Is Joe Louis still a top 5 heavyweight H2H if you give him modern training and nutrition?

I never said or even implied I think Joe Louis is a sloppy, slow, plodding moron. You don't understand that if someone likes Daniel Dubois lands just ONE power shot on Joe it's over. Usyk is better than Joe defensively and he's still had to eat some massive shots from Fury and AJ that I'm not confident Joe would be able to take without being dropped.

"Fighters today will have the same issues fighters back then had dealing with him, that being that his combination of hand speed, power, accuracy and skill would be unmatched"

But it's not the same issue. Why do you think that someone like AJ or Zhang would have as many issues taking Louis's power as Ezzard Charles or Max Baer would? Why do you not think that a massive size and weight advantage would help to mitigate Joe's skill advantage, as if that's not the entire point as to why weight classes exist? Would you argue that Joe Louis would have "the same issues" dealing with Middleweight Sugar Ray Robinson as Robinson's Middleweight opponents because of a "combination of hand speed, power, accuracy and skill would be unmatched"? Probably not, because you realise that at a certain point Louis's size advantage alone makes all of SRR's other advantages less important to the point of irrelevance.

Again you bring up "Exceptional power" like Joe would be just as powerful relative to his competition today as he was 80 years ago, again, WITHOUT any physical changes to his body in this hypothetical.

In other words, I guess I need to rephrase my comment about Louis's size not being a significant factor in his success. His NOT being 50lbs smaller than the majority of his opponents was a very large factor for his success that he wouldn't enjoy in this era.

Basically it comes down to this:

I cannot be convinced that a boxer puncher without ATG defence or an ATG chin can out boxer-punch MUCH larger boxer-punchers and punchers than he, that outweigh him by 50lbs, without getting knocked out almost every time. Especially when the former doesn't have access to 80 years of worth PED improvements like the latter group.

 

Most of these guys suck tho. Fury and Dubois are weirder match ups, but the rest are all nothing but targets except for AJ, who would have some success before crumbling mentally the moment Louis gets a good one in. Louis will land on them, far more often than they do on him. And they're not stopping him with one clean punch, come out of it. Buddy Baer had 53 KO's in 58 wins, 2 of those KO's were against Abe Simon in 3 (6'4 and 250 lbs, would be a top 5 contender in a few years) and Babe Hunt in 1 (6'4 and 230 lbs, also beat 1-2 contenders like Ernie Schaaf, and was on the verge of becoming one himself before settling as a gatekeeper). Baer clearly had both size and early KO power, and he certainly didn't end Louis with one punch.

I know you think these guys suck a lot more than someone like Miller or whatever other fat modern stiff you can think of, but that's only because you're living in their era. If you lived in Louis' era and actually experienced its big men, and not just through grainy black and white films where they gets destroyed by Boxing's longest reigning champ, you'd think they sucked a lot less than they did and would just call them what they were: mediocre but not utterly terrible big men with some semblance of skill, but overall limited ability, just like 95% of today's Super Heavies.

Carnera, Buddy and Simon were all the same size as today's guys. Louis knocked them all out. 5 KO's in 5 fights. Carnera in 6, Baer in 1 and 7, and Simon in 13 (dropping him a total of 4 times) and 6. He doesn't need any physical changes to make men that size crumble or to take a good punch from them without immediately being done for. And what's no speed and defence Joyce gonna do to him ? If he tries to rush him he's dead meat, Max Baer tried it and had success for 2 seconds before Louis almost took his head off and had him passively defending in the corner. Most people had the advantage of at least having more dynamic feet than Louis, Zhang doesn't even have that and simultaneously suffers from a gas tank that might unironically be worse than my 84 year old grandad's. Miller is a fat slob, Bakole is not winning any exchanges with Louis, and Hrgovic is a sitting duck for a Louis cross to the face with that guard of his.

 

It's just a fancy way of saying that it's a case of recency bias, because that's simply human nature. Take 2 groups of fighters, which group are you gonna watch in good faith ? The fighters whose careers and fights you experience first hand, or the ones who fought 90 years ago and only have 2-3 available fights ?

I mean, Hotep Kemba himself said that one clean punch from Dubois would finish Louis, despite a comparable puncher in Buddy Baer landing such a shot and dropping Louis for a mere count of 4. Louis never showed an indication that he could be stopped like that. Dubois on the other hand quit due to jabs twice, against lesser punchers than Louis. If that in itself is not a case of recency bias and looking at the older era in bad faith, Idk what is. Doesn't help that the forum echo chambers tell you to believe that these older big men had nothing going for them, especially when compared to the "advanced" modern Super Heavyweights (the only ones who actually belong in that category are Lewis, Bowe, the Klitschkos, Fury and maybe AJ and Dubois, the rest do nothing that differentiates them from their predecessors).

I don't know exactly how good someone like Baer was. But from what I see of him on film and gather on his ability, I'm confident in saying that I would look at him similarly as I do the modern crop of big men if I experienced him the same way I am experiencing them. He's got a decent smothering game, clearly has power, and he's way more cagey at mid and close range (there's even an instance of him using the shoulder roll while pivoting in the second Louis fight) than someone like say, Zhilei Zhang. His weaknesses are his lack of a fighting spirit, his delivery system on shots usually being pretty weak, and his unrefined footwork. To continue the Zhang comparison, while Zhang has more power, a more textbook approach to his shots and better footwork, he also has a nonexistent gas tank, his inside game is far weaker, his defence doesn't seem all that better, and has feet of cement. I can absolutely see Zhang being treated like some larger Galento figure if he fought in the 30's, or Baer being some sort of Joe Joyce type of threat today before he gets taken apart by the elite like Usyk or Fury.

It just seems incredibly odd how one would not view another era in a different manner than he does his own. Literally everyone does it, it's habitual. Even if you know some things used to be better before, if you were asked to pick between 2 things that are unfamiliar to you but seem similar on the surface, you'd pick your era because you are more familiar with it. I don't think it's all that complicated.

 

Does he get access to modern women and social media too? That could have profound ramifications on training.

 

Siiiiiigh. My phone is so ****. It refreshed the page instantly after I stopped using this website for a literal second AND didn't save my drafts. Oh it told me it just saved NOW, this new ranting draft, after I'd been writing the old one damn near 30 ****ing minutes, jfc.

ANYWAY, to keep it briefer cuz I don't want to retype it all.

1. When OP said "today" I thought he meant this era in general, not 2025 specifically. The best fighters of this era are very out of prime with some being shot, so I think Joe would have an easier time this year being competitive than he would in say 2017 for instance. BUT, he'd still struggle more than you think due to point number 2:

2. Here's my logic; It's not recency bias, it's just sports science. It's not physically possible for the most athletic sportsman on the 40's to be as athletic as the most athletic sportsman today on account of them lacking the modern PED's, S&C, equipment, diet, etc. The only reason you think Buddy Baer hits as hard as Dubois is because it looks like he hits hard on footage. People would be saying that Jesse Owen's speed is comparable to Usain Bolt's if their performances weren't measured.

Compare, EVERY single measure of human performance from Buddy Baer's era to now and you realise why thinking they hit comparably makes no sense. Does Jess Owens run comparably fast to Usain Bolt? Are 40's body builders comparably large to modern body builders? Can 40's marathon runners be compared to current marathon runners? The answer is no to everything.

Anytime someone points this out it's labeled as a form of bias when the opposite is true. It doesn't take a modern bias to think see that technology has massively improved every single aspect of human performance. It takes a massive old school to think that it hasn't.

The only counter argument to this is talent pools, in that you think that the professional boxing talent pool today is so diluted & **** compared to the 40's that the dregs of athletes we have in boxing now actually aren't up to par with the crop from nearly 100 years ago even with the additional improvements in sports science, and that ALL the best athletes are in NFL, Rugby, Football, NBA, etc which I don't think is the case but could be true I suppose, idk.

Please see that I'm not just going HURR DURR BLACK & WHITE BÄD. Hell, I'm the guy that pointed out that boxing as a sport has existed so long that unlike American Football or Basketball that are peaking in terms of skillset and technical ability today, boxing peaked multiple decades ago and has only plateaud since, with the "modern boxers are too skilled" shtick being absolute nonsense with zero evidence to back it up. But, like I said, if skill & speed were the most important factors between deciding fights then weight classes wouldn't exist.

 

That's such a tiring and redudant point. Show me those specific advancements in Boxing if they're so damn obvious. Show me that Fury, AJ and the Klitschko's are the norm instead of the outliers in the modern Super Heavyweight landscape. Don't just say ''well it's true in other sports so it must also be true in Boxing'' without any actual examples. Boxing is fighting, not sprinting, not high jumping, not pole vaulting and not any other one dimensional sport you can think of. It's got a basically infinite amount of elements playing a part in what makes an elite fighter and athlete, and each element itself has several layers of complexity. If power was a simple product of sports science, then a modern fighter like Devin Haney wouldn't be such a pillow fist compared to most Lightweights and Welterweights from the 60's, especially if you buy into the idea that he's a weight bully and a Middleweight in disguise.

Punching power is partly a product of genetics, partly a product of what are several dozen different and tiny aspects of technique/form that a lot of fighters might be unaware of, specified training for developing it (which is far from a modern thing), and even ****ing body composition (without even taking size into account). More importantly, a Boxer trains to fight, which means he cannot fully focus on training punching power the same way a sprinter trains sprinting, a swimmer trains swimming etc. The nature of a fight itself practically prevents most shots from being delivered with maximum power. Punching power and Boxing performance as a whole simply cannot be developed the same way sprinting can, such is the nature of the sport. There is literally nothing to suggest Dubois hits so much harder than Baer (to the point of ****ing one shotting Joe Louis) because of modern sports science and modern nutrition (the latter being another myth) if you think about it for more than a few minutes, especially given that they're the same size.

And even in the case of Bolt and Owens, it's well documented that Bolt was so ahead of Owens because of the changes in equipment rather than a huge difference in ability due to sport science. He literally had blocks that would propel him forward, way better shoes, and didn't run on cinder tracks like Owens did. It was measured that Owens would only be 1 single stride below Bolt if we took him straight out of the 30's and gave him access to that stuff. Not to mention that Bolt himself dominated everyone around him and was an absolute outlier anyway. It's an incredibly weak example, because if anything it actually helps Owen's case.

Sports science and training in Boxing is a mess anyway, there are so many counter intuitive aspects to it. Many S&C sessions revolve around matching your opponent. You want to train your fighter's strength because he has to face a guy like Beterbiev ? Well too ****ing bad because now you have to stunt that strength growth a bit by making him shed a **** ton of weight through cardio in order to make the 175 limit. Zhang and Bakole are literally fat, because fighters don't fight enough to consistently be in shape anymore like they used to. Do you really think these 2 have reached the pinnacle of even their own potential athleticism ? I really doubt you do, and I shudder at the idea that Zhang is on PEDs with stamina that shitty. There have been a total of maybe 7 Super Heavyweights in the last 35 years that have broken the mold, and the big bang China man, the tomato shaped Marvel superhero etc are not among them, they're about as good as your average elite big man from the 30's. It's on film.

Boxing is an outlier because it's got way, way, way more going on than any sport where performances can be measured with a number.

 

I kinda agree there comes a point in boxing and sport in general were things are just gonna stop progressing as quickly as they once did.

Supposedly UFC/MMA is evolving constantly from even just 5-10 years ago from my understanding but I don't follow it. I think in current boxing the problem is poor matchmaking and how much money and contracts are involved so most elites only fight once or twice a year.

We aren't going to see a 70+ fight career at elite level like you used to see on occasion if this carries on.

 

MMA is a different kettle of fish. The rules are still in flux, and it's a vetting process of finding out what works and what doesn't. When a ruleset changes, it's usually the next generation of fighters who figure out how to best use it, but with MMA, it has that still, as well as how those rules effect each martial art. I expect MMA to be evolving for quite some time tbh.

 

We're talking about Joe Louis here kids...not some overhyped stiff...The "Brown Bomber"...champ from 1937 to 1949...25 title defenses...the perfect puncher...how quickly the new generation wants to sweep aside a great fighter like Joe Louis...

 

A bit part of why its overrated is its conflated to weight which fighters back in Louis's era voluntarily chose to carry. There were fighters with 21st century builds that was just not the norm. Fighters Louis's size with Louis's build were much more successful at HW against giants then the short tanky types who in closing the weight gap have sacrificed the advantages guys their size had. I think the guys Louis's size don't succeed at HW today is they can't really have the speed of a Louis. So I actually think his antiquated methods would help.

When we add all these techniques what are they worth? A few years of added prime? Well Louis was the GOAT by 25 and his main issue with aging was suddenly losing his power.

 

People also forget just how old a sport Boxing actually is. Even with a skill evolution (which is really just adaption to rulesets after a certain basic development), the peak / highest threshold of skill would've been reached decades earlier than any other sport. By the time basketball was invented, for example, 'modern' Boxing had already been around for 100+ years. Plenty of time to develop rigorous fundamentals for punching etc. Again, I don't think people appreciate just how old some things in Boxing actually are.

And on strength and conditioning, the focus on it on this forum as a catch-all is very strange. Proper strength and conditioning is actually pretty simple. In fact, I would say proper strength and conditioning is simple to the point of monotony. Only difference is current fighters may do some minute (even gimmicky) things in camp for very specific reasons at the most. People on here act as if older eras had no strength athletes or training whatsoever (even though 1900 - 1930 is one of the golden eras of strongmen) and fighters back then knew nothing about it, or that current fighters never use 'classic' training methods (as someone who has been around many fighters, most of their training methods actually are 'classic' methods). And the 'modern' routines people talk about (the good ones, anyway) are derived from eastern bloc training studies, some of which are 50+ years old by now.

The only major difference between now and then are PEDs, and PEDs in boxing are used differently compared to bodybuilding and even other sports.

Most people on this forum have never trained for a Boxing competition at any decent level or spent a long time around good gyms and it shows. Crazy how this type of thing is still being debated here, with the same stupid vague terms like 'modern training', despite being routinely addressed many times over the years (such as the sprinting comparison lmao).

 

I said that the most powerful punches of the 40's can't be as hard hitting as the most powerful punches of now because of improvements in PED's, technology, nutrition whatever, and your response to this to say "Yeah but Devin Haney isn't powerful compared to powerful lightweights of old"... Ok? That indicates you've very much missed my point. I'm sure Haney in absolute terms would be even weaker if he were born in the 20'd, had a shitty diet, poor equipment, had to fight dozens of times a year and so had more off nights, didn't have access to modern diuretics and wasn't capable of cutting and regaining 30lbs in a day, + had fewer weight classes to exploit and had to fight a higher weight range of fighters, etc, and that feather fisted fighters of yesterday would hit harder in absolute terms if they were fighting now.

Also you just made my point for me in regards to Jesse Owen's. Correct, if you took Owen's from back then and kept all of his equipment and running conditions exactly the same he'd get ****in rekt, but if you have him access to everything sprinters now then he'd be much better than he was in his own era. You make this point, but then are arguing as to why Joe Louis DOESN'T need the addition of literaly any modern advancement, because I can't prove that a sport as varied as boxing can benefit from...any sort of technological or biochemical improvements, apparently.

If I take a combination of drugs that increase how much force my body is capable of producing, and then don't work on my punching technique at all, I will still punch way harder than I did before. So I'm not sure why you think the multifaceted nature of boxing makes it immune to basic biochemistry.

All in all I'm actually very confused by your response as imo you've just made my point for me several times so whatever agree to disagree. I think you're a very intelligent and informed poster, so I don't want to become hostile by extending this argument. That and Joe Yabuki is your profile picture so you're obviously a sound dude.

 

1. "The only major difference between now and then are PEDs, and PEDs in boxing are used differently compared to bodybuilding and even other sports".

What are you implying with this? PED's are used differently in boxing compared other sports, how? You'd have to argue that used in a way that makes them less effective, somehow, which as I've pointed out is impossible.

2. "Crazy how this type of thing is still being debated here, with the same stupid vague terms like 'modern training', despite being routinely addressed many times over the years (such as the sprinting comparison lmao)."

"Modern training" is a misnomer / dog whistle of a catch all term for science, technology and PED's. Not sure why it upsets people so much.

And I'm not sure how you think the sprinting comparison was addressed but certainly not in a way that disproves anything I said. A study or two said Jesse would be a "stride" behind Bolt if he were to run in modern conditions. Cool. A stride is about 0.15-0.20s which is pretty large. That, and the race in which Jesse Owen's was being compared to Usain Bolt wasn't even Bolt's personal best, it was Bolts 9.77, which was his 9th fastest time. So Jesse Owen's would run a 9.92-9.97s 100m if he were to run today with his own body but our modern technology, which is tied for anywhere from about the 400th fastest 100m ever ran to the 880th fastest 100m ever ran... Again I'm not sure what that's supposed to address.

 

Thanks for the good words mate, I think you're one of the most open minded new guys around here too. And any Ashita No Joe fan is inherently a good dude. Just a few things to wrap it up, so that we can leave it at that.

I think you got the wrong idea with the Owens example. The things holding him back are equipment, in the literal sense. Shoes, the cinder track, the blockers etc. Not the supposed improvement in the actual human performance due to to modern training, sports science etc. It's like a fighter punching harder in MMA gloves than they do in Boxing gloves. This actually works for Louis's case, because the shots Baer hit him with was with smaller gloves than the ones we have today. Owens himself being 1 stride behind the fastest man ever despite competing almost 100 years ago certainly isn't a sign of him getting rekt, especially with no PEDs.

And while technique does not make biochemistry pointless, punching power still comes from technique and specific training for developing it (far from a modern thing, as I've said) for the most part. You're not KOing Louis with the first good punch you throw by just taking PEDs. Also disagree that modern fighters would in absolute terms hit less hard in the 20's, and vice versa. The small gaps in divisions, as well the huge weight cuts due to the 24 hour weigh ins actually REALLY stunt strength and power. You've got fighters thinking ''what's the lowest division I can fight in ? I'm having some trouble cutting to 140, but 5 more lbs for 135 seem doable'' and then have them cut so much weight to the point where whatever strength is gained through S&C, is basically lost due to huge weight cuts and the loss of muscle.

That's one of many examples as to why I consider ''modern training, modern nutrition, modern sports science'' just a bunch of buzzwords with no real merit for the most part in Boxing. Modern nutrition is the biggest big myth of them all imo, elite fighters actually ate way better food back then after receiving paydays that would let them live comfortably. Less hormones, antibiotics and generally more nutricious and healthy. There hasn't really been an advancement in nutrition aside from some really niche supplements for creatine and zinc.

But yeah man, that's about it from me. Have a good one.

 

“Modern training and nutrition.”



I don’t know how many times over the years I’ve read that spouted as if it was an advantage.