Serious thoughts on this Harry Greb shadow boxing video?

You might appreciate this, since you've been on the forum at least as long as I have.

Remember when people called 6'3", 210 pound fighters "superheavyweights"? And the Marciano and Dempsey fans would come up with all kinds of attempted bargaining: "190 is enough to beat anybody, and Marciano was 185...wait, he was once 188 pounds...that's *almost* 190..."

And now the 210 pound fighters we accorded "superheavyweight" status back in 2001 stand in the same position that Marciano and Dempsey once occupied.

Unfortunately, I think the march of time answered the question of what a boxer's ideal weight is. At least for the foreseeable future, that answer is, "Bigger."

It's a funny old world.

 

Yours is an honest and consistent creed.

Except for the Cribb thing.

 

You're fixating on Heavyweights with an eventual eye to everything Ali, obviously. An open division which is a vastly different debate to boxing as a whole. I still remember loads of us chuckling at Corbett and co vs the likes of Ali and Holmes, even back then.

Back to boxing overall tho, where would you see the improvements from the 40's, some 75 years ago? Again, improvements should be obvious via that amount of time passage even if they was just trickling.

 

I always found heavyweights more interesting, since they're genuinely the best fighters in the world. It's a common preference.

Probably not in the way you mean it.

Ali is just the point where most people put up the greatest (no pun intended) resistance. The forum doesn't exactly overflow with offended Patterson fans, and it's already marginalized the Marciano fans. People defended Johnson for a while, and told me I was ignorant to believe he lacked modern boxing skills, but they eventually seem to have come around (or left).

Maybe, but the open division is the debate that interests me.

Athletic training, sports science, rehydration techniques.

I'm not a professional trainer. I'm not going to get into whether there were advances in technique since the 40s. Probably not much. The fundamentals seem pretty similar.

 

Aye…the idea than a prime Ali (height and weight) is going to be dominant in modern day heavyweight boxing, just won’t happen, and I’ve said this for at least 20 years. It’s not that they can’t “beat” the best, they may, but fighting much bigger guys time after time after time would take too much out of them. I’d love Usyk to beat Fury, I think he has the skillset to go close but i don’t think for a minute that Uysk is going to be a dominant heavyweight champ that cleans out the division over a number of years.

 

I think overall boxing is more comparable “then and now” to most sports due to its limitations, such as weight class obviously (apart from heavies) , how fundamentally basic it is (fistfighting wearing the same ounce gloves) and the fact that boxers were so much fitter than many sportsmen 75 years ago. Compare say, a tennis player or footballer (soccer) player to their modern day equivalent and the fitness levels are miles apart, but no so much with boxers, which at least make the debate thought provoking and lively.

 

Not sure how far I'd go, but the arguments I've seen from the modern folks are pretty decent. They're readier to point to social changes in boxing as an institution, data from scientific fields and other sports outside boxing, etc. That's more the kind of fight this really is. The most sustained counterarguments I've seen came from Cox and "The Arc of Boxing," although these both try to defend the 1920-1950 period, roughly, and wouldn't really help someone trying to defend the 60s and 70s from everything that came before and after.

What complicates all this, too, is that boxing is a sport of deep history and tradition, with LOTS of emotion swirling around it. It was a nostalgic sport in Cribb's day. Still is.

 

Very true CT, a lot of sport is like this though. I remember a few years ago a Manchester Utd footballer was asked to compare their winning team to the same club from the 1960s, he said “we’d win 10-0” , cue a lot of outrage. I remember thinking 1. He was right but 2. It sounded a bit uncalled for and he didn’t come out of it very well. I always remember Tyson saying (about Larry) “if he was at his best I wouldn’t stand a chance” and, while I don’t believe he meant it, it was a nice thing to say. So I think sportsmen (or women) are often reluctant to disparage older generations, especially those they’ve learnt from, and when they do, they often come across as a massive arsehole.

 

Yeah, I think it's an open question. If I was forced to commit, I'd say the moderns usually win. But you're right that it's fuzzy in some ways. It's complex enough that it deserves to be discussed calmly, but this happens less often than I'd like. Boxing invites heated debates, and always has.

 

My sister does the “your life depends on it” ultimatum for loads of sports comparisons , including boxing, and I usually say the same.

 

You know something? I wish it were otherwise.

 

Definitely.

 

Absolutely, but your improvement theory lay in a thread on Harry Greb and was a blanket statement. Going to Heavyweights murkies the water as it's an open division in which guys have been getting bigger. All other weights are a better overall barometer as they are governed by weight and it's orange and oranges. There's always going to be plenty going for bigger is better.

The way i mean is that in your opinion Ali and co are overrated on the forum vs big modern heavyweights. You think they've been bypassed. You can't go at it head on for obvious reasons so you are nipping away vaguely at the sides in the hope of making a little headway.

Ali and Patterson is like comparing the Grand Canyon to a crack in the bedroom wall. The worm has turned on Marciano as more and more users got onboard the train, particularly newer posters of whom many went with the flow. A lot of younger newer users are also very partial to the whole size thing. Johnson's era is far enough back and battled differently enough for it to be fair to opine boxing has passed him by. I personally never thought his style/skills would carry over to far into the future. I doubt the majority of the forum would have been plugging him over too many ATG's forward of his time.

Yes but the lower divisions show us boxing has, if anything, devolved in many ways despite all this new science etc

Rehydration is a different matter altogether and simply born out of the change in rules. It's just a change in weigh in strategy.

Where can we see all the advantages, in the ring, that all this athletic training and sports science has allowed? There's still a plethora of boxers running around without a big punch. I can't see any lighting the arena's up with more speed than the likes of SRR, SRL and co. Stamina certainly hasn't improved, to say the least. Even in the big boys I've seen Wilder gassed after sitting back all fight and then going hard for a minute or two. In the third Fury match he moved a bit and was busier than usual and started to tire in no time and he's one of the only lean ones.

There's no way on earth skills have improved. Flash24 has given his reasons why countless times now and IMO he absolutely nails it. You don't get better at something without practising it plenty, for starters. I also take heed of the claims there is no-where near the amount of skilled trainers getting around like there was many decades prior.

 

Worth keeping in mind that EVERYONE in modern athletics, ie from the early 80s is using PEDs. I have read a few books on this and cycling and it is bonkers but to be a top class athlete now you have to use some kind of performance enhancement. I would go as far as to say athletics is more corrupt than boxing although both lag a loooong way behind cycling. Hell the former Eastern block countries were pumping their athletes with drugs from the early 70s, many of the greatest champs from those countries and era are suffering horrible side effects from this. The US athletes then took over once the Soviet Union fragmented and now China are getting good at it.

 

Interesting, I am the opposite and have always preferred the lighter weights. Faster and more entertaining, plus many of those guys can punch. Just as many exciting KOs in lighter weights as HW. Also I suspect the recognized best fighter P4P in the world each year has more often been from weights other than HW.