The evolution of boxing

Boxing is different to plain athletics, in say the 100 meter sprint the more modern the champ the better, the are judged purely on speed, in other words they race to clock. Complex sports like boxing, rugby league and american football evolve vastly different, in these sports the rules and equipment have changed constantly and this for an example I will use rugby league, unlike rugby union it's father code rugby leagues rules have constant changes, once it was a bloodsport so bloody many boxers would never tread there, better to face one man face to face than to face 13 thugs wanting to break your face, arms and knees and from different directions, there was no tv so thugs got away with pure barbarism, another massive change was that the game went from unlimited tackle rules to being limited to just 6 tackles, this virtually made the game a totally different sport in many ways... then the halfbacks who always had to put the ball squarely into a scrum centre suddenly were allowed to put the ball anywhere in the scrum instead of the centre, so they just put the ball between the second row and the lock who was the guy at the back meaning scrums are meaningless cos the side whose halfback holds the ball gets the ball back EVERY time... now this meant that the position of Hooker, who was the guy between the two props whose job it was to hook at the ball with his feet in the middle was now obsolete.. The sport has rule changes nearly every year so there fore every decade is so different from the decade before, in reality no player fro today would succeed in the league of fifty years ago and nor would he ever want to ga back to that, and the player of fifty years ago wouldn't even recognise the the game as the one he played, he would have to learn 80 per cent of the game again from scratch
Boxing is similar to rugby in that respect.... we had 4 oz gloves and fought up to and over 40 rounds... you had to know a very different set of skills, like swordfighting which gave birth to boxing techniques you had to know how to feint and parry blows and hit as many times as you could to the body or risk breaking your knuckles on a skull or the hipbone which would surely shatter your hands. You cant just cover your face with the gloves and your belly with your elbows,, the small gloves mean there are many gaps and the small gloves can fit into places neatly like the solar plexus, every karate expert knows the solar plexus is a prime target because bare knuckle fists fit inside that gap so nicely the pain that can be felt is extremely awful and this is exactly what Fitz did to destroy Corbett. try doing that with huge fat gloves... i could go on and on but I hope you are beginning to understand my point... complex sports need a complex set of skills and this means a guy with a massively muscled body like a guy who runs the 100 meter sprint or the guy who has to swim freestyle for 200 meters is not necessarily an advantage to a boxer, indeed many great boxers physiques are lean, completely unlike those of an olympic weightlifter or a wrestler.

 

Greeting Pug! A good post for discussion. If you've been here for any length of time, you'll know my feelings on your thread.
I Totally Disagree. Athletes, in any era, have to be judged in the era they competed in. There are equipment differences (golf, pole vaulting for example). Then there are the physical differences, too many to mention.
Who knows what a Jesse Owens would have accomplished had he been born in the 1980's?
Who knows what the Klits would have accomplished had they been born in the 1890's?
Who knows what the Miami Dolphins 'supposedly the greatest team ever' would have done in 2000? (I know the answer to that one )
IMHO boxing is not any exception to the eras debate for any number of reasons.
For all the reasons you've mentioned, boxing may be THE example of era differences. Larger men, PED's, modern technique (of which the 'old guys' hadn't had a chance to take advantage of and of which the 'new guys' weren't restricted by).
Many on board here (some of whom have more boxing knowledge than myself) see me as some sort of 'troll' when I call them out when they post these ridiculous era matchups!
It's interesting, and fun, to post a cross-eras mythical matchup but placing fighters in a different era and THEN wondering 'what-if?' leads to some interesting outcomes.
Examples: A 1919 Tyson vs. a 1989 Dempsey?
A 30's Ray Leonard vs. an 80's Henry Armstrong?
A 1985 Ezzard Charles vs. a 1945 Michael Spinks?
The list could go on and on...
Another point: The 'old' guys (before big bucks got in the profession's craw) fought constantly! The new (late millennium, new millennium) fighters are lucky to fight twice a year.
Lastly (and I've said this before), if anyone denies that Sugar Ray Robinson was not THE greatest pugilist of all time then IMO they need a brain scan to determine their sanity!
Put Ray prime 1980-1990-2000-2010? Line up the horizontal bodies and drag 'em out!! Great thread Pug!

 

Jowcol, I am coming around to your way of thinking(despite still putting up cross era mythical match ups!). There are too many variables and it's all guesswork, really.

The evolution of boxing is also quite complicated, I feel. As you and the OP said, the moderns have access to PED's and high tech equipment, dieticians, strength coaches, etc , but as others have said on here the competition in the 40's and 50's was more intense. This could level things out to some extent.

Then, there is the argument that the modern training is not necessarily better, just different. There seems to be more emphasis on strength and power due to using weights, whereas even in Ali's time it was endurance based and weights were a no no.

My personal opinion is greats are great in any era. The things that made them stand out in their own era would still be good enough to carry them through. Is anyone going to tell me that Don Bradman or Viv Richards wouldn't excel in modern cricket? Or Pele wouldn't hack it in football, now? Not having it!

 

I've been very vocal about this. I should have got the thread moved to Classic.
http://www.boxingforum24.com/showthread.php?t=546140

 

Men fighting men.

Boxing is structured combat. If both men play by the same rules and have the same preparation, it doesn't matter if one was born 100 years later.

 

- If they have different rules and preparation then they are used to, they would fight differently, certain things that were inimitable quirks may be lost; as soon as you know it, you're filling in blanks for the fighter you support.
It's a futile process.

I'm sure there are some people here who would say Willie Pep would beat Guillermo Rigondeaux, judging on how they *actually* fought. To that, I disagree.

 

They must have the same rules and preparation. You can't say one fighter is allowed to stand over the fallen man and the other has to return to the neutral corner. One man is allowed an 8 week camp and the other needs to have fought twice in then 8 weeks.

You can watch the skillset of Pep and Rigo, put them in a situation where they have equal preparation and the same rules and determine the better man would win and that better man is Pep.

There is nothing wrong with that whatsoever.

 

If you use running/athletics as the guide of how to measure success, then anyone who suggests Muhammed Ali is the greatest ever is in for a rude shock. No sixties fighters from any decade (or seventies for that matter) hold a world running record. It is almost certain that Hagler wouldnt compete in the middleweight division. Tyson and HOlyfield would be virtually no chance of keeping up with todays fighters. In fact even Lennox Lewis would be unlikely to compete against todays fighters.

Personally, i cant see this theory being true, but it is possible.

 

Well that is the Pep for example that people are saying would beat Rigo.
All of what you have mentioned in the first paragraph has an accumulative effect on conditioning anyway, so it will yet be unfair if there's an 8 week camp only for Pep to get up to scratch. Pep would actually end up outweighing Rigo considerably, anyways.

Also, there's nothing reasonable in just saying 'look at their skill sets, let them go at it with the same conditions' because their point-scoring philosophies although similar, were not the same. Furthermore, refer back to the point I made about quirks.

 

Its much less training, nutrition, and PED usage than raw numbers. Boxing started out as a sport largely confined to US and Great Britain, and originally, didn't even have full penetration as a sport there. Both countries were additionally considerably smaller than they are now. Over the years, its grown more and more in terms of raw numbers of practitioners and accessibility to more people and more places. The US is vastly more populated now, pro boxing expanded to the old communist block a couple decades ago, and its now expanding to other places in the world that never really practiced it. Even where the raw number of practitioners is no higher than it was 50 years ago, there are many more athletes with the option of practicing it. I.E., unusually large or athletic people who have an inclination toward fighting are going to find their way there, and there are many more unusually large or athletic people now than before just because of population growth and market penetration.

If you have a group of 100 people and a group of 1000 people, the odds are overwhelming that the latter group will have much more diverse abilities than the smaller group, simply because they are much larger. That's logic that really can't be avoided except by desperate, irrational arguments, and it applies to boxing 100%.

In all athletic events with tangible records, those records consistently get replaced with the passage of time, mostly for the above reasons, along with a generalized tendency for humans or even life forms in general to learn, adapt, and improve in response to their environment. Those athletic events cover a whole host of attributes, range in complexity and often have very little in common with each other. All logic makes it overwhelmingly likely that non tangible sports like boxing have seen a similar improvement, especially considering the above factors and considering the much more numerous larger fighters at the HW ranks. The only argument that go against this really don't confront the above facts, but instead rely on logically tenuous conclusions that are overwhelmingly unlikely to have any credence. Most major, professional sports or even boxing commentators that I've heard acknowledge the improvement (Rafael and Kellerman come to mind). The ones that don't usually have an axe to grind (old champ Holmes, who wants to think he's the best, and Burt Sugar, senile and trying to sell his classic boxing stuff, both come to mind).

 

If both men had an 8 week camp, I would like to think both were professional enough to make weight. If the weigh in is 24 hours prior there are measures some take to be the heavier man on fight night, if it's on the day weigh in then both would weigh the same.

If both are aware of the rules of the bout (10 point must, extra point for a kd, 4 scoring criteria) then both would fight to those rules. There is only one fight I'm history I can recall where a fighter disregarded the scoring criteria to fight his own fight.

Ok then what quirks do you think Pep loses out on being given an 8 week camp? Or what quirks do you think Rigo loses out on being put through a more rigorous gauntlet of fights?

Would you prefer it if Pep was to fight every other week, Rigo fight every other year and then the two face up with Pep fighting to a 15 round limit and Rigo fighting to a 12 round limit, with Rigo following the 10 point must and Pep following round scoring?

 

Nice post, but boxing cannot be compared to athletics in that athletics to be frank, measures athletic performance only.

Boxing measures skill, athletic performance, will (heart, desire etc.) and other factors.

If boxers improved year on year or decade on decade, then on that note, we would have-irrefutably-the finest collection of fighters the world has ever (ever!) seen, all active right now.

Who thinks that is the case?

If there is but one example of this NOT being the case, then the theory that boxers improve steadily and constantly each year or 5 years or decade, is flawed. And thus cannot be logically supported.

 

Thanks for your respectful post, good to be able to debate respectfully. We'll have to agree to disagree. But I would say there are a number of different attributes in any sport, heart is important in sprinting etc as well. And many sports with a tangible result (swimming vs say shot put) have nearly as little in common with each other as they do with boxing. And the progression is not immediate, but rather gradual. Certain elements in boxing improve over time (experience, chin and power can), so fighters can last longer than with other sports, although there are older competitors even in swimming etc). And, style is an important aspect, which will further complicate the natural progression. So, while 30 years ago there were contenders who could beat some of todays contenders, todays contenders would beat substantially more of those contenders. Go 20 years before that and the imbalance would be even more. I don't dispute that there are elements of boxing that may make progression more complicated than other sports, but there's too many factually identifiable reasons pointing to gradual progression for it not to exist.

 

This is a brilliant point and one I subscribe to.:good

A lot of people are coming around to the idea of a man having to suit a set of circumstances of the time. Being the best boxer in one period requires different things when the rules, equipment and number of rounds effect things like pace, training and the actual way to fight.

A punch in the face is still a punch in the face. It's combat rather than sport.

Boxing has changed a lot but has always required super talented fighters throughout its history. Each having to adapt to that time under those circumstances. One time being better than another is more a matter of taste than anything that can be proven.