I read the book The Arc of Boxing recently and made me really think about the state of boxing. I looked at Boxrec and listed all and active and the search showed and it had a number of 882. The Arc of Boxing made a statement and I dont have it in front of me to reference but sometime in the 40s there were 2000 active boxers in the state of New York alone. So if the numbers of active boxers have declined so dramatically can people really argue against guys like Marciano and Tunney in comparison of todays fighters who face far less daunting odds to make it to the top? Can we really say that a guy like Floyd is worthy of being considered an in top 25 all time P4P? Thoughts? Am I wrong in the dramtic decline in numbers?
The 882 are the number of PAGES... so with 20 names on each page, there are actually more than 17,000 active boxers in the world today.
Wow I really screwed that up. Still if I just take the 17,000 active today and the 2,000 active in New York in 1940's that would equate to 12% (2,000 / 17,000) of boxers, if the boxing population stayed the same. I can't imagine New york ever represented 12% of the world boxing population, therefore I would imagine the number had to be significantly higher. If New YorK represented say 5% of the boxing world in 1940 that would translate into 40,000 professionals.
i know there was a decline in boxing in the uk in the 70's due to full employment and the like. maggie thatcher put that right though and the number of boxers must have increased since then
