How much do the rarest fights sell for?

It's my understanding such a rare fight would only be traded for another rare fight.

 

I guess it depends. But to put it into context one of the best boxing collections out there was for sale. The late Tony Fussco, who had many rare films and over 10,000 total films wife was asking for $250,000.00 for the entire collection. It was an all or nothing type of offer. At least when I checked. There was a rare Armstrong film on the list.

Maybe a very rare film from a famous boxer in good condition could go for $10,000.00 Boxing films are like baseball cards in a way, the collectors tend to be an older lot. Unlike a rare baseball card a boxing film is easily copied. Perhaps one-day rare film holders could monetize their collection, say for private screenings at the boxing hall of fame with some security to make sure no one is sneaking in a cigar box with a hole in for a camera.
I'd probably pay $100.00 to see a rare boxing film, but I can't see myself spending $5,000.00 to own it.

 

What about selling copies?

 

I've always been curious about this. Seems like a very difficult hobby to break into unless you're in the right place at the right time and have the right connections. Compounding the difficulty is that the right connections aren't necessarily interested in cash, so buying your way in isn't always an option even if you wanted to.

 

Let's make it specific.

Complete, clear, high quality Greb/Walker film.

What would the expected price for that be?

 

Depends. I think. Rarities are what Im most interested in but if you are talking about something like Chucky Ts first fight or something like that (I dont even know if tgat exists or is rare or not) I dont care. But I buy rare stuff all the time on guys guys like Florida Al Jones, Jeff Merritt, Bennie Briscoe, Kitten Hayward, or more well known guys like Griffith, Luis Rodriguez, Frazier, Robinson, etc. They dont have to be legends but I gave to have some kind of interest in the fighter. I have most of Tonna, Bouttier, and Max Cohens careers which constitute rare fights but I doubt theres much interest in them among even die hard collectors.

 

I just hope that these guys leave their stuff to other people should they pass away. It would suck to have pieces of boxing history literally fade into oblivion because people didnt want to leave their collection to posterity.

 

Let me have a look - I think I've got a tape of it laying around somewhere. I'll get back to you with a price

 

If you knew how often throughout history that has happened youd throw up in your mouth a little.

 

This is why everyone that has something ultra rare has a moral obligation to forget about their petty ego and vague plans to maybe sell their collection someday (which they may or may not get around to before croaking; plus as someone mentioned above most of what collectors do is trading rather than buying/selling...which, like trading baseball cards or audio cassette tapes is an increasingly obsolete practice the deeper into the new century/millennium and digitized age we get) and just dump all the footage into the public domain by uploading it online.

Here the hoarder dinosaurs will usually answer with something like:

"...but I really like having something 'valuable' and feeling special & smug about it! "

Yeah, well, that's fine, but if you're prioritizing that selfish urge over the long-term preservation of the footage itself (after you die, and then after whoever you trade it/bequeath it to dies, and down the line until the footage is either destroyed or lost forever without having been replicated for posterity) then just know the rest of the fan community is going to consider you worse than pond scum, and it would serve you right if some vigilante broke in, swiped your entire library, batched it onto YouTube (plus a dozen sketchy Russian and other foreign sites where it will surely be downloaded and multiplied several times over) and then returned it to your living room before you could even discover it was missing or file a police report. Then what, *******? You think any cops are going to listen to you if you explain that somebody took a material item from you & then put it right back on its spot, alphabetized?

 

Im curious what you do for a living that are so outraged that others who spend their valuable time and money acquiring these things should just give them over to the public. Are you an independently wealthy philanthropist? If so lets put this to the test. You can buy my entire collection right now and dump it into the cloud for everyone to do with as they please. Something tells me wont. Its easy to spend monopoly money. Its easy to give away something you have ZERO investment in. Do you have an extra room in your house? Why not give that over to the homeless guy downtown? What boils down to is the ME ME ME generation that grew up getting all of their favorite movies, books, music, television shows, video games and programs on the internet for free from Napster, Limewire, torrent sites etc just cant stand that there are still some things you have to work for. Get used to it, life is full of disappointments.

 

No, you're wrong on this. People like you who think boxing footage is some kind of commodity that should be jealously guarded, are relics. The overwhelming majority of televised fights in the last few decades have been archived online and can be freely accessed in some form. An ever shrinking percentage of boxing fights going forward are going to be on those dusty old tapes & reels, with fewer & fewer people investing the resources to get their grubby little mitts on an obscure match from over a hundred years ago. Eventually it will become such a marginalized niche interest and enough of the people in the "hobby" dying of old age that all of those dragons' lairs full of tapes & reels will see their value dwindle to next to nothing, and the fights contained on them lost to eternity all because of your obstinate selfishness and refusal to accept the world passing you by.

 

IntentionalButt's version is a little extreme, but your answer to the collection question is probably going to depend on how you view boxing history.

If boxing is just a fun hobby that people make too much of, then the closest analogy is probably to guys who collect old Star Wars action figures, or Pokemon cards.

If boxing is an important part of Western cultural history, then the analogy is the antiquities market.

With the number of cultural histories being written around boxing (which admittedly look a bit like postmodern gibberish, some of them anyway), opinion might shift from the first option to the second. I assume that most fight film collectors would answer that boxing is just a hobby, despite the enormous effort they've dedicated to it.

 

Then put your money where your mouth is. Thats all this boils down to. Money talks and bull**** walks. I spent nearly $20,000 in the last 8 months on my collection. You want me to just dump it on youtube because your are afraid you might never get to see it? Thats comical. Thats the very definition of entitled. You feel you are entitled to see something you have absolutely no investment in. Trust me. The world wont stop spinning because you dont get to see Harry Greb-Mickey Walker. I promise you.