I think Don King would've had a lot to do with that. People sometimes forget just how bad he was and how he ruined careers down to his dirty ways
I would say that it is very difficult, if not impossible to prove that an era is weak. It tends to be a bit of a red flag, if the best of the current era, can't beat the past prime best of the previous era. You also tend to be suspicious if no particularly strong contenders emerge.
It's actually pretty easy to find missing fights from the late 1800's and early 1900's, I've found quite a few, and that's just recorded ones missing, I remember Johnny Coulon saying he tons of fights that were totally unrecorded. Plus in the 1800's there's bareknuckle matches weren't are supposed to be counted (though a few are).
alot of writers just say that I noticed this during Hagler's reign "he's good but who has he fought" but what I read into it is that these writers didnt watch the division and werent actual fans of the sport. They spread themselves out thin covering other sports such as football, Baseball, basketball, hockey, gymnastics, tennis, and so on so when they posed the question "who has he fought" it really means "I never really watch the sport except for big sporting events and I'm too lazy to do my homework to know who's who in each division" It's easier that way and it makes them look knowledgeable. it's a writing trick to cover for their ignorance
One other thing to consider is the ams. Those numbers would be very different today compared to 75 years ago, and a lot of those guys opt not to fight as pros.
Great post. Those numbers back up the thesis of the post-WWII decline & the resurgence as pro boxing became more globalized. I think, too often, people take the domestic decline in the US as a more modern dropoff because, despite the shrinking US market in the 60's and 70's, they were still competing mostly against each other. The complaints didn't really pick up to what I hear now until foreign guys actually started winning and top US trainers started bringing them in. The idea of the top gyms bringing in fighters from an ex-Soviet state in the 50's, 60's, and 70's would've been laughed at. It's not just them- asian fighters weren't promoted here, and the Latino fight fanbase in the U.S. wasn't nearly as developed as it is today. Things were much more insular.
That's the saying about fighters who were contenders in the late 60's through the late 70's. Quarry, Lyle, Shavers, Young were all said to title holders in other eras if it weren't for Ali, Frazier, Foreman, and Holmes
Although, if we want to use these numbers as a proxy for talent pool, then the 1960s and 1970s were the weakest point in boxing history since the 1910s, and the eras of Dempsey and Louis were still, to this day, the high points. The boxrec stats have a little bit of weirdness that both sides of the debate will have to deal with.
I'd agree that this is a fairly good indicator. Even when there is a dominant champion (or a small group of top operators) , distinct from the rest of the pack, the depth and the breadth of a division lies in the number of contenders and the fights generated between them, as they vie for ratings. If they aren't fighting each other, regularly or otherwise, one has little with which to rate the contenders in the broader sense. If the most notable fights that a bunch of assumed contenders' records carry, over a given period (e.g. a decade), are their losses in failed attempts to win titles, then it tends to raise questions of merit.
Ring Magazine voted the 1930's as the worst era. There was musical chairs with the championship until Louis came around, some fishy DQ's, and an overall lack of talent. My opinion is top fighters should not lose often to journeyman or non top ten contenders in their prime.
Boxing had a red line, which pretty much went away by the mid 1990's. You can argue the meaning world champion has more merit now if the champion has say two belts or more.
If the 1930s were stacked to the brim with talent, we would *expect* the competition to be that stiff, wouldn't we? To see what I'm getting at, take the logical extreme -- if every single fighter in the division was Joe Louis, then we'd see a lot of upsets to journeymen.
I'm not entirely sure what it is you're trying to convey here. I can only assume you are suggesting that, if every boxer in a given division performed at around the same level, we'd see a spread of wins, losses and draws across the pool?
Yes. I make the assumption that Joe Louis was pretty close to the talent ceiling that a 1930s heavyweight could reach. So applying my point to something closer to the real world -- If the talent pool was so huge that there were tons of contender quality heavyweights running around in, say, the top 300, I expect you'd see a spread of wins and losses to journeymen among the contenders. Again, that's granting me the assumptions that there's a ceiling to heavyweight ability that a given environment can produce, and that the differences between the guys close to the ceiling don't make a big difference in their chances of beating each other.
Yeah, I don’t see how a constant rotation of champions and top challengers would be a meaningful measure of mediocrity per se. But when a lot of those guys are unaccomplished and/or look bad on film, then it tends to suggest that the cream of the crop are subpar and the era a weak one.