Ken Norton vs Max Baer

I am with you on the Cooney fight, but Norton was still a very important contender when he lost to Shavers.

The problem is this.

Yes we can make allowances up to a point, but the fact remains that Norton fought three Baer tier punchers, and all three ended him early.

We are not seeing a mixed picture here.

If you put a gun to my head, then the Baer of teh Schmeling fight probably ends him early too.

 

While the Baer fight is obviously the strongest argument for him having a chance against Shavers or Cooney, it is not the only fight that I am basing this conclusion on.

Braddock has four very good wins at heavyweight, and he did better against Joe Louis than any of the champions of the 30s, with the exception of Schmeling.

Now that could be debated.

Braddock was coming off a significant layoff going into the Louis fight, and the Farr fight.

 

Nothing much that I would object to here.

 

This. Norton was an excellent fighter, but against a strong aggressive type fighter, who wasn’t afraid to let their hands fly was very beatable. Shavers, Foreman, and Cooney all literally bullied Norton to ropes and battered him. I don’t see Norton doing much better against Baer.

 

Having just lost to Holmes, Norton was going to have to fight his way back into contention, despite the echo of that losing effort shoring up his rating in the immediate term. If the loss to Shavers didn't confirm he was done, his performance against LeDoux sealed it. Norton announced his retirement the following month and he was dropped from all the ratings.

I don't really see four very good wins for Braddock at Heavyweight. However, Baer is far and away Braddock's best win on paper, for sure.

And, the problem I have with using the match with Baer as the yardstick here, is that there are no obvious similarities in style between Baer, Shavers and Cooney - certainly not when viewed through the lens of available Baer/Braddock footage.

Also - this 'Top Trumps' approach to assessing head-to-head matchups, i.e., the comparative number of rounds lasted, is really quite misguided.

I don't think we can realistically equate Braddock's one year out before facing Louis to Norton's reaching the end of the road.

 

You could take the Shavers fight as meaning that Norton was shot, or you could take it as confirming what the Garcia and Foreman fights had already showed us.

That Norton did not match up well against punchers.

Lewis, Lasky and Farr were all relevant men in the division when Braddock beat them.

You could argue that the Lewis and Farr decisions were controversial, but he got the Baer fight off the strength of the Lasky
fight, and there was a talk of at title shot at Louis after he beat Farr.

No objection.

I don't give Cooney much credit for beating this version of Norton, so I can't really use it as a stick to beat Norton.

 

Given Norton would never recapture the form he'd shown against Holmes, was 35 years old and retired the same year, after a relatively poor showing against LeDoux, I lean heavily towards the former being the case.

So they might or mightn't have been half-decent wins for the times. But, I don't think any of these guys were really separating themselves from the field when Braddock fought them. This doesn't take away from the relative significance of the fights and what they meant for Braddock when he achieved the wins.

However, at the same time, to make them count in an assessment of the fighters we're discussing here - particularly in what is a speculative head-to-head - I don't think them merely being "relevant" at the time is really adding to the case for Braddock and ultimately Baer.

I do think they serve to help make the Cinderella Man story what it is, but for them to matter in regard to how the likes of Baer and Braddock would do against the top-class contenders of the 70s, they'd need to have been a sight more exceptional in their own era. Frankly, I think the vast majority of post-Dempsey-Tunney / pre-Louis period Heavyweights would have been out of their depth in the 70s heavyweight scene.

Baer stood out a little for the period (as did Schmeling) and had a terrific punch, but he fought nothing like Ali, Foreman, Frazier, Quarry, Bugner, Lyle, Young, Shavers or Holmes.

As for Norton, he was both a superior athlete and, in terms of his results and his performances as seen on film, the superior boxer. Baer has a puncher's chance but he would not be as apt to land that fight-changing blow against high quality fighters. As I mentioned at the beginning, Baer fought sporadically, lacked discipline in his offensive swings, spent most of the time without his guard up and showed limited footwork.

Moreover, from what I have seen, he preferred to wait on his opponents actions; tempt them into making their offensive move and capitalize on gaps in their defense when they took the bait. This would suit Norton for the most part, in my opinion.

When Baer did decide to make a conscious effort to put a come-forward offensive together, he did so in a straight line. He had little to no aptitude for cutting off the ring effectively or making instinctive adjustments to his positioning, thereby maintaining an offensive threat. Bearing in mind that Norton would have been bigger than Baer's average opponent, he's going to have less of an easy time imposing himself physically on Norton but it's not impossible if he wanted to put that kind of a sustained effort in to make it happen.

I think Baer's best chance would be to perhaps make this a close range affair and attempt to grind Norton down on the inside. Alternatively, he could pay some attention to targeting Norton's body, from long-to-mid-range, but I just don't see Baer as a cerebral fighter, who'd put all the pieces together to devise and execute tactics, in-ring - He has losses on his record that he really shouldn't have, which are probably due to just that.


No - It's going to take a much better argument than Baer could punch; Norton couldn't take a punch (but Braddock's Light Heavyweight whiskers were imported from the planet Krypton) and, therefore, Baer wins, to convince me.

 

It is not going to take any additional argument to convince me.

 

Clearly, but then you tend towards believing that there is parity of ability, between the rated fighters from one era and all other eras, which is, on its face, utterly bonkers.

 

What about Ken Norton vs. an actuall Grizzly Bear?

 

I think that the 70s was a much stronger era than the 30s.

I also think that Baer was inferior to Foreman, better than Shavers, and much better than Cooney for whatever that is worth.

 

All it takes is watching the footage.

 

After a few minutes, the bear will start to gas out as it doesn't have the ability to sweat like a human.
If Norton can survive the first 3 minute onslaught he can use his jab to irritate the bear and outpoint it for a decision.