How do organise your classic fight watching?

Imo there only really two ways of doing it, you have an interest in an era, or an interest in a division.

If its an era you watch the key fights from that time, you keep an eye on the ranking changes and other bits of key information to help you contextualise it.

If it's a division you watch key performances of players who have a good standing in the division.

Whichever way, writing a list is a good place to start.

Right now I'm interested in the Canzoneri/McLarnin/Ross trilogy. But there's all sorts of other fights that tag onto that that need watching. One of the best things is, whichever fights I watch in between, I know I'll be finishing with Ross vs Armstrong which I love.

 

Yeah that sense of knowledge is really powerful.

And to an extent it can be gleaned from doing a fair bit of reading as well.

I'm sure most people when they first look into boxing history go on the journey of "Sam who" to "how did this legend not get a title shot"

 

For my money the highest level 3-way rivalry ever. All top 15-20 P4P fighters. 3 really interesting fighters too.

 

He's such a fascinating fighter to watch. He's at times both technically sound yet incredibly rule breaking. The way he times jabs with leaping hooks is crazy.

It was once written about Canzoneri that his style is unique and couldn't be replicated and I think I believe it.

Normally it's the athletic types who fight the way he does, but he does it with technique and timing as opposed to raw speed and power.

I can see why the dedicated jab and 1-2 from Ross was enough to upset his rhythm but man what a talent he was.

If he had the power of someone like Naz he would have so many highlight reel kos.

 

I actually used to class McLarnin the better of the 3 but I've recently changed my stance completely and now have him the bottom, by a considerable margin.

 

Same mate, McLarnin may have some very very impressive wins, but he was often the much bigger guy. And that means a lot more in the lower weights. I have Ross #1, Tony at #2 with McLarnin a couple places behind.

I think I've seen it called: "the closest style comparison to Bob Fitzsimmons, on film".

 

I think he was often the fresher guy as well.

A lot of his names are faded imo.

And it says a lot that Canzoneri actually beat him first time out and Ross took home the bragging rights.

 

He certainly did throw hooks with nice intentions put it that way!

 

I’m generally fairly random. I think of someone or a certain fight I want to see — or maybe a name comes up on here and gives me an itch — and then that fight sometimes takes me to another fight and then another.

But occasionally when I have a chunk of down time (or maybe an anticipated lighter workload for a stretch) I’ll pick something and dive in — like a couple of summers ago it was West Coast 1970s-ish lightweight and below. Saw some amazing stuff there and got familiar with Chucho Castillo, for one, who was only a name to me before that.

Mostly though it’s just finding one fight and it leads to another.

 

I don't have the time to put forth anything resembling a structured plan and schedule for watching fights. I'll think of one in a given moment and go find it or think of a fight and notice another closely-related one and decide to go that route. A lot of stumbling onto things.

 

I'm very unusual. I order all the fights from every division that I'm interested in watching. I go down to decade, year, month, and day. Then I match filmed fights on the same cards. I basically watch all fights in the order that they happened.