Joe Louis KO6 Roscoe Toles 1935 should be listed on his pro record

Agreed. So it was an 8 round bout and not a 6 round one as I originally thought, which lends even more credence to the fact that this should be on the record.

 

You can always count it unofficially. I don’t know who you’d go to for an official establishment.

 

If it wasn’t sanctioned as an actual fight (even if there were judges), then it’s an exhibition.

But if we want to overrule the athletic commission somehow, for some reason, I’d need to know if Toles treated it like a fight and both trained to take the title from Joe and tried his best to do so.

That’s impossible to know, I’d think.

 

Joe wasn't the champ yet in 1935.

 

I read on a old Boxing News Magazine that I have someone using the term "brilliant" to describe Toles, so, yeah...

 

Regardless, my point still stands.

If you call a guy and offer him an exhibition, he’s not going to prepare the same way he would for a real fight. And probably not going to approach it in the ring with the same urgency. If he knows it’s not going on his record, that winning it will do nothing to further his career, you can’t retroactively —- years later — decide it was a legit fight.

It’s like deciding at the end of the season that an NFL exhibition game is going to count toward whether the teams make the playoffs.

Participants go into exhibitions with a different mindset than they do real competitions. And prepare that way too.

 

As per the newspaper article, the chairman of Detroit's boxing commission picked Toles "as a suitable foe" for Louis so one can only assume that they were matched to fight a non exhibition match.
They didn't use exhibition gloves or head gear and there's no line about an absence of a judge or referee. It seems like a proper six rounder (not an eight rounder after all) which Louis won via ko.
Toles was matched against the biggest prospect in the division, the best guy he'd have been in the ring with at that point (or ever), do you think he'd not take it as seriously as any other sanctioned bout?
Had Toles knocked Louis out in this one or out pointed him, who knows what doors would have opened for him.

 

Some comments from Boxrec re this interesting subject: -

https://boxrec.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=160387

 

Louis had four bouts within a couple of weeks around this time. All were scheduled for between 4 and 6 rounds, and all ended in easy stoppage wins. Boxrec considers the first of them - against Biff Bennett - to be a real bout, but not the others. Some press reports from the time describe them as exhibitions, others don't.

Whichever side you come down on, the achievement of beating Toles should be kept in perspective. Although he did become a fringe contender a couple of years later, at the time Toles was an unknown who stepped in to face Louis with only a matter of days to prepare. On the night, he barely put up a fight. His corner had to be dissuaded from pulling him out in the second round, and Toles was threatened with having his purse withheld.

https://ibb.co/VQZ5vcw