Rank the eight heavyweight champions

But listen, I want to be clear here, Corbett isn't getting nearly enough credit for what he did with Jackson in this thread.

Jackson was Corbett's tenth professional fight. Tenth. Jackson was one of the literal best fighters in history up until that point. I forget how many fights Jackson had and a lot of them were shorter distance, but he was an absolute veteran of the ring at somewhere in the region of sixty fights, as technically complete as anyone had ever been at that size.

Corbett's "seasoning" consisted of a twenty-five round victory over an inexperienced Choynski, a six round fight with an undertrained Jake Kilrain and a bizarre four round "fight" with McCafferey.

Perhaps because he was such an unpleasant human being, Corbett seems undernourished for going sixty rounds in these circumstances - and being the man demanding the fight continue. It was Jackson's team that pushed for a stoppage draw.

It was absolutely heroic.

 

I think that this is actually not that unreasonable tbh. I know that Pollack feels that it was far and away Jackson who was the more complete technician. But in the light of my last post I can only insist that it was Corbett who benefited from their real life contest and Jackson who was hurt by it. One was up, and there's only one way to go after that, one was sumitting.

I think Corbett would have kicked Jackson's ass in a rematch.

But, that said, at his very best, it's fair to say Jackson was the better man, although this is not proven. There was definitely something very, very special about him and his story may be the saddest in all of boxing, which is ****ing saying something.

 

I understand, but a) have now lost all interest and b) flat out disagree that a fighter who is not training and fighting can be prime. I just don't see it, at all, at any level.

Either I am fundamentally wrong about boxing or Corbett couldn't possibly be prime for Fitz. Whichever it is I definitely don't want to talk about it any more

 

Very true, and the place would be awful if we all did.

Plus, calling head-to-head prime-for-prime from 140 years ago is a total crapshoot anyway.