Primo Carnera vs. Gerry Cooney

I'm somewhere between that extreme view and the conventional view. At #11 and 12# respectively I rank Foreman and Frazier lower than most, but higher than anyone Louis beat, as in my view they are outliers/ATGs in their own right. The dominance of Wlad, Jeffries and Liston (including pre title run), all of whom I rank top 10, just counts a little more for me.

 

There's a gray area between head to head and greatness, which can probably best be summed up with a chess analogy. (Which is a measurable competitive activity with a long history, albeit different enough that this is *only* an analogy.)

In chess, there are some guys who stand way above their nearest competitors. Fischer, Philidor, and Morphy are good examples. Of those three, Morphy and Philidor wouldn't be competitive against the absolute best today, but they were still really, really good, and might have been able to compete against some modern GMs. Their opposition wasn't as impressive, though: good for the era, but not much more. Fischer was like a higher-level version of that dynamic: he would genuinely be competitive today against the absolute best, but he stood head and shoulders above his competitors back then in a way that he wouldn't now.

Before the computers got better than people, and could finally number-crunch earlier players' abilities somewhat objectively, you had a similar situation to what you see with boxers. Who did great player X beat? How was that guy viewed in his era? You could view several of Fischer's opponents as "greats." But out of that group of historically significant players, probably only Fischer could step out of the 1970s and stand a decent chance against a modern world champion head to head.

Ali and Louis may be in a similar boat. Their absolute domination (in Ali's case, gradually declining domination due partly to medical issues) of their eras suggests that maybe they're outliers, like Fischer in chess. But I'd be a lot less sure about the great, historically significant, but not-ridiculously-dominant guys Ali and Louis faced, like Schmeling, Frazier, Walcott, Foreman.

 

Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing.

Talking of interesting, do you have a top 20, or even 10, at HW?

 

Greatness or head to head?

Head to head, there are too many unanswered questions to know for sure, IMO. Especially because I don't know enough to say for sure how much PEDs changed things. It's probably possible to draw one up for the pre-70s guys, though.

 

Greatness please. I don't have any all time H2H lists for those exact reasons.

 

Depends on the day. Roughly, and in a few un-ordered tiers:

Ali / Louis

Sullivan / Johnson / Lewis / Wlad / Holmes

Tyson / Foreman / Marciano or Frazier or Schmeling



Something like that.

 

Cheers. Interesting that despite your comments, you do rate Foreman, Frazier and even Schmeling as outliers, rather than just good contenders, and given they're in your top 12, presumably as ATGs.

incidentally, aside from Sullivan (who I don't rate because I don't know enough about the opposition he beat), Marciano being a little lower and Schmeling a little higher, your list resembles my own more closely than most I've seen. My 20:

Louis
Ali

Holmes
Lewis
Marciano

Johnson
Wlad

Jeffries
Liston
Tyson
Foreman

Frazier

Wills
Dempsey
Holyfield

Charles
Langford

Bowe
Tunney
Vitali

 

I rate them as greater, but not necessarily talent outliers. Greatness includes all kinds of things. Some of them are about historical or social significance, even.

A head to head list might look pretty different. Wouldn't include Johnson or Sullivan at all, for starters.

Same way that Morphy's opponents are historically very important, great players, but couldn't get close to the title if you time-machined them into today.

 

Well - yes - doing well in one's own era gets you into the conversation but not necessarily ahead of the next guy, even with similar numbers. There is the quality of the wins, manner of victory; the quality and manner of the losses to take into account - who was beaten, who was lost to - context of the bouts... ... ... But quality is as much if not more so driven by the action in the fights themselves, I think.

There's always something beyond the numbers; always at least a touch of subjectivity involved.

That said, I don't think one needs to get into deep detail and assessment to take a loose 'plan view' of the eras over time and gain a sense of where the quality was stacked - and, conversely, where it was not.

 

Ultimately, I think one possible way forward for these questions is to look at them institutionally.

Look at what factors produce progress in measurable sports. Check those factors against boxing history. Things like talent pool; types and quality of athletic training, nutrition, and supplements; recruitment patterns; boxing-specific factors that coaches then and now agree are important, etc.

That still doesn't get you out of subjectivity, but it's at least something to add alongside looking at film and records.

 

It is possible but only in the broadest of terms and I would be less inclined to look at the question of comparative eras through this lens. I am not discounting the factors you mention, the progress you are alluding to or that it might supplement other types of evidence in the wider sense. However, I think it is a study that would render a perspective some layers removed from the competition itself.

This I find problematic since I suspect the results of such an approach would be hard to align with specific cases of relative sporting successes/failures.

 

I agree that it wouldn't be very helpful in explaining the outcome of a specific fight that actually happened. At least not compared to a normal historical analysis.

Where it might be more valuable is assessing the relative strength of groups of contenders -- the guys at the end of the bell curve -- from different eras. What does being in the Ring top 10 mean for somebody in 1930 compared to 2020, for example? What kind of talent pool are these guys sitting on top of?

It might not be useful to give specifics of how a fight would play out, but it might be useful to gauge that nebulous catch-all "fighter quality".

We see some of this even in a single era. For example, people usually didn't think much of Mexican heavyweights in the 80s. Or even "European" heavyweights in the period between the 70s and the fall of Communism.

 

I have taken the liberty of numbering the points of your position, and I will allow myself a couple of observation.

1. I also make this assumption unless told otherwise. However if a fighters best performance is a single outlier, I treat that as a red flag, and if it is a losing effort then I see that as another red flag. So with two red flags I am already questioning whether this fight is a reliable indicator of Cooney's A game.
2. There I disagree. I am very wary of hanging too much expectation on a single very good performance, and I think I have explained why.
3. I think you know my position on this.
4. Even if we ignore my red flags, I don't this this is necessarily the case. Is a losing effort against Holmes really that more impressive than a demolition of Jack Sharkey, who himself might have given Holmes a good fight?
5. Carnera was by no means the only guy who got destroyed by Joe Louis. He also destroyed Max Baer, Max Schmeling, John Henry Lewis and Buddy Baer. Does that mean that none of those guys are any good?
6. Carnera undoubtedly changed his style between teh two Sharkey fights, and it is in this period that his ultimately successful assault on the title takes place. Coincidence? Probably not.
7. It is not so much that I assume equivalence between eras, as I don't feel comfortable assuming the superiority of one era over another. Therefore I compare them as if this equivalence was the case. For the record I am sure that there is a strong equivalence at the low to medium end of the spectrum. A guy who made a living losing in Carnera's era, woudl have fairly effortlessly settle into the same role in Cooney's era.

 

I see where you're coming from. Interesting stuff and there might be something to it. But what methods and measurements would be used for comparison? How granular would the research need to go? And, how many confounding variables would be introduced the further down the rabbit hole one journeyed?

Such a study would be a considerable undertaking. Only a fool or a hero would even attempt it.

 

1) I agree.

2) I think you'd want to look first at studies of improvements in other sports, and find the factors that are cited most commonly. My guess is that you'd see something like talent pool and the presence of modern sports medicine being among them. After that, it would be a long, grinding slog to find proxies for that stuff.

3) And then find the best coaches around and ask them what specific additional stuff to look for in boxing. Repeat slog.

There were *attempts* to do something like this in The Arc of Boxing, which I very much respect as an effort, even if I'm leery of its conclusions and some of its methods.

To take an extreme example: Look at Sullivan's era versus our own. This is, of course, a toy/model of how you might approach it --

Sports medicine: Newspaper reports and manuals contain a lot of how fighters trained, ate, and thought about training. Nutritionists today are generally accepted to know more than Victorian guys, giving us a fairly objective comparison point. Have them assess the quality of meal planning compared to what you see in modern fighters. Same, to a large degree, with modern sports science guys and training. Fighters in Sullivan's era were dehydrating, for example. This is objectively bad. Oh, and they obviously didn't have steroids, whereas between a third and a half of modern top 10 heavies have been caught using them.

Talent pool / recruitment: Even accounting for the differential reporting on Boxrec, the number of active boxers in Sullivan's era compared to now was tiny. This is further supported by the historical fact that boxing was mostly illegal at the time. The physical size of the populations you're drawing from is also somewhat recoverable. People were smaller back then, which means fewer heavyweight-sized young men to choose from. They didn't even have a standard ruleset. You could probably find other proxies like the number of boxing gyms -- which I know Monte Cox cited at one point as evidence of 1920s superiority.

Professionalization: This is a much closer-run thing, but I think you can still see gaps. The guys claiming the heavyweight championship when Sullivan comes along are an old junior middleweight (if that) and a guy who only had a few recorded fights. It didn't take much to get to the top. Boxing itself was, as mentioned, often illegal. There's no institutionalized rating system. Not much of an amateur system connected to the pro game. Even at the end of the period, Corbett is able to shoot to the top without that many fights, working part time as an athletic club teacher and banker. You see some of this kind of thing today as well, but there's more of it back then.