[RING, Dec. 1962] 40 Experts Pick Greatest Heavyweight (Dempsey wins)

Its Unforgiveable Blackness!lol
Okay you found ONE reference but you said this.
Often he'd invite local press to his room to watch him prepare for the evening before he went to the venues. They'd actually watch him take a bath and get dressed, so they could all "marvel" at his nude build, watch him get dressed in the finest clothes and ask him questions. A young Nat Fleischer was one of those reporters.
I'd like some more eaxamples of these often ocurrences you speak of.
And yes you come across as creepy with your comments?
FFS what goes on in some peoples heads?

 

I'm just glad thanks to the internet we've now agreed on the correct opinions, and we can dismiss anyone who has ever diverged too much as a moron. I'm sure future generations will all agree we have it spot on, and marvel that we were the ones to figure it all out.

These stupid idiots of the past. Haven't they even seen a copy of a copy of degraded fragments that have been uploaded to YouTube at the wrong speed? And the old fighters do some stuff differetly under different rulesets and different equipment, therefore they must be useless. I mean it's not like any boxer can be way better than they look or beat someone that looks better than them, even against mutual opponents. Noooo

Have they not seen how a modern athlete sprinting fast on a synthetic track is faster than a student working a part time job was on cinder, proving people are getting better. Do they not even know aliens have been slowly modifying us into a race of super humans year on year? Aging actually isn't thing, it's just that the later generations are so much better you can't keep up, which is why people lose their title to new and improved fighters.

 

Maybe everyone so confident in their cross era fantasy match ups and all time rankings should make a log predicting competitive match ups and current boxer's future careers. See how many they get wrong.

 

Langford was only 1/2" taller than you claimed, but with very long arms, & he fought at weights that were all over the map.
Way heavier than 155 in his HW prime, 175-180.
But still, I cannot see him #1. Though in 1962, he would be at a less dramatic weight disadvantage than later.

 

100%?

 

Better.

 

I have to say i am truly enjoying this thread. I love the odd bit of bizarre.

 

Let's be honest, you can talk about all of them to make them sound terrible, as you can with anyone. Jack Dempsey fought weak opposition and didn't fight the best challengers, but the same can be said for Jack Johnson's lackluster reign, a lot of his best opponents weren't even Heavyweights. How many times was Joe Louis knocked down by mediocre opposition? How many fighter did Joe Louis beat who can really be called great? Gene Tunney at heavyweight is what? Beating a washed up Dempsey, and getting knocked down. Jeffries was battered by the smallest heavyweight champion in Fitz, and another smaller one in Corbett and largely won due to his size. Langford was stopped by a welterweight, and put up little against Jack Johnson. Rocky Marciano's best opponents were old, Light Heavyweights, or old Light Heavyweights, and he still regularly took a beating to get the win.

You can play the same game with pretty much anyone, and I wouldn't be shocked if in the future, enlightened forum posters decide some people most of us rate are really not that good.

 

I don't think any of them had seen any Jeffries fight other than in 1910. While many of the names of the voters I don't know, but most of those I recognize started writing sports no earlier than 1910s. Fleischer started writing for NY Press no earlier than 1906, became sports writer only in 1908 after graduation from college; he didn't mention having been present at Jeffries-Johnson. Barton started writing for Minneapolis News around 1903 and I very much doubt he was given a chance to travel to California to report later Jeffries bouts for that newspaper, although I suppose he could have seen Jeffries-Johnson.

 

Wwhere there any comments on Dempsey ?

 

Chances are Johnson didn't actually tower over them, and this is just bad sensationalist writing. Picasso was 5'3'", born around the same time as Johnson, and lived most of his adult life in Paris, and photos from his youth show almost everyone towering over him, including women. (His friend Braque was 6'1".)

In my experience whenever you find a literary reference claiming that six feet was some towering height in some earlier time, the actual writing itself is much later and the author is probably pulling it straight out of his ass, as a cheap literary device to make the past seem more exotic.

I've read quite a bit of nineteenth century literature and run across numerous references to people's heights, and nothing I've ever found would even faintly suggest that a six foot tall person would be considered some kind of giant. About the closest I can think of is in Moby Dick when a character is described as "a full six feet tall". In Crime and Punishment there's an old woman (Lizaveta) who is described as six feet tall, but although this is obviously noteworthy enough to be remarked upon (as it would be today) Dostoevsky gives not the slightest indication that this is any more unusual than it would be today. In Company K, a short novel set in WWI written by (if I recall correctly) a veteran of that war, one soldier sarcastically remarks that they should get rid of every soldier under 5'9".

Oddly enough there is a passage in War and Peace where some Russian soldiers remark that the French are all dwarves, but they also say in the same conversation that their corpses don't stink, and this seems intended as an example of far-fetched soldier's gossip.

 

I thought Wilt only claimed to screw 10,000 women. Either way it's almost mathematically impossible, let alone pragmatically.

 

I'll make one right now:
Wilder and Joshua won't meet until Wilder is actually old enough for his age to be a somewhat plausible excuse ("Wilder was 33!") but gets knocked out early when the fight happens, and some of the cruder "modernists" start to crow that Wilder lost to Joshua because he was just too skinny to compete against modern 240 pounders, even though he probably hits significantly harder than Joshua and actually loses because he's just too damn sloppy.

This is a completely serious prediction by the way, and I'm about 85% sure this is exactly what's going to happen.