In which division would Jack Sharkey fight today?

Not true. When HBO does morning of the fight weigh-ins they label them 'weigh-in 2' as opposed to 'tonight', which is what they call the measured weight in the dressing room.

Check out JMM-Peden for reference.

 

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All the ones I produced were dressing room weights. Morning of the fight weigh-ins are highly impractical and are quite rare.

I know of no instance where Kovalev weighed more than 189 pounds. His mean and mode weight in the fights I have numbers for him is 185, and this is, incidentally, how much he weighed in his first fight with Alvarez at 35. I don't know where you are getting 191.

By the time Sharkey was 25 (around the time he was entering his prime), he never again weighed under 190. When Kovalev was 25, he was a 178-pound amateur (he didn't have 24 hours to manipulate his weight as an amateur).

 

And Carnera would support the heavens as Atlas did.

 

I understand, I just don't agree with taking the heaviest weight we have of Kovalev, and comparing it to Sharkey at 24 years old. That's like saying Hopkins and Spinks are the same size because they were both light heavyweights.

If we were comparing like-for-like, it'd be 205 at 29 against 189 at 31. And that's only if we take the tack of using outliers to represent their size.

 

He could definitely make bantamweight, if he cut both his legs off!

 

One obsevation has to be made.

Sharkey was 24 when he fought Wills.

As I understand it, Kovalev was two years older than that, when he turned professional.

He was fighting as a middleweight as an amateur.

You are essentially comparing a very young, perhaps precocious version of Sharkey, to Kovalev in his late 30s.

You are not going to convince me, that a man whose best weight was around 200lbs in his 20s, was a natural light heavyweight.

 

Probably cruiser. He was fairly consistently over 190 even in his own time and today with strength training and calorie intake I can’t imagine him being less than that

 

Some housekeeping:

Kovalev was already a light heavyweight at 24.

What we can say is that he was a 165-pound amateur in his 21st year. At that age, Jack's average weight was 186 (and this included a career low weight in his very first year as a pro).

Jack reached his prime much sooner, and was out of it by the time he was 30.

Personally, I don't think he was at his best north of 200. Be that as it may, there is still a weight differential when discussing Sharkey and Kovalev. And the same applies to Kovalev's contemporaries.

 

True. In some eras the Heavyweight Division was truly the Catch Weight Division, in that anybody, at any weight, could compete with Heavyweights and were generally accepted by the Boxing Promoters, Officials, and Fans. There were even times when people in their 140's competed at Heavyweight and didn't even bother to try to put on weight to do so. In general, today, they would be hard pressed to do that. They would need to pack on 50 to 60 pounds in order to compete at Heavyweight. It almost looks to me like some have done nearly exactly that. Floyd Mayweather and a few others may have been able to make a ton of money at a lower weight class, but the money is certainly easier to come by, for the average fighter, at Heavyweight...even today.