw video of the people he was knocking out in the HL reels. His opponents were so inept that it is hard to determine how good Louis was.

Willard, Corbett, Galento, the Baers, Carnera, if any of them were fighting today just as they were on video they couldn't win at the 4 round level. That any of them was a champion or contender tells me all I need to know about their competition.

 

You didn't answer my question.

 

Really.

Really.?

 

Sure bro, a guy who never won a known fight, often getting KOed in a round by no one, and was possibly actually someone impersonating him who got KOed in a round by a footballer, beats a former heavyweight champion.

Are we also going to do Charlie Zelenoff vs Tommy Ryan?

 

Pretty quick

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To be fair, it's hard to see someone picking up boxing so late getting near the top against todays refined athletes. I mean how would he deal with the beautiful artistic boxing of Adam Kownacki or Deontay Wilder?

 

Yeah. It's hard to to draw a firm conclusion because you have to mentally compensate for the poor framerate in the extant film of Willard, but I frankly see no reason whatsoever this should be absurd on its face. If you have film in which the rounds last exactly three minutes, you know at least that the playing speed is pretty much correct, and it looks to me for all the world that the time between the throw and return of many of Willard's punches is as short or shorter than that of Klitschko's.
(This is not to say that he is Klitschko's peer overall, any more than when I say Morrison may have hit harder than Tyson.)

 

I know a guy named Franklin