Have boxers gotten better as time progressed?

I'm of two minds about this. I used to think that the shift of the sport from Britain to America, the changing of laws that made it illegal to legal, the rule changes during the transition between bare knuckle boxing and gloved fighting lead to a certain deterioration of the sport from the London Prize Ring days and so from 1890-1925 was sort of a relearning and repopularizing period.

I'd look at the transitional period between Karate and PKA to what we now think of as kickboxing and I'd see about a twenty to thirty year lag while people figured out what worked under the new rules. Same thing with mixed martial arts. Benny the Jet and Don the dragon Wilson aren't quite where Giorgio Petrosyan or Ernesto Hoost are, any more than Ken Shamrock and Bas Rutten could compete at the level of Jon Jones and Anderson Silva.

My thinking was that the high point of the sport, when it was most competitive was probably 1930-1970 when the sport had the most fighters and the most fights bringing everything to it's most competitive level. I don't think the techniques have gotten better, though the drugs definitely have. At the same time, the competitive level has lowered as the number of fights in a career and the amount of experience a fighter gets has gone down. So the modern fighters aren't a lot worse than their predecessors but it's noticeable. Mayweather, Pacquiao, Hopkins, Jones Jr, are all good but not quite as good as guys like Duran, Robinson, Armstrong, etc. You can see it in their records and in the footage of their fights. It's a slight difference. The best today are top 50 all time whereas the best of earlier days would maybe be top 30.

I still think that the level is more or less the same, especially once you get out of the top ten. Contenders and journeymen are much as they've always been.

If you just look at the footage from the 20s and before then most of the boxers look terrible and it's hard to square that with their impressive records. Dempsey looks like ****. Johnson looks like ****. Langford looks like ****. Tunney and Loughran actually look really good though. That's why I used to place the twenties as the period the final touches were being put on gloved boxing, and because all the guys in the 30s look stellar.

However, I was recently watching some footage of Jim Driscoll fighting Frank Robson, and Packey McFarland fighting Freddie Welsh that didn't look half bad. It's making me think that maybe some of those guys at the turn of the century did know what they were doing and the expected lag in a rule change wasn't that bad going from bare knuckle to gloves. Anyway, it didn't look as bad as the Fitzsimmons vs Corbett footage or some of the other stuff I've seen.

 

This gives a decent insight as to why Karate guys came up with 'full contact kick boxing' http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2014/7/31/5854816/muay-thai-mma-martial-arts-history-ufc

Langford, IMO at least, most definitely does not look like ****.

Neither does Jimmy Wilde.

 

Gans does show some brilliant flashes I agree.

 

But Dempsey wouldnt have been taken down and submitted in 1 round like Toney did.

 

Dempsey was 31 when he first fought Tunney and 32 the second time around.

 

He was a Judo black belt who practised chokes. Still, he bottled from a mixed rules bout with 'Strangler' Lewis, who was no Randy Couture.

 

Interesting info, thanks for that Flea.

 

How close the fight was actually to being made I don't know. There was beef in the press between them though.

 

In my opinion, Langford and Gans don't look good on the available footage. Not when you compare the available footage of Robinson, Leonard, Jofre, etc. If I showed you that footage and you didn't know who they were I doubt you would have such high opinions of them. Or maybe I'm wrong. I watch Ketchel fighting Papke and I think it looks more like a wrestling match than boxing, but maybe I'm wrong. The available footage of Jimmy Wilde doesn't look superlative either.

 

Re: Wilde; by 'available' you mean what's on youtube?

Ketchel-Papke IV I agree with. But it was reported as a lesser fight than their other three.