Lewis and Marciano hypocrisy

Well said.

 

You also get those athletes who stay just inside the rules, by creative use of legal supplements.

I have a friend who used to be a professional cyclist.

She trained with Chris Frome.

She won the occasional event, but lost more often than she won.

One day her trainer sat her down asn said:

"Look you are going to have to take some stuff if you want to advance in this sport."

She quit the sport the next day.

 

I thought HGH was used for preserving your looks as you got older and having aesthetically pleasing muscle?

Miller is only 32 and looks like an obese defensive lineman in the off season after gorging himself at a buffet.

It doesn't look like he skips any meals and has always been a hefty dude. Do you think he really needs drugs to gain 40 lbs? And why would an inside fighter intentionally make himself much heavier? I thought, and I could be totally wrong since I watched the interview a year ago, the drugs he took were to increase his endurance and work rate so he could continue throwing a high volume of punches?

 

You would probably win that wager!

 

And in turn Do you see this as an issue to consider when comparing heavyweights before this era to fighters benefiting directly from this actual era?

okay, so shall I refrain from using “PED” as an umbrella explanation?
Can you suggest acceptable terms that can better help me to be understood?
I specifically would like to make the point that because of access to the benefits of one era a fighter represents something that could not previously be achieved.

 

Thanks. Point taken.

 

Rocky's in-shape walking around weight was 205-212 lbs, which meant he wasn't eating junk and was staying active and exercising regularly, but his fighting trim, was around 190 lbs with it being sometimes lower and sometimes higher. However, post retirement Rocky's weight was around 228-240 lbs, so he was well over 200 lbs and he definitely was out of shape, since he didn't have to follow a strict diet or workout all the time anymore. I post a few pieces with the articles attached, so you can see for yourself.

Here is a piece in 1957 just a year after Rocky retired and his weight is already at 240 from 212 lbs just a year before. This showed how much of an impact of not having to account to Weill, Goldman, and Columbo or himself for anymore made.

Rocky Marciano - Who's over at clearwater with his wife Barbara - now weights 240, or 53 pounds above his fighting weight, further evidence that he won't try to come back. When urged to diet, he refuses. Says he won't try to come back. Says he: "I gave 12 years to fighting. Now I'm finding out about the other side of life - and I like it.
https://imgur.com/Hu9BTkh

Also, most heavyweights nowadays rarely if ever show up in anything close to fighting trim and there is a big difference between being in shape and being in fighting trim. Also, earlier in his career when Marciano didn't have the luxury of dedicated fight camps, had less time in between fights, and had yet to receive much financial support from Weill he lived like a monk and kept his walking around weight around 193 lbs, which required a lot of training and a strict diet, since Rocky's natural body weight is much higher than this.

Once he was champion and had more time between fights he wouldn't wait to the last minute to take off weight like some of these guys do today. By the time he started working with sparring partners he was already within a couple of pounds of what he planned to fight at.

Here is Marciano answering a question about his long layoff for the for him at the time going into the Walcott rematch.

Is the champ carrying much blubber now, after the three month lay-off?

"No, I'll only have to take off six or seven pounds he said. "I weigh about 193 lbs now, and will fight around 186, or 87."
https://imgur.com/qw0Ek3b

Here is a piece on Marciano going into the Moore fight. The interview was carried out on July 31 and Marciano is already down to 194 lbs, which gives him plenty of time to comfortably and safely get to 188 to 190 lbs, which was his target weight for the Moore fight later in September.

Rocky Marciano weighing a trim 194 pounds, boxed two round with Felix Antonio of Dayton, Ohio, Saturday as he began heavy work for his Sept. 20, heavyweight title defense against Archie Moore. This was the first time he had put on the gloves since his May 16 defense against Don C**kell at San Francisco.

I feel great and expect this to be one of my toughest fights, said Marciano.
https://imgur.com/qkS9xor

Marciano started camp against C**kell at 205 lbs in January, but by the end of March he was already at 191 lbs and he planned to weight between 190 to 194 lbs for the C**kell fight, which he came pretty close to.

Heavyweight champion Rocky Marciano broke camp Monday and headed for California, where he will begin serious workouts for his May 16 title defense against Don C**kell of England in San Francisco.

Here in his Catskill mountain haunt, he has been training lightly for more than two months. This consisted of boxing 87 rounds with his spar mates, doing hundreds of miles of roadwork and whipping through the equivalent of another 100 rounds with the punching bag.

He weighted 205 pounds when he started Jan. 11. Sunday the scales showed 191, just 4 pounds over his best fighting weight.
https://imgur.com/sjiXSXB

When Marciano announced his retirement in 1956 he was still in shape at 212 pounds, but family pressures eventually resulted in him calling it quits from the ring.

Marciano, who admitted he will be 33 on Sept. 21, said he weighed only 212 pounds, about 23 over his normal fighting weight. He insisted physical condition had nothing to do with his decision to stop fighting.

"I am retiring because of my wife and Mary Ann (his 3 1/2-year old daughter)" said Marciano at a hastily called news conference after his wife, Barbara, already had released the news to Vic Dubois, sports editor of the Brockton Enterprise. "Actually I feel good. I still have some good fights left in me."

"My mother never did want me to fight" said Rocky. "My decision puts her very much at ease. My father always liked boxing but he's happy to see me quit.
Barbara has been after me to quit for some time. After the Don C**kell fight (in San Francisco, May 16, 1955) we spent a month in Mexico. She did a lot of talking about our not being together and how I had to be introduced to the baby every time I went home. I never spent more than two weeks in a row at home.

"Even after the Archie Moore fight (his last match. Sept. 21 1955) I was thinking about retirement. After the fight I really began to consider it seriously. I think I would be taking advantage of my family if I tried to fight anymore. At first I was single. It didn't make any difference then. But the baby makes a lot of difference."
https://imgur.com/gahZFSs

 

Wow, that’s a lot of evidence that shows Rocky really was following the custom of the day and aiming to come in as low as he did.

Clearly it suited the times.

By comparison, in a later time of improved nutrition training and science and more readily available information, Holyfield walked around at lower than his actual fight night weight.

Between fights Rocky was said to have always been very disciplined. Obsessive about staying healthy yet still he had to cut weight for fights to do what he did in the time that he fought.

I read somewhere that both Charles and Rocky were heavier than announced for their second fight because of a weather postponement.

 

Between fights, Rocky was notorious for eating a ton of food.

His main exercise between fights seems to have been taking long strolls (walks).

 

And yet they still overrate him

 

That doesn't really mean anything to be completely honest. All this tells us is that he gains fat very quickly when he doesn't have someone hounding his ass to go to the gym. If he was 5'10 and ballooned up to 240 a year after retiring that tells me he was an endomorph who puts on fat very quickly whenever he eats a lot.

A 5'10 man shouldn't be anywhere remotely close to 240 unless he is some sort of body builder, football player, etc and it better be mostly muscle. I've seen several pics of retirement Rocky and his cheeks were very puffy with flabs, etc. "Walk around" weight does not mean you have a gut and jiggly flab.

I will definitely dispute this since most athletes are usually going to cut maybe 10-15 lbs at most from their "walk around" weight. 20 is pushing it. At 212 he would need to cut nearly 30 lbs to get in shape and that's pretty impractical but I honestly wouldn't be shocked if he ballooned that high when inactive.

Here's the problem:

-Rocky fought 11x in 1948
-13x in 1949
-6x in 1950
-7x in 1951
-5x in 1952
-2x in 53
-2x in 54
-2x in 54

from 1949 to 1952 it would have been nearly impossible for Rocky to balloon up to 205 between fights and then cut all the way down to 185-188 if he were fighting 7+ times a year, let alone cutting down from 212. Mrkoolkevin posted several of Rocky's workouts and jogging 3-4 miles and doing some bag work and sparring is not going to allow someone to cut 20+ lbs every other month to get down to his fighting weight.

Do you get what I'm getting at? Other than the last couple years when he was champion, it would have been incredibly impractical and damn near impossible for Rocky's walk around weight to be a "natural" 205-212 constantly going up and down in weight like a yo yo he would have been in horrible shape and very weak.

Again this doesn't mean much. Any idiot can balloon up to 240 lbs binging on Italian food and sweets. I never disputed that Rocky could put on a lot of weight. Putting on functional explosive muscle is a totally different subject. We know for a fact Rocky wasn't a functional or healthy 240 lbs of muscle, he was a notoriously big eater.

For your first point, most heavyweights nowadays don't even have a "fighting trim". That was a thing up until maybe the mid 80's and then very few heavies actually picked a target fighting weight to reach for maximum efficiency, stamina, speed, etc (Holyfield being one of the few to actually be fighting trim in this era). Many heavyweights nowadays give no f***s whatsoever how chunky they look as long as they can go 12 without gassing out.

As for the 2nd point, cutting from 193 to 185-188 is not a huge deal and doesn't remotely prove Rocky was "killing himself" to make his ideal fighting weight--especially because in multiple fights he came in weighing as much as 190 or even 192 so whatever weight he lost was essentially just a byproduct of him simply working out.

I never said Rocky was obese or couldn't function at 193. He has multiple fights where he is only a few lbs shy of that.

He would not be killing himself to drop 7 lbs.

Ok so we've established that as champion Rocky walked around at maybe 193-197 lbs give or take. Nothing that remotely suggests he was killing himself to get down to 186-188 and is pretty normal for most old school heavies. It doesn't remotely suggest he could carry 210+ of functional muscle and hang with behemoths who were 220+ today.

So he started in Jan and ended camp in May. He lost 14 lbs in 5 months. Do you honestly think someone is "killing themselves" working out to lose 14 lbs in 5 months?