Number of pro fighters today compared with the past

Yes 'sanctioned' is a ridiculously abstract term. Boxrec admit their records are far from complete, and I suspect never will be. Not least because their definition of sanctioned will differ from others. For instance the last pro fight they have for Archie Moore is against a pro wrestler on a pro wrestling bill.

Boxrec sanction that bout, but not others that were staged in booths and neighbourhood 'halls'?! As you suggest, everything is open to interpretation and to a degree, personal opinion.

 

Neighbourhood halls are church halls, sports halls, former church buildings or what had been music halls. Swimming baths emptied out of water would erect a ring and stage an evening of boxing. There was a lot of boxing. It was before my time but I remember working as a barber as an apprentice and it seems like half the old men who were young men in the 1920s had cauliflower ears, had fought 100s of fights as boxers and you would never have heard of them. Today you just don't see so much cauliflower ears with later generations.

Carnival boxing booths were licenced in the UK by the British Boxing Board Of Control. Real active boxers worked for the house and would tour with the boxing tent. Both a professional boxing career and career on the boxing booths as a day job was a possible reality for many fighters since they could travel and live with the booth and take fights on local shows in different towns. Even on the booth they often fought each other when they were not challenged by the public. Lots of kids who "ran away with the circus" wound up on the booths. A booth fighter and a professional boxer amounted to the same thing for a very long time.

 

I was just watching the Willie Monroe Jr vs Brian Vera bout to see the kid that GGG will be fighting next. One of the commentators mentioned that Vera was actually 0-3 going into that bout and had just been knocked out by Gabriel Rosado in an unlisted bout for a tournament where boxers fought in a pit without ropes.

And if you've seen the documentary Tapia, Johnny mentions that after he got his license revoked he became a homeless coke head for a few years and used to fight all comers in back of a bar for $200 and a case of Budweiser.

Plus, we still have Tough Man contests and little boxing tournies at Firehouses and police boxing clubs. Steve Cunningham learned to box in the armed forces, and Bernard Hopkins picked up boxing in prison.

If you check out the documentary Knuckle, you'll see that Irish travelers are still fighting bare knuckle fights to this day, and there is no shortage of unsanctioned amateur bouts.

 

It's an interesting question, but the number of active fighters in a given year pre-WW2 (and to a certain degree later as well) will always be pure guesswork, I think... as there is no way we will ever know, how many fights/fighters went unrecorded back then.

Also, even if we got the number of fights right, there's another important factor to consider: how many fights did the old-timers have, on average, in a year... compared to more recent boxers. I think, we can all agree, that they were much more active than today's boxers - but exactly HOW much more, is anybody's guess. I know, it doesn't tell the whole story, but to maybe get just a little closer to something factual, here's what I did...

...I took The Ring's end-of-year rankings for 1925, to see how many fights the 10 top contenders (I did not include reigning champions) in each division (80 men in total, as there of course were only 8 divisions back then) had during that year. I found, that they had anywhere from 2 (Harry Wills) to 33 (Young Stribling) - with an average of 13.09! I made the same calcuations for 1930, and then for every 10 years after that (each time only for the 8 classic divisions) and came up with this:

1925 - 13.09
1930 - 10.74
1940 - 9.94
1950 - 8.60
1960 - 5.86
1970 - 5.33
1980 - 4.15
1990 - 3.29
2000 - 2.96
2010 - 2.26
2014 - 2.18

It's interesting to note, that of The Ring's 80 top-10 men (in the 8 original divisions) at the end of 2014, only ONE had more than 3 fights during the year: 10th ranked light heavyweight Artur Beterbiev with 4. In 1925 only 3 of the 80 contenders had less than 5 fights... and 14 HAD 20 OR MORE! Hard to believe, the difference is so enormous - but, then again, maybe not all that surprising to those who browse old-timer records on BoxRec from time to time.

Now the obvious question is of course whether those numbers are representative for the ENTIRE pool of boxers, during those years. On the 1st of January this year, BoxRec had registered 19258 boxers (18161 male + 1097 female) who had been active (at least 1 fight) during last year. They have not yet published the number of pro fights for 2014... but the last several years it seems to have been rather steady around 22,000. If we use this number, the 19258 boxers entered the ring last year an average of approx. 2.28 times. So there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of difference between the top boxers and the whole pool of boxers, when it comes to fight-frequency. At least for the year 2014!

But does this also hold true, when we go back in time? Somehow I doubt that, as it would give us som insane numbers! Let's say, for instance, that there were as many boxers back in 1925 as there are today, and that they did in fact box 6 times, 13.09/2.18, as often. That would give us in the neighborhood of 132,000 fights that year - or more than 5 times as many as 22,900 recorded by BoxRec. So either BoxRec is missing more than 80% of the fights that actually took place, or there were FAR fewer boxers back then... or the 13-fights-a-year average is much too high, when we're talking about the WHOLE boxing population. Or maybe a combination of all 3?

 

Another thing that needs to be considered is the amateur records of modern fighters. Modern boxers often have lengthy amateur careers where they fight every week for a number of years. Their actual ring age may be the same as the old time boxers but after hundreds of amateur bouts they only feel the need to face a major opponent two or three times a year at the professional level. Boxrec doesn't take any of that into account.

Vasyl Lomachenko (396-1)
Guillermo Rigondeaux (374-12)
Gennady Golovkin (345-5)
Matt Korobov (300-12)
Adrien Broner (300-19)
Terry Norris (291-4)
Chris Byrd (275-19)
Kostya Tszyu (259-11)
Sven Ottke (256-47-5)
Stevie Johnston (260-13)
Shane Mosley (250-16)
Virgil Hill (250-11)
Mike McCallum (240-10)
Lucian Bute (235-15)
Odlanier Solís (227-14)
Vernon Forrest (225-15)
Oscar De La Hoya (223-5)
Kennedy McKinney (214-13)
Andre Dirrell (210-26)
Jeff Lacy (209-12)
Vassiliy Jirov (207-10)
Aaron Pryor (204-16)
Tommy Morrison (202-20)
Pernell Whitaker (201-13)
John Mugabi (195-5)
Vitali Klitschko (195-15)
Sergey Kovalev (193-22)
Leon Spinks (181-9)
Michael Nunn (168-6)
Sugar Ray Leonard (165-5)

Modern boxing is like an iceberg with only 10 percent of it's mass above the surface. Some of these guys stepped into their first pro fight with 900 rounds of experience. **** Tiger's whole career is only 677 rounds! Johnny Saxton 504. Beau Jack 854.

I also have to wonder if modern contenders make as much money for 2 fights as they would have for 13 eighty years ago.

Then you have to consider the quality of their opposition. If you fight ten times a year you probably aren't fighting the champ or a top contender every time. There's a thread around here somewhere of ATGs versus top ten competition and nobody has more than about 40. Most don't have 20, even the guys who'd fight 100 times. Take Young Stribling for example. He has 289 fights. About five of them were against big names. You just can't fight top opposition that frequently and expect the human body to hold up. That guy was fighting farmers and local club fighters in what amounts to exhibition matches most of the time. Miguel Cotto and Floyd Mayweather only have a little over 40 fights, but you'd have heard of at least twenty of their opponents: champions, ex-champions, and contenders.

Lastly, I know this point has already been raised, but maybe the fight circuit wasn't that big back then. Fighters fought ten times a year, but then you hear about them fighting the same guys over and over again. Langford and Jeannette, Langford and Wills, Ted Lewis vs Jack Britton, Greb vs Tunney, Murderers' Row, etc.

 

I would have thought those high numbers from the twenties and thirties were mainly concentrated on America and Western Europe.
It would be interesting to find out how many of those were USA based.