Jack Johnson v Gene Tunney 15 rounds.

Yes, I realise that afterwards.
No claims to being Colombo from me ....



..... "but there is just one more thing, sir ..."

maybe because fixed fights were rife and most pros were though to be at it ? :hey

Wlad has carried so many opponents he has forgotten how not to !

Or if not ... how bad would he look carrying these guys ?

Firstly, any fight that stinks is questionable. And those two have been in a few stinkers.
Many fights are questionable. That doesn't mean they are all fake or dodgy is some way, but the questioning of the result is legitimate, surely.

Froch admitted to carrying an opponent for betting purposes. That is blatant. That is only a very small step removed from an out and out fix, if at all.

 

I have said all along that I am not saying they made stuff for their fight report, but only that they may have done.

A lot were fixed.
I believe the majority were not.
I don't know which ones were, and which ones were not.
Newspaper reports may not be telling the truth.
So I hold my hands up and say, "I don't know".

That's my position in a nutshell.

:huh No, if I have seen the fight, I can question the fight, and draw my own conclusion on it being fake or fixed - "yes", "no" or "maybe".

Maybe.
I see lots of fights that look like that might be faked, but others might only ever say "that guy fights so unmotivated", "these two suck, they dont throw punches", "this guy is so inconsistent now".
NEVER allowing that something fishy might be going on.
I find that position very extreme, just as much the conspiracy nut who thinks all fights are definitely fixed.

If you looked at the fights, even before their confession, you should at least be able to say "maybe" he's carrying that guy, if you are any sort of judge.
And you should also be able to say the same thing about lots of other fights.

I'm not rushing to question every result in their career. The fights of Froch I have seen (v.Pascal, Taylor) looked on the level (.... and the Direll one which was a poor even fight at best) .
Haye fought a load of wahed-up zombies at heavyweight anyway, which is "questionable" in itself. But I've seen him fight, and he can punch, and he legitimately KO'd some fighters who I think were simply outclassed.


With Jack O'brien, I haven't seen his fights, his famous victories.

 

If this is a report of the fixed Burns-O'Brien fight, I think it makes it out to be far more competitive fight than a "fake" would suggest ....

[url]http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=2p0jAAAAIBAJ&sjid=YDsDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6408,2530230&dq=tommy+burns+jack+o+brien&hl=en[/url]

There is a little bit here about the fight too ....

[url]http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=trxGAAAAIBAJ&sjid=UC8NAAAAIBAJ&pg=993,2209770&dq=tommy+burns+jack+o+brien&hl=en[/url]


This one seems to say O'brien under-performed but still describes it as a gruelling, bloody one.
It says the "straight Queensberry" rules favoured Burns, cos he was allowed to rough Jack up, and that's where Jack lost it ...

[url]http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=vHgtAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ApgFAAAAIBAJ&pg=6074,1477600&dq=tommy+burns+jack+o+brien&hl=en[/url]




Is this the right fight ? :huh

Or was it the second one that was "fake" ?

 

I think you mean newspapers reports over footage !

That's almost true.
But all the circumstances surrounding a fight need to be taken in to consideration.
For example, a 6-round no decision that goes to a draw, is more susceptible to being arranged, or under suspicion, or suffer embellished reporting, than, say, a fight that ended in a 39th round KO in the desert and has photos of men covered in blood accompanying it.

Are you kidding ?
Haye carried Harrison until the 3rd, and in the pub where I watched it the comments that it was fake were thick in the air by the middle of the second round.
He also carried that other guy for 12 rounds and it was obvious throughout.

I can't even remember the Froch fight, if I even saw it, but that's some claim to say you know that every viewer in the world never thought it was faked.
if that's what you are saying ?

 

I don't. I've said this many pages back. Some of the stories of fights being fake are bull****. The press men are unreliable witnesses.

O'brien might be 100% clean, a non-faker, as far as I'm concerned too.

I'm not holding the 1909 press up as anything to be relied upon.


As for Johnson-O'brien, this is all :

1. I consider that a "6 round no decison" in which (you agree) Johnson turned up not too bothered, because he knew he couldn't lose a decision, is not entirely "on the level". He took his money and went on his way.

If that was to happen today, it would be regarded as an exhbition or some sort of farce.

2. I wouldn't be surprised if Johnson agreed not to go for a KO too. I believe that he did that in several fights. Anecdotes or rumours of him, and Sam Langford for example, routinely doing so are quite common. Maybe it's all untruth too. ..... But then I've seen him carrying Ketchel with my own eyes ...

It's point 1. that forms the basis of saying the fight wasn't exactly "on the level" as I said many pages back.
point 2. is speculation, based partly on anecdote and partly on what I've seen on film.

I'm just about the weakest witness ever to what happened in a 1909 fight of which there is no film. I dont know, That's what i've been saying all along.

I do know that I would pick the Johnson of the Ketchel fight to beat O'brien up badly. I don't see any middleweight being a match for that Johnson.

I'm just not sure what you are saying.
On the one hand, you say 1909 reporters were all very wise and could tell a fake and would ruthlessly expose it.
On the other hand, you say no one would have known that Haye or Froch carried an opponent if they hadn't confessed.

The fact that no reporter noticed Froch was carrying that guy shows how little they know. The Haye fights were obvious, but I think he had already said so before the papers came out ? I dont remember, but it was bleeding obvious.

 

Well, this is what I mean when I say boxing was different back then.
Championship fighters fought 20 rounders and 45 rounders, but it was acceptable to agree to 6-round no-decision bouts too.

It was not necessarily "on the level" as we would understand it today.
Sure, maybe nothing outright dishonest was on hand, but surely we can agree that a champion's motivation and the performance expectations would be seriously compromised by those fight conditions in themselves ?
Straight off the bat, as soon as it is signed, it's kind of a lame proposition.
A knowledgeable fight crowd would know that.

[And IF there were some other conditions in place, for example, with O'brien really having NO CHANCE of a KO win (therefore no win) because he wasn't a great puncher, if anyone ever would have a reasonable motive to ask Johnson not to go for the KO either, it would be a bout like this. (Or course, that's a big "IF", but if I was O'brien's manager I'd sure as hell try Johnson for that ! ) ..... if any such conditions were in place it wouldn't be a shocker.

This is speculation, completely, and I don't wish to say that's what I believe happened. So don't jump on me.
But in that era, where rules and conditions and agreements were not regulated and the camps sorted this stuff out among themselves, I wouldn't say it was impossible or even highly unlikely.
Such a fight could look decent to the press men, even if they were being completely objective.]

Allowing that they were NO 'private conditions' it still isn't quite "on the level" in the sense that it would be expected to be a true test or showcase for a champion's skills.

maybe it's not meaningless. It was a professional engagement after all. But I don't think Johnson took it seriously .. and didn't you say O'brien didn't want any part of Johnson in a rematch scheduled for a longer distance ?
That's one guy not taking it seriously, and another guy not wishing to capitalize on his 'successful' performance.

This is true.
And I'm aware that my suspicious speculations regarding the possible scenarios of the O'brien fight (or Johnson's attitude towards it), and my readiness to dismiss it as something of a sham, are shaped much by the way Jack Johnson fought.
As a matter of course he didn't seem to be going all out. It's almost as if he might have based his entire style around wearing the cuffs, so as not to scare the opposition off.
That's the problem - where does deliberate stalling merge in to unmotivated laziness or sheer lethargy ?

He toyed with Burns, Jeffries, Ketchel before knocking them out.
Yes, maybe he didn't know how to beat O'brien over 6 rounds, because his whole style was geared towards toying and containing fighters over long distance. Nevermind because he didn't need to beat O'brien, it was a fight he practically could not lose.

No, not proof of conspiracy or wrong-doing, but quite a cynical match-up for a quick payday from a long-distance championship fighter.

Yes, they exposed some fakes. Maybe not the better fakes. Maybe they wrongfully accused some legit fights too. I don't know how we could possibly estimate their detection rate, or how much of a detterent they acted as.
You were right to highlight that there was a great deal of anti-fixing and anti-corruption in the boxing press, but it's impossible to tell how effective that was against the crooks in the industry as a whole.

Sure, two fighters faking is more likely to get caught.

Ismail Abdoul.

The guy is durable anyway, and I dont know if Haye could take him out. But Haye didn't try to.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLzyE34-2P8[/ame]


It's a sleeping pill of a fight.

 

That's fair enough. Looking at it in those terms, it was serious business.

again, fair enough.
I suppose it's the Jack Johnson factor at the idea that he's up against a small guy who wasn't much of a puncher that makes me think expectations should have been low under those conditions.

He didn't fancy HWs but he was willing to face one of the biggest baddest ones in a fight he really couldn't win.
(again, the problem that it was Johnson and his style kind of makes it hard to even speculate firmly on what all this means)

True.

I agree.
That's why with these threads (the intended subject of the thread : Johnson v Tunney, remember ) I would use only the primest possible Johnson, that we can see on film, over the relevant distance. The Johnson that would be going for the KO in the last third of the fight. A Johnson who was conditioned and motivated to go fight the long distance and do enough to win rounds.

yeah, innuendo and repeated gossip.

Well, Haye went out there from the opening bell with the intention of doing the minimum and going the full distance. He used it as a sparring session, and not even a heavy one. Against a man who posed him little threat and really could have been given a beating.

Yeah, we stunk out the whole thread. I'm calling it a "sham fight" ! :good