20 is still young and if you're a Heavyweight, it's conceivable to pick up a belt...because most Heavyweights fight well into their 30s...but I can't see any of the guys in the footage making it to that level...all seemed significantly older than 20.
There was a kid outta Ohio St. that walked to the ring with his team mates. Looked impressive as hell. What the hell happened to him?
Seems like a guy starting at 20+ would find it hard to be an amateur and at HW it seems tough to do "on the job training" in boxing. I would say it is damn near impossible at HW. It is an either/or scenario. 99% of the time the opponents will either be a bum or have enough pop to starch a beginner. Below LW you may be able to bring a guy up slowly facing better skills, but keeping him away from TnT punchers. At HW it is almost impossible. He would get starched by or have a war with the first decent guy you put in front of him. Ruining his future.
This is bull**** and a total cop out for hurt US egos these days. Ever hear of a football player becoming a great boxer? They act is if they can pick up any random football player and turn him into a great boxer, which is total propaganda, as if Euros did't have great competing sports as well (ever hear of hockey or soccer...i.e., the biggest and richest sport on planet earth? ). Good athletes do not necessarily translate into good boxers (look up Jameel McCline or Micheal Grant). You have to be born to fight and that's that.
football players have weak chins. You see them taking a ton of hits in football. Won't translate well into boxing. putting a ball into a hoop and wearing football pads is a lot less strenuous than taking hard shots to the head for 12 rounds.
You make no sense. The point is that for every one NFL player you see on the field X number of players dedicated themselves and sucked. For every DOMINANT player you see on the field X * Y players dedicated themselves. It has depleted the American talent pool at higher weights. Please point out a POPULAR and well paid Euro sport where it is regular for men that are 230 lbs to play and size is the deciding factor. You can't. If you can it isn't recent. The NFL and NBA have killed American HW boxing.
They're not saying that if you grab one of those football players and put him in the ring he's going to be heavyweight champ. No. It takes years of work. That kid who at age 15 should be sparring, is instead on the basketball court or football field. Why? It's safer, more lucrative, and he can get a god damn scholarship. It's not like Wlad and Vitali started when they were 20. They came from a school devoted to the sport. We have ZERO equivalent to that in America.
What's bull**** is your failure to wrap your brain around the context of Teddy and Kenny's statement. You completely missed the point yet at the same time expounded on their thesis. Allow me to simplify things for the mentally handicapped: an athletically gifted American heavyweight with undiscovered boxing talent (you said it yourself "those born to fight") is in all practical purposes playing in the NFL or the NBA. Athletically gifted youth in America are identified at an early age and groomed for football and basketball, not boxing. Do you get it now?
It is true to an extent. American school is one of the only places that kids get physical activity due to constant fear pumped into parents. So the solution is to keep kids at home with video games. Now even that physical activity is under threat due to budget cuts. There are 101 factors as to why HW boxing sucks but the top ones are: -- Rise of cable and huge NFL and NBA contracts -- Rise of PPV and removing boxing from televison -- A generation watching the decline of Muhammad Ali
Basically. If you take the top 10 most dominant defensive line backers my guess is that no lest than 3 of them could have been HW champion of the world.
Back in the day, football legend and Muhammad Ali friend, Jim Brown, gained a sudden interest in boxing well into his football career. Brown figured if he was a professional athlete (one of the greatest) in one of the toughest sports ever invented....and could handle himself in the NFL, he could succeed as a professional boxer. Why not? He then told Ali about his ambition. He even thought he might be able to hang with Ali somewhat in Ali's own sport. Ali advised against it and assured him that he would be wasting his time. Brown disagreed and wanted to know why. Ali could not explain it in words that Brown could understand, so he chuckled a little, and slapped Jim with a multi slap, lightening quick combination in fractions of a second, to demonstrate exactly what he meant. Brown quickly realized how helpless he was, and even more so if those slaps were punches, and that he was never going to be a boxer. Great running back though.
Euros don't understand this in the least. I've tried explaining it. They don't understand what kind of athletes we have. They sure as hell don't understand what kind of money they make. Watch....somebody will probably try to tell me that one of their soccer players is as big as any NFL player and that they get paid just as much. I don't ****ing think so!