Haye vs. Ali: Make a convincing case for Haye

There aren't many of my kind. We Fitzsimmons and Tommy Burns fans are a rare breed.

Yep, which is why I've explained in several other threads -- going through the other side of the argument -- that sports like boxing, Muay Thai, and some other combat sports give less athletic competitors the opportunity to beat bigger, stronger, better-conditioned opponents. It's the main reason why I still believe that Louis and his third-world support infrastructure would leave a trail of concussions through the modern heavyweight division.

"Looking cut"? Yeah, that's worthless.

Being bigger, stronger, and harder punching than your opponent? That helps.

Yep. But tenacity isn't everything. Mentally weaker fighters have still done great things in several weight divisions. They've held championships, too. Just less frequently.

An "MMA mindset" -- or a kickboxing mindset, or karate mindset, or even a judo mindset -- is a helpful thing for a boxing fan to have. It allows you to view boxing from a different perspective, not just from the inside. You see more when you have points of comparison.

For instance, Burns's and Corbett's styles actually seem sensible to me, rather than a bunch of ridiculous hopping around and arm waving. I can appreciate them because I've seen competitions that share some elements with mid-19th century boxing.

 

Absolutely true. But Ali and Frazier represent the most conditioned end of their era's boxing spectrum. Haye is among the least conditioned fighters of 2013. He compensates by being a fast, hard-hitting counterpuncher with great reflexes.

"Functional" training has fallen into some disrepute recently, but the basic idea is that by weighting the movements, you're training your muscles to recruit more force to do the job.

There are punchers in every era, but better trained punchers still hit harder. Whether they hit hard enough that it makes a huge difference in their performance is another question. (After a certain point, you're better served by working on other skills).

Foreman and Shavers were monsters, yeah. Almost anomalies. But that isn't the correct question to ask. You should be asking whether you could improve 70's Foreman's punching power with modern training, and I'm pretty certain that the answer is yes. 1970s training methods aren't ideal for building punching power.

Lewis, Wlad, and several other 90's and 00's punchers were pretty close to Foreman's league, and they were a lot more skilled.

Different tactics, probably. Foreman tried to run Ali over and exhausted himself. Liston was old. Haye would make Ali come to him. He has the reflexes, size, and handspeed to give Ali a puzzle that he hasn't worked on before. Ali has faced harder punchers (Shavers, Liston, Foreman...heck, you could probably throw in Mac Foster), and he's faced faster-handed fighters (I'm looking at you, Patterson). He hasn't faced the specific combination of handspeed, hitting power, reach, and annoyingly reactive style that David Haye can bring to the table.

 

Then he is doing a remarkable job at impersonating a fighter, considering his record.

I dispute this. Strongly. What is it about the current crop that makes you believe that a talent pool of thousands of professional athletes are all incompetent? It beggars belief.

Why not? What is it about Haye that's so much worse than Ali's 60s and early 70s opponents?

 

In the States, maybe. Though Roach, (formerly) Steward, and many others would tend to stand as counterpoints.

I find it unlikely that a bunch of people on a forum -- some of whom are amateur boxers -- understand the importance of slipping, blocking, and feinting, but professional fighters who do it for a living at a world level do not.

Were the old-timers better at it? Maybe. You could certainly make that case. But you're going too far in the other direction. If you were right, the modern guys -- and their trainers -- would have to be unbelievably stupid.

Oddly enough, Povetkin seemed to throw the left hook just fine against fighters who weren't 240-pound Ukrainian world champions with a penchant for leaning on him, lots of practice nullifying an opponent's offense, and a sympathetic ref.

Again, in the States. Even here, there are a few. Just fewer than there used to be.

Like I said, you can easily make the case that average boxing skills have declined. You're just taking it to extremes that I can't buy.

That's why I compare Ring-rated guys to Ring-rated guys when looking across eras. Most people do.

It's harder to become an undisputed heavyweight champion now because of the alphabet soup. And once you get it, you need to defend three or four belts a year.

Compare that to the long layoffs and lackadaisical fight calendars that guys like Dempsey indulged in. And Dempsey fought in a very, very strong era of heavyweight boxing. The US was overflowing with boxing gyms. Just not top-of-the-line fights.

 

What am I guessing about?

There are lots of gyms in Europe. That's just a matter of record. There are also lots and lots of fighters competing in a globalized sport. Over a thousand heavyweights listed on boxrec alone.

If you mean that I'm guessing about heavyweights being able to slip punches, feint, or evade punches with footwork, I don't know why you consider that guessing. I've seen them slipping, feinting, and moving away from punches on film.

They may not do it as well as previous generations. Even so, you'd need to point to some evidence to show that. Preferably film.

But my "guesswork" -- and we're all doing guesswork, unless you own a time machine to stage a Klitschko vs. Ali bout -- is based on a pretty solid assumption.

Namely, professional fighters and their trainers are not idiots. They were not idiots in the late 19th century when they looked like they were fencing. They were not idiots in the 1920s when Dempsey fought with low gloves. And they are not idiots now.

Not even the former "amateur" coaches (like Steward) that you disapprove of. Modern fighters may not have the full gamut of 1950s boxing techniques, but they'd have to be comically bad at their (highly paid) jobs to fall as far below the level of competence as you claim they have.

You -- and many other people like you who were privileged enough to see the golden age of American boxing gyms -- are free to train fighters. Many have. The knowledge is obviously still out there, since very few from that generation have died. If it really makes THAT HUGE a difference, you'd see more old school trainers running over the new guys. Boxing is the definition of a competitive market.

...Which isn't to say that the old-timers weren't more skilled. They arguably were. It's a matter of degree, though.

I'll go a step further. If ALLprofessional boxers were skill-less amateurs, and ALL coaches were equally skill-less former amateurs, they'd either hire guys who knew about old-time training (like you), or they'd figure the techniques out themselves. Huge monetary incentives and the risk of getting punched in the face are great motivators.

I know this because boxing has already undergone two metamorphoses. The first came when Sullivan switched the heavyweight championship to purely gloved fighting. Everybody had to adapt a long-range fist fencing technique designed to keep wrestlers away (classical pugilism) to something approaching the modern game. They did it within 15-20 years, and they had a much smaller pool of fighters experimenting than we have. The second came between Jeffries and Louis, when they enlarged the gloves and eliminated most of the remaining clinch-work. Again, fighters adapted.

Compared to those changes, redeveloping the techniques of 1950s boxing is fairly minor.

If you look at other sports, you'll see similar learning curves. Kyokushin and American "full contact karate" went from rigid, blocky fighting to Muay Thai Lite in about a decade each. Not to mention the other end of the spectrum: MMA went from a disjointed mess of fifty zillion styles to an integrated approach to fighting within about ten years. That's with fewer competitors than even modern boxing can muster, and NO coaching tradition or sports infrastructure to begin with.

Not to mention that a lot of the "flaws" you mention only show up in the heavyweight division. Very few would claim that guys like Pacquiao or Mayweather are talentless amateur hacks. Yet most lighter-weight fighters are trained by the same guys who train the heavies.

In short, there's more at work here than you're suggesting.

I know. In fact, I think I mentioned the large number of gyms when I described Dempsey's era as very strong.

It might help to point out more specifically what all of these lost skills are. I agree with the "decline" narrative that you're proposing, but I wouldn't take it as far as you have.

Povetkin had hundreds of amateur fights, and he's a byword for career mismanagement anyway. Moreover, sparring contributes more to a fighter's skill than the fights themselves.

I'll also point out that fighters from Louis's era -- or Dempsey's -- don't conform to generally accepted boxing skills either. That's not just upright European technique I'm talking about. Take a manual from the 1980s or 70s and you could find dozens of faults in Dempsey/Louis era fighters.

That's true, but that doesn't make the fighters any more or less skilled. Just less recognized.

 

Absolutely. Ali beating Haye soundly is by far the most likely outcome, but I'm playing devil's advocate here.