Jack Dempsey v Bernard Hopkins

Dempsey vs Houdini

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His victories against fulton, willard and firpo are absolutely stellar. All were top 5 hw's at the time jack destroyed them. Fulton was possibly the best white hw in the world when jack beat him.

Now if you're intimating they were overmatched in the skills department, i'd certainly agree. Which is more my point. Jack was a giant killer because he knew he was quicker, faster and fitter than the super heavyweights of his time.

When he fought his more skilled contemporaries he still came out on top, he just wasn't as destructive.

Makes for an interesting comparison with rocky who actually did still destroy his contemporary opponents who were the same size and shared an equal or superior skillset to him.

 

Dempsey puts BH shoulder joints out with a hard punch and BH retires hurt.

 

B.S. Political Correctness at it's worst...
S, I expect more from you.
Years ago when PC wasn't around this stupid thread would be laughed at.
To say that the middleweight Hopkins or the 40ish Hopkins of today ,whichever suits you, would be even put in the ring with a prime Jack Dempsey would be a source of laughter by serious boxing people.
Bernard Hopkins in the 1940s would have been not even fighting top opponents today when we had the prime likes of Ezzard Charles, Archie Moore, Harold Johnson,Lloyd Marshall, Jimmy Bivins, ALL in their primes.
All of the darn Dempsey haters of today defy all logic and opinions of people who saw him from 1919-1923, and held him in such high esteem.
It bears saying again ...Sam Langford, Gene Tunney, Mickey Walker, Jack Sharkey, Max Schmeling,Damon Runyon, Ray Arcel, Nat Fleischer,and several hundred top sportswriters who voted Dempsey as the BEST heavyweight ever,at his best, knew squat, but today's NAYSAYERS, NINETY years later, somehow know better than these great historians of our great past....atsch
Phooey !

 

it would be an unspeakably cruel thing to do to ol' Popkins, to put him in the ring with a primed Jack Dempsey.

it would be a more laughable suggestion if it wasn't for the fact that some people here seriously seem to fancy Hopkins' chances of "springing an upset".
it's puzzling. Bernard Hopkins of all people.

Hopkins has wisely taken advantage of the fact that the light-heavyweight division today is in a terribly weak state. If there were any really good 175lbers around Hopkins would be knocked right in to retirement.

 

fair enough bb, but most of the heavyweights that are ranked higher than dempsey (save johnson) in most lists came AFTER the times langford and company gave that opinion. would they hold dempsey in such high regard if they had seen ali, frazier, foreman, lewis, louis, etc. in their primes? would they be able to reflect on their respective historical placements? dempsey was possibly the best heavyweight up to his era, the 8 decades since may well change many historical opinions

 

Fair enough to you also. But I haven't answered this ludicrous thread about the OBVIOUS Merits of Ali, Frazier,LOUIS,etc, against Jack Dempsey...Have I ? Hell no...The Dempsey detractors are misrepresenting me to imply that I am comparing these great heavyweight worthies to Dempsey, when I responded to the the thread asking only this QUESTION, "Jack Dempsey v
Bernard Hopkins"... That is why I am damned angry about misquoting my post to FURTHER their AGENDA...Now for a shot of whiskey !

 

Dempsey got outboxed and lost to far worse fighters

 

in his prime he didn't

 

Against some fighters Dempsey has no chance at all.

 

it's all the more impressive in that he was coming off a two-year layoff.
of course the critics (and Dempsey himself) weren't too impressed because he fail to score a KO. In some ways going the full 15 at a blistering pace proves more, in hindsight of course.

 

Again, I'm unfortunately in a hurry, so I can't give this post all of the attention it deserves. I'll need to be a bit short in my replies.

15%? Probably not. 100%? Now I'm a bit more likely to ask questions.

I agree that this approach isn't typical (or even representative of what I do most of the time), but I think boxing historians are often blinkered by the fights themselves. They don't pay as much attention to the social factors around boxing that could point one way or another in a fantasy fight.

We don't even know if depth of talent pool correlates to better performance at the higher levels in boxing. Nobody's studied it. A few sociologists or historians could work wonders here.

Fair enough, but it still works well enough for analogy's sake. If we suddenly switched to Fischer Random, the post-Steinitz guys would probably still beat the pre-Steinitz guys by a wide margin.

Chess, incidentally, is a good example of a larger talent pool creating stronger players. Its rising ELO rankings in recent years are apparently not entirely due to ratings inflation.

In any event, if you look at the ATG lists made by top chess players, they do not agree nearly as much as you'd think. I'd still maintain that ELO rank combined with technical analysis is a more accurate assessment of a player's strength (within his own era) than technical analysis alone. Harry Pillsbury might have looked invincible -- opening knowledge aside -- if he'd only needed to keep massacring American amateurs for his entire career. Put him up against a modern top 10 guy in a Fischer Random situation, though...

Yeah, I'd agree that boxing deals less in absolute truth than chess. I'd also say, though, that we have not looked thoroughly enough at those historical features that can be quantified.

A few computer analyses of Capablanca and the other champions have been performed recently. Not sure if Morphy was on the list, though.

In any case, Capa has consistently rated in the top 5

"Boxrec warrior" shouldn't apply to people who use boxrec in conjunction with other sources. I do think that boxrec has an important place even in the filmed eras. You can assess a fighter's strength much better if you look at his record; it reveals things that his film alone doesn't.

Even if they don't admit it, even regular film analysts use records strongly in their argument. "He beat X and X and X" shows up whenever someone questions a fighter's greatness on film.

Many fighters, after all, "look like journeymen" against certain opponents. And vice versa.

I have a different approach. Who somebody beat strongly suggests how good he is. Marciano looks awful on film, occasional subtlety aside. If you watched the Cockell fight, you'd never know it was an ATG beating his #2 contender. He always found a way to win, though.

I agree that you can pick out awful fighters in any era. Similarly, most people can give you a pretty general idea of the temperature outside -- but it still helps to have a thermometer.

I also agree that analyzing journeymen would also use the same principles (but, as you say, more finely).

Looking for statistically significant correlations between time-in-rankings and the number of licensed boxers / gyms / whatever in the period immediately preceding that fighter's career strikes me as a bit different, though.

I think of boxrec as a really, really crude ELO ranking, and film analysis like technical analysis. You need both, since our "ELOs" aren't as precise as chess.

In chess terms, ELO is precise enough that I'd prefer to use it to predict matches except when the difference between the opponents is relatively small. ELO's boxing equivalent, boxrec, isn't nearly as precise. Boxrec is only the handmaiden of technical analysis -- but it's still important.