Ray Arcel on the black fighters of the 30's.

You have been here for a long time, and is obviously a very knowledgeable poster. Over the years, you must surely have noticed that, almost without exception, old-timers (be it trainers, reporters or the fighters themselves) believe "their era" (when they first got into boxing) was superior to what came after. Best example of this is of course Nat Fleischer... who believed the greatest fighters of all time were those who just happened to be around, when he first got into boxing as a young man.

Now Mr. Fleischer had of course seen many of the old-timers in the flesh, which I obviously haven't. Does this mean I have to agree, that Corbett would beat Louis, that Ketchel was the best middleweight ever... and that Archie Moore shouldn't even be included in a list of the 10 best 175 pounders? I don't think so... surely one must be allowed to question opinions like that.

Fleischer, Arcel and everybody else are of course entitled to their opinions - just as I should be entitled to take what they say with a grain of salt. That's all I'm saying!

 

So because he holds one opinion that you don't like, we doubt everything else that he says? All those decades of front line experience at the very top end from WW1 to the 80s, having watched and trained hundreds of fighters from Benny Leonard to Roberto Duran, and we take his opinion with a grain of salt? The greatest trainer of all time? That's a farcical line of thinking mate. Where are the rest of Arcel's dubious opinions that provide enough of a counterweight to his achievements in the sport in order to take what he says with a pinch of salt? Fecking nora, you'd need a library of books full of bollocks all of them thicker than War and Peace to offset that.

Or is more along the lines of that you saw a single slightly questionable observation in that ocean of knowledge and experience, and it fed into your own pre-existing and frequently displayed bias against the olden days?

The bias where you pop up in threads in the alleged name of fairness and objectivity to challenge any opinion or statement that infers that a bygone era might hold a particular given advantage over a more modern one and label it as rose tinted glasses etc? The thing is, I've never seen you do the opposite as a measure of objectivity. The boxing media and fandom is chock full of ignorant opinions held by people in positions of prominence. If I were to guess, I'd say that those people vastly outnumber a few of us on an internet forum, and yet I've never seen you challenge any dubious pro-modern argument on here.

So I'd say that you hold enough of your own biases for your own opinion not to be taken seriously on the matter. I understand too that you're an older person than most of us? In your seventies? It's admirable that you don't hold the prejudices found in some of the people of your generation, and your knowledge of stats and trivia has long had my respect. But it comes across to me sometimes as though you seem to be resolutely determined to a contrarian degree to not favour anything boxing-related about your own generation or any generation prior in order to prove to that you're objective. Being objective means taking things on their own merit rather than shoehorning them into a preconceived agenda, the very thing that you've accused Arcel of doing. Unless I'm mistaken (which is possible).