Silly But Honest Heavyweight "Weights"

Anyone over 220 would be too big ,and robotic. They would do little to anyone who boxed since 1800's.

Another thing too consider is the old days didn't let you see the true actual size of the fighter BC the filming technology shrunk them down to fit in the frame rate . Guys like Burns would be closer to HW Tyson and Tua like but not a overweight 220 pounder and Louis like a Frank Bruno type in person.

Fighters of yesteryear would be gigantic today , but than they would be too big. The bigger a fighter is the less effective he becomes . Marciano proved that , the ideal weight for a HW is 192 pounds.

 

The way I picture it is even on your list I can count just one great fighter weighing more than 225. Lennox Lewis, who could make 225 if he had wanted to.

The biggest listed here is Carnera. How many people would back him against anyone else in your list?
Was Fury much better? He beat Klitschko!

 

It might have been more instructive to rank them in chronological order.

That would have shown a general trend towards greater weight, but it would also have shown that it was not exactly a linear trend.

 

The so-called weak Louis Era, had some big-bass fighters on the scene. Buddy Baer, Canera, etc.

 

Probably more big heavyweights then than there were in the 50s and 60s.

 

The money guys and power players always recruit from the Olympics. There always were big jumbo sized heavyweights but they never won tournaments so managers never scouted for the jumbo sized giants.

Along came the Super heavyweight division in amateur boxing...

Finally jumbo heavyweights has somewhere to go. They could win tournaments and encourage investment from professional boxings power players.

 

They were courted actively during the white hope era it seems, with some obvious results that we might point to.

 

Precisely. That's why they weigh boxers. It's not fair on some lumbering 220lb+ man to make him fight a man who weighs a lean 190.

 

This is, to me, a consequence of the increased skill level in the 50s. In the 1930s, being big was enough to make you a challenger. As the skills and training increased, this was not enough any more. The variance in weight was much higher before 1950 than it was afterwards.

If you have ever read Stephen Jay goulds essay on why no one hits .400 any more, I think that the principle is the same. The variance has tightened as the skills become more uniform.

 

I've read Gould's essay (though it was over fifteen years years ago as a kid) and his arguments as I recall them don't really apply to boxing. As I remember most of what he says boils down to two basic points:

1) Baseball players didn't train at all in the off season, and indeed were only semi-professional

2) People claiming that golden era players hit better are neglecting the "arms race" between hitting and pitching

I don't recall Gould ever claiming that training techniques themselves and improved - and if he did he was talking out of his hat - and if he did make such I claim I'm certain he never supported it.

When you say, "as skills and training increased" this is what's known in propositional logic as a suppressed premise. That is, while it's not necessarily false, it certainly can't stand alone and do the work a premise is supposed to do without anterior argumentative support.

 

True the smaller guy usually wins They should really cut the limit to 225 to give the bigger guys a fighting chance.

 

It was a while ago I read it. What I took from it was that when people hit .450, there were also players hitting .150. The variance has decreased, so now no one hits .400 or .200.

I'm not going to hold myself to the standards of formal logic here. But it is observable in the data that the freakishly large heavyweight (by the standards of their time) disappeared around 1945. This is around the time when boxing skills show a marked improvement, to my eyes at least. And it is what one would expect. When very few people are highly skilled, a big tough man with little skill can prevail.

 

Well, without (I hope) being an anal retentive stickler for formal rigor, I'll just say that analysis, while certainly not absurd, doesn't do much to rule out alternative hypotheses.

 

No. Most theories dont, though, they present themselves rather than all possible alternatives.

Is there a way of posting a graphic here? I have one which is help to the discussion.