Heavyweight champions if the color line had *never* come down?

People sometimes minimize the effect that the Color Line had on boxing talent. I've seen the argument made that the Color Line's effects on the lineage were limited -- that, e.g., Jeffries or Dempsey or Sharkey would have been champions regardless of drawing the Line.

Others, by contrast, argue that the relatively late disintegration of the last vestiges of the Color Line in the 1940s and 50s opened the floodgates and changed the heavyweight boxing landscape to a greater degree than any other development in the 20th century.

I think it might be helpful to examine the same issue closer to home, with fighters modern boxing fans are more familiar with.

To examine both claims in a different light, I propose the following thought experiment:

Assume for a moment that the Color Line had persisted *up until today*. Who would the most likely lineal "champions" have been in those circumstances? And how good are these potential champions compared to the ones we actually had?

 

My own thought is that the fall of the Color Line, in retrospect, had the greatest impact in the period from the early 60s to the early 2000s.

It was already a big deal by the 30s and 40s, when Louis, Charles, and Walcott stood head and shoulders above their competitors in a way that they hadn't necessarily done in the 1930s. But Marciano was also a player toward the end of this period.

Marciano went out of business in the 1950s, though. The Europeans produced a couple good fighters, including Ingo, but no champions after the early 60s. Which is mostly when the European welfare states really kicked into institutional gear.

After that, the best you're looking at from the States are Quarry, maybe Cooney, Morrison, and a few others. Europe didn't exactly produce world beaters either from the 60s to the early 2000s. It was only the fall of the Soviet Union that brought guys like Vitali and Wlad (and Maskaev, Valuev, etc.) to the fore. Tyson Fury, meanwhile, is a member of an itinerant minority group. African Americans (and British of African descent) remain at the top of the division in the 2020s, alongside Eastern Europe and an Irish Traveler.

This suggests what we already talk about a lot: that affluence and/or majority group status are weaknesses when it comes to producing the ideal conditions for great heavyweights.

America ran out of marginalized immigrant groups of European descent to throw into the boxing meat grinder by the 1950s. The Europeans sort of lucked out with Ingo, but Sweden was a very comfy welfare state with no real need to send people into boxing thereafter. Eastern Europe remained impoverished for much longer, and continues to produce excellent heavies. The Travellers are almost sui generis, but are a relatively poor minority as well.

Based on this, if the Color Line had fallen earlier, I wouldn't expect the total dominance in the 1880s through 1940s that we saw from great African American fighters in the 1960s thru early 2000s. Reason being, they would have been competing against a much larger population of poor, marginalized immigrant communities, which have similar sociological forces working on them. African American athletes would have done quite well -- certainly better than the majority, non-immigrant group -- but probably about as well as we see nowadays.

 

Something in between. The way that certain (most) white champions discriminated against black contenders was supported by general public acceptance/permissiveness around that practice's legitimacy. Additionally, there was a general informal lack of interest in defending against *less deserving* black contenders, not just worthy ones. Black fighters were just as rare among the lower levels of Louis's "Bums of the Month."

 

I would add, though, that my thought experiment is artificial. In reality, you couldn't sustain the Color Line into even the 1980s, most likely, because by that point the civil rights movement had basically won against de jure segregation. Never mind the 2020s.

So whether you want to interpret the persistence of the color line into the 2020s as some sort of bizarre anomaly caused by custom, statistical weirdness, or outright magic, it's basically artificially posited in order to get to the more interesting question of how inferior a heavyweight division where, say, Gerry Cooney is champion would be compared to what we had.

 

It seems to have been more popular than Jack Johnson was.

 

It's tricky how far you want to (hypothetically) give them more resources, though. Too many, and they lose interest in boxing and become a respectable middle class.

 

Basically, yes. Ultimately to assess just how much of an effect we should expect the Color Line to have had on the competition in the 1900s through 1930s.