Gerry Cooney V Jess Willard ?

If you want to understand why these guys want to think there has been no progress in boxing I'd suggest staying away from watching any video. The old boxers like Willard look like they've never been taught anything about boxing. He is stiff, slow, awkward, and unskilled, yet he was "champion" during his era. That he was "champion" tells me all I need to know about that era.

The people who want to compare Willard and others like him to real boxers just read the silly stuff posted by others here or they read contemporary articles written by people who had never seen better boxers and had little/no understanding of the mechanics of boxing. Willard, on video reminds me of one of those big guys who come into the gym, train a week or so and decide to spar with a much smaller fighter. The smaller fighter makes them miss, tags them a few times and you never see the big guy in the gym again. That is what happens to guys with Willard's skill level and ability today, apparently in his time being big was enough to be a "champion?"

 

Willard and Cooney are both crap in any era.
So I'm not sure what you guys are arguing about.

 

Only willful ignorance would make someone say that boxers in Willard’s era were skillfully unevolved.

Their brain literally blanks out when they see fighters from that era showing high levels of skill. Inversely, their brain lights up when they see a technical flaw.

 

Reminds of when a 3 minute clip of Willard was posted, and people said he didn’t throw a single double jab.

Not only is a 3 minute highlight clip insufficient in determining the volume of double jabs he threw as a boxer, but when you actually saw the video, he threw a double and a triple jab lol.

 

Crazy people cannot be reasoned with.

I've seen the arguments and the evidence and it isn't remotely convincing.

We don't have to have turned into super-humans in the space of 100 years to have had significant athletic/sporting improvement. Human beings are fundamentally the same now as we were thousands of years ago but we have made some progress since then in lots of areas.

What about embarrassing nostalgia passing itself off as historical knowledge? I'd go as far as to say that if you honestly think that the best boxers from the 1910s are even remotely close in their abilities to the best of today then not only do you not possess much sense but that you also cannot possess any real understanding of history.

The best boxers (and I don't think i'd include Willard in that group) of the 1910s had skill and talent, they'd batter 99.9% of current human beings with little trouble but they existed in a very different time, to even think that they would stand a chance against their modern counterparts is to discredit them.

 

Benny Leonard and Harry Greb would do fine today. They were just unusually natural gifted for boxing.
Boxing is the same, hit and don't get hit. They figured it all out by instinct and practice. They were masters of the art.

Someone like Willard, he wouldn't do so well. Even in his own era he was considered just a big tough man with rudimentary boxing.