Heart without fitness and skill is more dangerous than the other way round. There is such thing as too much.
Define what you mean by heart? If you mean the will to carry on while being smacked in the face and body, that seems like an important thing to have if you participate in boxing wouldn't you say?
Heart is important, but in the grand scheme it's no more important than a liver, pancreas or at least one kidney.
Its probably the most important thing for any fighter. A fighters heart is what keeps them going when they cant. A big heart means you aint a *****! Just ask devon alexander
Good point, some people tend to be naive. You can have all the heart in the world but still lose and end up severely injured. Take this from someone who got into boxing watching the Ward-Gatti fights: heart and heroism is the legendary stuff we all love boxing for, but boxing is all about eliminating the need for heart. Like Chris Arreola said in his last interview, "make boxing easy." Train hard so you will box easy, so won't need heart. Its like chin, don't give anyone a chance to test your chin. When you need heart you will know it. Heart in training is another thing. To train consistently 2 or more hours a day, 6 days a week, through fatigue, discouragement and pain requires far more heart than getting up from a knockdown. Thats real heart.
It is the trump card that trumps EVERY other aspect, one way or another. If you have that inner drive, desire, motivation and NEED, you can succeed not just in boxing but anything else you are driven to. Heart will keep your diet on track, will get you training hard, will not let you skip sessions, will get you keep going when the going gets tough.
Depends on where it is exhibited. Training? Huge. In the sport? Not important at all. If you get to the point where you even need to figure out if you have heart? You are out gunned and out skilled. The only "heart" a guy needs is the heart to come back to the gym to spar after taking his lumps so he can develop his SKILL. "Heart", in other contexts, gets guys HURT. Heart has guys walking into punches, the SAME punch, and not yielding when they have no hope of winning. The things I hate the most are guys thinking they are showing "heart" by FIGHTING and not actually training skills in sparring or "seeing if I can take a punch". F that. Boxing is a SKILL sport. You wanna show heart? Raise a family.