JEFFRIES V CHUVALO?

Re- read Jeffries,if you want to get clever then I'm your man Mr Langford!
Q Who did Jeff Clark beat at 160lbs to call him great as a middleweight?

 

You might accept my wider point here.

We might one day have a complete record for Jeffries, and we might already have it, but we will never know whether we have a complete record for Baker.

It is not important which weight Clark was most successful in.

The point is that he was a pound for pound great, whose record was until recently, very incomplete on Boxrec.

 

The only importance is you referred to him as one of the greatest middleweights.

 

Classifying a 175 lb. man as a middleweight?

Without a primary source indicating he weighed 159 against Creedan, there is really no worthwhile evidence.

ALL the evidence is shaky, guesses from newspapers, but 80% of it points to Baker weighing in the 170's, like later contenders such as Carpentier, Gibbons, Conn, Matthews, etc.

Studying his record, Baker does seem to have been a better fighter than I would have thought him.

 

"We might one day have a complete record for Jeffries"

My take is we'll never know. Too many years have gone by. Everyone is dead. We are limited mostly to what newspapers chose to, or were able to, cover and report on.

"We might already have it"

That will always only be a guess.

Also, I wonder about modern records. For example, about 50 extra fights have been found for Lee Savold from his early career that were not listed in the old Ring Record Books. I notice that for many of them he was supposedly fighting under the name Savoldi, a common Italian name. I question whether he would fight in the middle west as an Italian. To the point, how do we know they aren't confusing Savold with another man named Savoldi? Not that it really matters, as it just adds a lot of insignificant fights to his totals before he became visible on the boxing scene.

 

Indeed, there are serious issues with Boxrec up to the 1950s, and perhaps beyond.

 

Clark was a middleweight, and he aspired to fight for the middleweight title, but a lot of his work was done at higher weights.

My point is that he was one of the best fighters of the era, and half of his current record was missing a few years ago.

 

Box Rec classified him I didn't.A couple of days ago you were telling me Jimmy Ellis was a puffed up middleweight at 191lbs even though he hadn't fought at the weight for 6 years! You do make me smile at times!

 

My point is he wasn't that big a name and was never heavyweight champion of the world therefore the spotlight was never on him ,he was also black and fought in obscure places on the "chittlin circuit",so his fights may have gone unrecorded.
Every heavyweight champions fights got ink everyone of them has had biographies written about them and subsequently a hell of a lot of research has been done on them and information unearthed.I find it most unlikely that Adam Pollack would not discover any professional fights that Sullivan,Corbett,Fitz,Jeffries had.Corbett was a celebrity almost from the start he was the champion boxer in his AC and being so prominent, regularly written about early in his career.

 

"Box Rec classified him"

And they classify Joe Choynski as a heavyweight. Glad that settles that.

Box rec classifies Choynski as a heavy, Fitz as a light-heavy, and Baker as a middle. If the weights Pollack gives are ballpark, Baker was actually the heaviest of the three when he fought Jeffries. Personally, I would go by weights rather than Box Rec's classification opinion.

You have a decent point on my criticism of Ellis. His weight was at heavyweight for the last part of his career. I really don' t like using a term like "puffed up" except in reply to those who use it to criticize old champions. It is always an invidious term. If the man could fight and fight well at the weight, accept him at it.

*Just aside, it isn't that easy to classify. Take Joey Maxim. After 1943, when he turned 21, how often did he fight at the light-heavyweight limit? Only 8 times--against Lesnevich, Mills, Murphy, Robinson, Moore (3), and Olson. In contrast, he fought 33 times at 185 lbs. or more. Same with his opponents. Maxim in those years faced 19 opponents who weighed over 200 lbs., more than those who made the light-heavy limit. I have no problem classifying him as a light-heavy, as he could make that weight and was the champion at that weight, but he seems to have been a natural heavy.

 

I just made the point that it wasn't me doing the classifying.

 

Jeff Clark did not have the spotlight on him as much as Jim Jeffries, but he sure as hell had it on him more than Henry Baker.

If half of Clark's record can get lost and rediscovered, then I wouldn't bet a second hand spit bucket on Jeffries early opponents having comprehensive surviving records!

 

You are clearly unfamiliar with the book."They Called Him Slaughterhouse".By Johnathon Caldron. I wonder sometimes just how near you have ever been to a spit bucket?