How is comp-box flawed? Well a lot of athletes moved to different sports, and boxing has declined in popularity at the same time. It's alright saying Ward & Co aren't great, but many people put them in H2H matches with the best and the results are not so biased! Wlad is a stylistic match-up for ANY HW ever.
Its evolved into a circus where you can win a couple of fights and be a champion. Also the jab has now become something you only use on twitter.
In all these years I have never yet seen any intelligent argument proving that anything whatsoever about boxing has improved since the 60's or 70's, and that current-day boxing represents its zenith. All one has to do is look at old fights and compare what you see there with what we have now. If after that you still really think today's brand of boxing represents more skill and further refinement over the 50's or 60's, then muddle along in your dream world. You have no idea what you're looking at.
Boxing is like body building, if you break down your body with weight lifting to often, the body simply wouldn't get the needed rest for growth in the long run. Fighting thru multiple concussions just break you down... I would say, one concussion per year for just a few years is more than enough for top fighters to handle. Fighters today are stronger and smarter then ever before... To say otherwise is so stupid it's sad.
boxing has come on from grass roots amateur boxing all the way to the top. particularly in Britain todays fighters are much much better. in 1948 Freddie Mills won the world light heavyweight title, tough as he was, he was crude and these days would be lucky to be top 10 super middle n the UK all this **** about not being as tough as the old timers has been going on for a 100 years mainly by pillocks like Nat Fleischer ie dempsey not as tough as mace marciano not as tough as dempsey etc etc.
I'm not sure this is correct. Mills did well to beat Lesnevich the night he won the title. Based on that performance he'd certainly have the ability to score at least one significant win if he were around in this era. And Mills wasn't considered particularly good back then. But he did have a good night, or maybe Lesnevich had a bad one, or perhaps it was styles. Either way, things like that still happen. Let's not forget that Lesnevich wasn't even the best light-heavy of that era. There were at least half a dozen or more who were better. It's kind of true though. It's hard to say you're as tough as a world champion who stands in a field slugging with bareknuckles for a hour, his face punched into an unrecognizable mask, if you're a 3-round fighter with 12 ounce gloves, for example. Give credit where it's due.
Yeah, Mills isn't representative of what the world's best 175er looked like in those days, far from it. How he'd fit into today's BRITISH scene is more difficult question. Yes, perhaps we have better fighters today at 168. I'm not sure there's many though.
Compubox is a couple of people pushing buttons while trying to keep up with extremely fast professional fighters. I don't take it seriously. It's just a tool, that MIGHT give you some idea of what is going on. I don't know how seriously you can take a system that has Tony Thompson outlanding Wladimir Klitschko in their first fight, Trinidad landing 160+ punches on DLH, DLH over 260 on Trinidad, Mayweather landing 220 punches on DLH, etc... I don't really blame the people counting. Pro boxers are very fast, with their hands, with their heads (slipping and dodging punches), parrying, etc...It has to be really difficult to accurately count the punches landed by such fast professional fighters.
Personally the sport regressed. The only progression the sport has seen is safety protocols. But as far as fighters themselves I don't see any progress. That's why a fighter like Mayweather is so successful because most of the competition he's faced would've been considered club or regional fighters not world class yrs ago. Why fighters like Hopkins, Holmes,Foreman men way passed their primes could come back and have the success they had, simply the competition they were facing though much younger were not well schooled. R.Jones went up to heavyweight and won a championship, a natural middle/light heavy. You see fighters coming into the sport at what would've been considered too old (20 AND UP) yrs ago, and having some success today. Feints rarely used, slipping and countering, cutting off the ring, even the use of boxing 101 the basic jab is lacking in todays game. Some consider the fighters today better conditioned thru modern training. But are they really? How many 15 round fights have happened the last 20yrs? How many championship fighters are fighting every 3/4 months much less 2/3 times a month like H.Armstrong did one year. And one of the greatest examples of this is from a fight years ago, Duran vs Moore. Moore a natural jr middle with shoulders that suggested he could go up to light heavy. A world champion caliber fighter yet he was completely taken apart by a natural lightweight. Moore just didn't really know how to fight, at least on the level of a Duran. And even non fans of the game see the awkwardness of the fighters today. I was watching the heavyweight championship fight featuring D.WILDER about a week ago with my girlfriend. She, a person who never watched a fight till she met me said he looks so uncoordinated on his feet. Yet this is what were calling the Heavyweight champ these days. The game is in a sad state today. And with most of the legendary trainers and gyms gone I just don't see it getting any better.
Hwt boxing has been a progressively bigger joke year after year for decades. The sport was ruined once the commissions decided to run the sport like a business forgetting its history. Today we can have 4-5 hwt champions and 40-50 top ten contenders. What this means is its no longer a very difficult task to be a champion. It's no longer a very difficult task to be a contender. Fighters no longer need to be great or strive for greatness. So you get nothing's and jokes like Fury with incredibly limited talent able to win the "championship". Boxing needs to be federally controlled to eliminate what it has become and bring it back to its roots.
So much to disagree with here. Which of Mayweather's opponents are you saying would have been regional/club fighters? And what era are you using for your basis of comparison? Boxers literally feint all the time-- many of them have subtle feints built into their body rhythm and movement. They throw jabs and slip punches too. Championship level fighters don't fight more often because they don't need to, not because they can't. It's a reason why so many are able to age better and put on more consistent performances too. What does Davey Moore have to do with today's fighters? Other than Shawn Porter, there aren't many top fighters who throw punches as wide and wildly as him, and maybe none who are as wide open when they miss. The Moore example undermines your argument-- he had some decent success in his era (may have had more if he hadn't run into Duran) and still gets talked up on here despite his obvious fundamental flaws. To be clear though, I don't think that anybody was saying that the sport evolved since the 1980s. This topic came up in the context of another thread suggesting that guys from 100+ years ago would be able to compete with modern boxers. There have always been clumsy and poorly skilled heavyweights who are able to succeed in the sport because of their physical gifts and punching power (see young George Foreman).
Mr.koolkevin, The reason I used Moore Duran is to show what a truly skilled fighter (Duran) Could do against a fighter, even naturally much larger fighter (Moore) if that fighter hasn't learned, or has been taught the science of boxing. It was just an example off top of my head.Are you suggesting Foreman was just as clumsy as D.Wilder? The fighterI used as the example. I was crtiqueing condtioning not if a modern fighter could fight more.Alot of people today like to throw in modern training techniques. My example was/is fighters were Fighting at lot more often and usually closer to their fighting weight year round, and As Emanuel Steward said the best fighters are actively fighting, learning the science in the ring.Not lifting weights and pulling tractor tires Thus they were better condtioned to fight.Guys I would consider no more than a club fighter that Mayweather fought Gatti/Berto/Alvarez/Guerrero/Ortiz/Should I go on, because I could. And if you see fighters feighting and slipping all the time in todays game. That's great,but as many fights Ive seen over the years, I rarely see it in todays game, and I fell in love with boxing in the early 70s and not to many fighters that have fought since that time that I haven't seen fight. Esp championship caliber fighters. But these are my opinions, And the reason were all here and on this site is the love for tge game. So your certainly welcome to rebuttal lol.