Let's try and improve Primo Carnera

You can teach a man to snap out a jab from his shoulder, put bodyweight into his punches and tighten everything up but he will always look like he cannot utilize any of this if he is trying to time faster, more fluid smaller men.


Against a fighter of a better level the gap isn't there. The openings don't come. The time it takes from pulling the trigger to landing a fully leveraged punch you have exposed yourself to a multitude of counters and could quite possibly be facing the wrong way. Compromises are made. You have to make do with the connections you can land. Make do with landing a fending blow with less steam on it just to make a connection. The back hand travels further so it is often saved until up close in a clinch. A fighter can know better but will resort to what he can do to be effective. Giants taught by the best end up making compromises because their size allows them to opperate at a better level than they should ever be allowed to.

Even Muhammad Ali looked clumsy against smaller Bob foster. Riddick Bowe against Herbie Hide was no boxing masterclass either.

Primo, by the 2nd Sharkey fight was fighting over 12 times a year and had wracked up enough experience to know what he was doing. He was a pretty good boxer and effective at elite level. Schaff, Laughran, Sharkey, Neusel, laskey, levinsky, uzcudun and poreda (who primo was robbed against) were as good a level of fighter around at the time when Primo was beating them.

 

If they didn’t like Primo Carnera, then they were hardly going to like the guy who lost to Primo Carnera.

 

Can you name any champion of the period who was not involved in some crooked fights?

 

Unfortunately not every trainer is offered a choice of numerous fighters who are capable of being moulded into some sort of heavyweight champion.

If Carnera walks through your door, he might just be the best shot at it that you are ever going to get.

 

Can you name any other that had his entire rep built on them ... ?

Very simple Carnera question. He has 71 KO's in 89 wins. Why is he NEVER, EVER listed by anyone as a top heavyweight puncher ?

 

Can you produce any evidence that more than two or three of his fights were tank jobs?

The alegations are mainly based on the testimony of Leon See, which is clearly not reliable.

 

See discovered the strong man , built him up as an attraction and was muscled out in America by the mob is the basic version I have read ..

 

That is prety much how it happened. See then went and sulked, and wrote lots of unkind things about Carnera.

 

So why is a man with an 80 % KO percentage and over 70 KO's (victories ) to his record on no one's list of top fifty heavyweight punchers ?

 

I don’t know, but I do know that there isn’t any piece information available to the people who compose such lists, that is not available to us.

Carnera’s handlers did not reveal their secrets to them, and deny them to you!

 

Janitor, we both know why. One thing that separates the class of posters on this board is not having to be a last word freak. The reason is obvious.

 

Unfortunately it is very far from being simple.

We don’t know very much about the alleged irregularities in Carnera’s fights, and what we do know is based on second or third hand testimony. The evidence for individual fights on his record being fixed is sketchy, and that is putting it kindly. The only one that you could really make a case for on its own merits, is the Chevalier fight.

 

I don't think the Schaff fight was fixed. Do you?

 

Janitor's hanging his argument on nonsense. This is a former heavyweight champion that had 71 KO's in 89 victories and no one of any reputation rates him as a credible heavyweight puncher. There is not even a comparable champion to compare this to .... my question is why ?

Trainers such as Angelo Dundee are on the record talking about what a third rater he was .. no doubt he did improve and when carefully matched against much smaller men he was able to hold his own to some degree but his over all underpinning is one of set ups, well matched and then disregarded when he no longer had any usage which happen to coincide with his career ending collapse at a still very young age.