Name some 175s in history you would confidently pick to beat Kovalev

Slavic Fighter,

That's not always the case and you know it. I've seen fights that haven't been fought at a great pace where fighters have really struggled.

Based on what??

Boxing is a sport that stands alone.

It simply doesn't progress in the same way like other sports such as: track and field and swimming have.

Stop being ignorant.

Just because the sprinters from 30 years ago couldn't beat the best sprinters of today, it doesn't automatically mean that fighters from 30 years ago couldn't beat the best fighters of today.

That line of thinking is just absolutely ridiculous.


If you you were knowledgeable about boxing, you'd know 2 things:

1. Many fighters of today would beat guys from the past.

2. Likewise, many fighters of the past would beat guys from today.


In boxing, you have strong eras and weak eras. They ebb and flow. They always have done. The fighters and the divisions don't get stronger each decade. The best fighters today aren't really any better than the best guys of the 80's and 90's, from 20 and 30 years ago. It's baffling how you can't see it.

Advancements in sports science, nutrition, training facilities and equipment etc, won't aide a fighter as much as they will a sprinter. Because a sprinter relies heavily on speed and power. They have to run from point A to B in the quickest possible time against the clock. While there's certainly a lot of technique to perfect, they haven't got to perfect as many skills as a fighter has to.

Being bigger and stronger than the sprinters of the past, enables today's sprinters to run faster. They also have better footwear and they run on a better surface. And it all makes a huge difference. Boxing is different. You could have a boxer who's a supreme athlete, with a perfect body. You could give him a strength and conditioning coach. You could give him the best facilities available. But unless he'd got great footwork, timing, and great all-around skills, then it wouldn't help him to succeed at the highest level. Boxing is an art. Hitting, whilst not getting hit. Using footwork to feint and make your opponent off balance, so you can time him and counter him etc. It's the sweet science. A physical game of chess. Skills are more important than power. There were fighters from 50-60 years ago who used to do roadwork in baseball shoes, who possessed just as much skill as some of today's best fighters. Like I told you yesterday, a left hook will always be a left hook. Timing will always be timing. Advancements in sports science etc, will never change that.

Sprinting in a 200m race is completely different to fighting another man. The two sports are literally world's apart.

Whilst you'd put your life on Usain Bolt beating any sprinter from decades ago, there's no way you would do the same if one of today's top guys fought a fighter from decades ago. You'd be crazy to do that.

Whilst it's a fact that Usain Bolt could have beaten Lewis and Christie in a sprint, it's not a fact that Deontay Wilder would have beaten Muhammad Ali.

If you think Sergey Kovalev would easily beat Joe Louis, then give me a breakdown. Because saying that he'd beat him easily, based on today's football teams being better, just isn't going to cut it.

If I had a time machine, I could bring fighters from the past, who in my opinion, would easily beat some of today's guys.

Big George Foreman of the 70's would more than likely wipe out most of today's HW division.

What about the best MW's of the 90's, against today's best MW's?

What are you saying here?

That all today's top fighters are superior, and that all today's divisions are the strongest they've ever been?

Who's in your top 10 P4P list?

By your logic, they should be 10 of the greatest, if not THE greatest 10 fighters who've ever fought.

Yet you'd have to be crazy to believe that.

 

They were fighting other bums (by modern standards) on their level. Having that many fights a year just means that they were even more shot and useless. Watch some of those fights from before world war please. Watch Marciano vs Ezzard Charles, the guy who people here have as favourite over Kovalev (lol). Slow-paced sloppy flat-footed zero mobility fight that look more like sparring than modern top fights. If you don't see a guy like Kovalev just blasting away these guys I don't know what you're watching.

The only anomaly boxing has is that it has so many delusional fans who create these mythological creatures out of some boxers from the past. Those people probably think that some boxers from ancient Greece would beat Kovalev too, never mind that they lived in a time when average life expectancy was around 30 and average height was something like 168cm.

 

No doubt in my mind.

 

So what about guys like SRR and Gavilan who look great on film? They had speed of hand and foot and impeccable technique. Were they fighting bums for their whole career?

When do you think boxing evolved to the point where older fighters can be compared with guys from this era? Robinson? Ali? Leonard?

 

There's plenty of footage available, that show fighters from years ago, operating at an extremely high skill level.

Boxing has progressed from the M.O.Q. but it hasn't continued to progress over each decade. There's even skills that aren't as common today, such as: double hooks, the use of the uppercut, in-fighting etc. Some skills and techniques have been lost along the way.

You are completely ignorant on this subject.

Absolutely clueless.

 

He's just embarrassing himself.

He needs to go on to the classic for a few months to get educated.

 

Not a given, IMO. Roy's chin was durable enough to take flush shots from Ruiz - and no way is Kanvalev punching harder than a full fledged HW...

 

:good

 

Based on what? Never mind that it has similar training methods to any other sport and modern boxers use modern nutrition, physiotherapy and have had great help from the advancement of modern science just like any other sport.

You should tell all those boxers that they're wasting their money and should train like cavemen like Dempsey, punching heavy bag entire day and skip rope, spar heavily and do pretty much nothing else.

By your logic it doesn't matter how you train or how you eat and people are just born with some innate boxing talent, yet somehow in the past there were more people born with that talent and mostly concentrated in the USA (another thing that reactionaries like you constantly ignore - no Eastern Europeans in professional boxing until recently which alone increased the quality of boxing greatly).

And where are any arguments for those statements? It's just that you and delusional nostalgics like you repeat them all the time and create those fantasy threads where Ali and Louis and Sullivan and who knows who run through entire modern HW division.

It has zero to do with facts, it's your imaginary world. You remind me of people who discuss whether superman would beat batman.

It's just a myth that people like you repeat all the time. You base your opinion on hype and not facts. I saw those fights and they're inferior to what you see in modern boxing if you take all the hype away.

Also, people think that a strong era is an era where you have 3-4 fighters that stand out and fight each other, yet if you have only 1 guy who stands out (like Klitschko) it's a weak era. It has zero to do with reality and it leaves out the fact that the competition as a whole is greatly improved with each new era.

And boxing doesn't rely on speed and power? Ali relied on speed, Foreman relied on power. If they fought modern boxers they'd give away a lot of advantage, Ali wouldn't be able to use his athleticism (for his time) and all those energy consuming footwork. It's not like many of those mythological boxers from the past had a good technique, in fact even when it comes to pure technique they were worse on average than modern boxers.

You know why? Because modern boxers have more time to improve their technique, they can train much more thanks to sports science. Modern nutrition and supplements allow you to train much harder than anyone in the past did. Modern physiotherapy and advancements in medicine allow you to cure your injuries faster and better, giving you even more time to train. Modern facilities with modern equipment also help. Also, knowledge of boxing has accumulated, we know more about boxing than people in the past did.

As I explained to you before, even in those aspects that you mention boxers today are better than in the past because they train more.

You have sports like football which rely heavily on technique and skill, yet you don't have delusional idiots claiming that Italian national football team that won the WC in the 1934 would beat German national team of 2014 or even that Bayern from the early 70s would beat Barcelona or Real of today.

By your logic steroids shouldn't even be banned from boxing because they shouldn't make any difference whatsoever, as it's all about "timing", "feinting" etc. By your logic people could box well into their 60s, as if boxing is chess or something.

Even your mythical fighters of the past constantly tried to improve their strenght and conditioning.

Boxing will always rely heavily on strenght and endurance, it's one of the toughest SPORTS.

Did you watch Joe Louis fight? Those fights are a joke compared to what we see today in every single aspect, if you look at the pace of those fights it looks like sparring compared to modern boxing. Louis wouldn't be able to deal with the pace of Kovalev and wouldn't be able to handle his footwork, speed, power and overall athleticism. It would be like that obese guy like Dustin Nichols against Wilder, that funny fight that's mentioned here often. Dustin Nichols could have been the most technically sound intelligent fighter on the planet and he still wouldn't have a chance.

People post those "breakdowns" as if Louis was a modern fighter, those breakdowns are flawed from the beginning.

 

Dawson, when he was under Mayweather sr, was a *very* technically sound fighter. He had a damn good jab, good power and was hard to hit cleanly..

 

It's all about context. Everyone can look great, it just matters what kind of competition they face.

You can compare those fighters all you want, but it should be highlighted that they were great in their own context, just like we have P4P lists. However claiming that they would actually beat modern boxers is absurd.

Also, before the 90s there were no Eastern Europeans in professional boxing, as soon as they were allowed to compete we're slowly witnessing Eastern European domination. There's a huge question mark how well those American greats would do if communists didn't impose that ban. Robinson and Ali could have been beaten by some unknown Ukrainians for all we know. Let's not forget that if communism still existed you would have never heard of boxers like Kovalev and Golovkin in the first place. Wlad would only be known for his gold medal.

 

I saw those fights and I see people fighting at a snails pace, often flat-footed and no mobility, flailing around etc. Nothing that would suggest that they have the mastery to overcome significant advantage modern boxers have in terms of pure athleticism.

It's like emperor's new clothes, not many people have the courage to expose those old boxers because they're always attacked by an army of delusional reactionary nostalgics who think watching and knowing those old boxers makes them some sort of great experts. Those nostalgics take great pride in that and what they love to do the most is to constantly bring some random guy from the past (the more distant past the better) and claim how that guy would demolish modern elite boxers with ease. When you call them out for their BS they act like you insulted their religion or something. It's hard to discuss this.

Let's look at this this way:

If you have one top boxer fighting another top boxer who is on roids, who would you bet your money on? Even if you subjectively think that the non-roided boxer is more skilled?

 

Based on what exactly? Outboxing a senior citizen? Far better timing and accuracy? Where was this better timing and accuracy in the Hopkins fight? As I recall, the Ole' Man had the TOMATO KAN Krusher swinging at nothing but air for the first 11 rounds. Ruiz' looked better beating Evander Holyfield, IMO - which, at HW, is a better scalp than a 50 year old Hopkins @ 175...