Jack Dempsey vs. Wladimir Klitschko

As usual you are bang on the ball Burt :good - i think this is one of those stick-on victories, I can't realistically see anyway Klitch can survive long without getting tagged - Dempsey really is probably one of the best instinctive fighters ever and WK looks as though he wouldn't really have much of a clue without a great trainer advising him on how best to approach each round - Klitch doesn't do anything particularly great IMO - yeah people say he's strong? well anyone of his size would be!!?? people say his jab is difficult to get by?? He should have a difficult jab!! He's 6'7" - but i'm not impressed with it - it's more a pawing range finder?? His power?? You'd think he'd be a lot more powerful - anyone his size should pack a punch but again not superlative so - how often does he take people out early these days in dramatic style?? People say he is atheletic for a giant but again I don't see his foot or handspeed as being dramatically quicker than any other lumbering giant I can think of?? Plus he's doesn't have particularly great confidence in his own chin and understandably so. Dempsey on the other hand has blazing handspeed vicious power, unsurpassed levels of aggression, no fear whatsoever, nimble footwork, was a great instinctive fighter - just as deadly when hurt... I could go on but in short Klitch is not 50% the fighter Dempsey is and it would get found out in this one:hi:

 

I too would love to see film of the Manassa Mauler of Toledo and before..
But there is none. So i rely on two things to grading Jack Dempsey so highly. His record of 25 first round kos, some against very large opponents as Arthur Pelkey, Carl Morris, Fred Fulton,and yes Luis Firpo,Jess Willard etc.They might not have been great fighters, but they were big and products of a tough age,and starching these big guys so quickly is very impressive to me...After all Tyson went the distance with the likes of Bonecrusher Smith and other large men...Abe Simon took Joe Louis to 13 and 6 rounds...So the Dempsey who accomplished this feat in his prime has impressed me very much, even without films of these distructive events..After all I never heard Daniel Webster speak, but i take the opinions of those that called him the greatest orator of his age.If we ignore the past,which we have not seen, we are always stuck in the present, and should discard our history books,and boxing lore...
One last thought...In 1950 the top boxing writers alive who saw about all of the heavyweight champions since Corbett, voted by a large margin that Jackj Dempsey was the greatest " Fighter ",1900-1950...I take their
judgement seriously, because they were THERE...Another thing , the greatest fighter I ever saw LIVE, was without doubt SugarvRayb Robinson, who I saw four to five times in his very prime.He left the crowds in awe...
But if 100 years from now some revisionists, would see Ray Robinson take
a lacing from journeyman Ralph Tiger Jones in 1955, they would conclude that the boxing writers of the time were not to be believed,when they picked robinson as the greatest....A film can be deceptive and not convey the greatness of a fighters career body of work...So I go by what the consensus of the boxing writers of the time, choice as the best fighters
of the past, even though I 50-100 years later was not privileged to have seen by myself...

 

I understand and respect it ... as always good points .. we all have to go with our gut on something like that ... I personally felt outside of the Willard fight I know more about Dempsey by his Sharkey and Tunney 2 bouts than any victory ..

 

:-((

Can't keep up with your opinions. Slow down in life you bitter old ****.

 

Seeing him in his prime, musta been amazing, wish i could see that...

 

Of course I have never seen Dempsey in his prime when he was lauded as the most destructive fighter of all time,by veteran hard nose boxing writers..
But I envision young Dempsey as a much larger harder punching version of a later smaller edition of Roberto Duran...Fire burned inside them both, mixed with a will to destroy, and clever defensive methods to avoid punishment, where needed...I think though seperated by eighty years,Dempsey and Duran were kindred souls ...

 

Here is the crux of the problem... those hard nosed writers (oxymoronic statement if there ever was) never saw the likes of the heavyweights of the 60's-00's, a Liston, Frazier, Holmes, Tyson, Lewis, Foreman, Klit... We hard nosed desk jockeys never saw more than a little of the greatest version of Dempsey. I believe that in terms of objectivity and perspective, the modern opinion, in this case, wins by a nose. Neither is satisfactory.

 

Wlad KO here.

 

Going soft? You normally run riot on the size and effectiveness improvements of the modern superheavies.

 

By hard nose writers I mean guys watching fighters going 15 or more rounds sans mouthpieces, thinner gloves, no 3 counts and your out,boxers often fighting every other week or more etc.No welfare checks and if you didn't fight you didn't eat...Show me fighters today that fight 25-45 fights per year against all opposition,without mouthpieces and some bouts 15 or more rounds, and doing that again in a week or two ! The writers who saw the fighters had to be "hard nosed ",reporting those tough cruel bouts of a tougher generation...I said it before that in the course of human evolution
80-100 years are meaningless in a fighters built...What makes one er4a better than another is the amount of pro fighters competing and how many fights were the top boxers fighting...I say "practice makes perfect "
and the oldtimers who fought two or three times more fights than todays boxers, were for the most part better, as I have observed from comparing the recent 1940s with todays fighters...Give the oldtimers their due, they who fought so often learning their craft through only one way,EXPERIENCE !!

 

Fulton was 6' 4 1/2" or perhaps 6' 5" depending on source. His weight when he fought Dempsey was given as 208 lbs. He was close to as tall as Wlad but nowhere near as solidly built.

 

"We today have never seen films of the prime Dempsey"

Dempsey was not prime in the Willard fight?

 

Of course he was...I mean the Dempsey of Toledo [ Willard] , and before.

 

Please don't give such a ham-fisted reasoning to my delicately nuanced arguments.