The evolution of boxing

Lindrum is one of my heroes too, I am an A grade snooker player and have been for like 20 yeras, Lindrum is the greatest cueist in the history of cue sports (billiards, snooker, 8 ball and 9 ball pool) and that is simply the truth, he was like Bradman and Darcy and Heather MacKay freaks, once in a millenium types (except for Darcy because I can't prove that because boxing is less reliant on stats), why they were so good is impossible to know, we just know that these three are so much better because the stats prove that beyond doubt. In the case of Squash and MacKay I am not totally sure of her achievements, I read somewhere that in every British Championship (which was basically the equivalent of the world title) that not only did she never lose a match... she never even lost a set OR EVEN A POINT... but I am not sure if this is fact or fiction ... but we do know she never lost a match... proof enough, if the rest is actually true then oh man she is not a human but an alien from outer space.

We Aussies have produced many other amazing talents but you have to put them on a tier below the big three..... Herb Elliot would not have a chance in the mile against the top Olympic milers today, but no miler ever dominated to the extent that he did.... from the very first race he ever ran in to his incredible triumph and last race at the Olympic games, Herb won every single race he ever ran in, at any distance........... Then there is that woodchopping dude from tasmania whose name I cannot recall but he was a freak too.... it was simply a waste of time anyone trying to beat him, he is still the greatest competitve lumberjack of all time... period.

Yep we have left the realm of boxing entirely here Boiler but hey.... I love pointing out to Americans just how awesome some of our top tier sportsmen and women are.... How good are we at Netball and rugby League and Cricket (yeah not so good at this moment at cricket but Steve Smith may just become the 2nd greatest batsman to ever live behind Bradman.... since his debut ton over two years ago he has averaged 72.79 runs an innings WOW just f****ng WOW and his whole career average is 56.27 and that is obviously rising at great speed).... overall in those sports we have been the most dominant nation, We haven't lost a test series since 1970, just some tests along the way to NZ and the odd one against England but never a whole series, WE ROCK... in Netball the dominance is even greater and in cricket we have won 2 thirds more tests than England head to head and the other countries we have blitzed... then there was tennis from the late 40s to the early 70's........ Basically we are a nation where sport is our religion. And we have a good track record in boxing as well considering all the obstacles the Yanks put in our way.

 

I think that part is evolution. People are bigger now, not more skilled but bigger.

So there are more bigger men, meaning more big men in the gym, more big men in the amateurs and hence more big men turning pro. So the chances of getting a big champ are higher.

Between Willard and Bowe there's been no SHW champs.

 

but that's how it's always been oversized guys being less skillful generally than the rest. If there are more fighting each other skillful ones emerge. There being more of them might have less to do with them taking over than the fact that it is easier for oversized giants to be effective than it used to be. The modern heavyweight division is slower, the equipment, rules, training and pace is not comparable to the past. So much so that age is less of an advantage. If primo carnera was fighting shorter old bodybuilders in 10oz gloves over 12 rounds slowed further in trying to match primos weight carnera might have stood more chance of dominating.

yes there are more around but why would a smaller guy want to fight a giant now?

Big men are not enhancing their size so much as the shorter guys are at heavyweight. It becomes harder to overcome reach the heavier you get. Shorter heavyweights are heavier for their frame by comparison to an actual giant. Taking away stamina advantage. The bigger gloves suit the biggest guys more too. With more cushion they can block a blow easier with comparatively less skill and lean all over the shorter guy. Smaller guys need a cleaner hit just to earn respect. So why would a shorter guy even want to fight a giant now?

Carnera was certainly a super heavyweight. Terrell and Tucker were also 6'6" and there were many challengers like C00ney, Buddy Baer, Wepner, Bugner, Abe Simon, Leroy Jones, Carl Williams that size too so these big guys were often relevent throughout history. Difference was with smaller gloves they were defending against faster guys with a better work rate. They had to be more sparing with their work to pace themselves over championship distance and the guys they were fighting were not doing weight training and encumbering themselves with excess, artificial weight.

 

David Haye is one of the fastest HW fighters in history. Wlad is one of the most skilled fighters today.

People fight the giants to try to get the richest prize in boxing.

Carnera was, I forgot about him. No the difference is the giants then we're more like freak occurrences.

Tucker might well have been champ were it not for Tyson or Holy being around.

Lewis was at his best against Rahman in the rematch, I see no reason for him to be significantly lighter than that.

 

Wlad is one of the most effective today. Effectiveness is as good as skill. A lot of that effectiveness relies upon having every possible physical advantage too.

And when they do they often play into giants hands by coming in so heavy with big gloves and shorter arms. With modern gloves so much more is stacked against the shorter armed fighter at heavyweight these days than ever before. It is therefore logical to conclude that this could be why the giants are more effective now than any point in history.

but on the whole more successful head for head than average sized heavyweights? If this can be proved true you could be onto something but I don't think it is. Do you think if you put the modern gloves on Carneras championship opponents he would have fared any worse or better? Would he up his tempo if the rounds were cut from 15 to 12 and do you think modern artificial weight gained upon Jack Sharkey, Tommy Laughran, Paulino Uzcudun and Max Baer would have hindered or helped their efforts against Carnera?

Tucker was good but like Tubbs, Dokes and Thomas he really got a shot at the title with no real world class form to speak of. If he was matched harder would he have made the grade? A lot of belt holders crashed and burned because their step up fight was for a belt and tgey lost the next fight.

Lennox was less than 230lb nine times even with all the advances in modern training. Why do you see no reason why under old conditions he could not be significantly lighter than what he weighed in the much changed future at age 36?

Against Rahman Lewis was past his physical prime aged 36 years and two months. Joe Louis was around that age fighting Rocky Marciano. Perhaps modern training and advances in reducing wear and tear preserved Lewis more but after 12 years as a pro (10 at World level) after the eight years at international Olympic level during the amateurs it's hard to imagine lewis really at his best aged 36.

Would 12 years under 1940s training and boxing conditions even have preserved Lewis so well or allowed him to grow so heavy?

 

I'm not much of a believer in the evolution of sports by way of training, nutrition, and all the other **** that gets spouted by people using the "it stands to reason" logic.
The evidence points to two sources of advancement - mass participation as suggested already - boxing has less participants than it used to, whereas sprinting has many, many more.
The second is science (ignoring the current doping allegations). The shoes sprinters wear are designed to be light, nimble, and have outstanding grip. Millions is spent on developing the surface they run on for grip and bounce. The 100m 10 second barrier was broken in 1963 - 9.9 seconds. Give that fella modern shoes and track and he'll shave a few more hundredths off. Hardly much of an improvement in over 50 years.
For the participation element, the evidence can be seen by breaking sports down geographically as opposed to absolute global records. In the UK, running boomed in the seventies during a fad. By the eighties we produced some stellar runners.
A guy like Steve Jones - the British marathon runner, was winning the London Marathon. Jones had a full time job, no nutritionist, and trained by running.
Fast forward 30 years and team GB's very best athletes, who train full time, have an army of sports psychologists, nutritionists, and train at altitude and recover in hyperbaric chambers. These guys are nowhere near the times of Jones. If modern gubbins actually did anything, this wouldn't be the case.

Jones was simply genetically blessed, but picked from a far larger pool than the current crop of British distance runners.

There was a documentary a couple of weeks ago called How Far, How Fast, which looked at Olympic athletes physiologically and pointed the finger at those who excel being different from the rest of us (Colin Jackson the hurdler and 110m world record holder having 12 times the number of fast twitch muscle fibres of a regular man, for example)

Bottom line, the more people participate, the greater the odds of having one of these physiological marvels

 

Yes, the more people participate, and the more you have access to participate, the greater the odds. There are more boxers now, not less. Even more, there are more athletic people with access to boxing, than ever before.

 

And by your reasoning, the reason why the 1940s produced so many great champions, and solid contenders was because there were thousands of licensed pro fighters in the USA alone, there were a tremendous amount of fight clubs scattered all over the country allowing young fighters to learn their trade, and earn a living fighting monthly or more. As I posted before in the New York City area alone there was at LEAST a fight club operating every day if the week except Sunday. There were so many more fulltime boxing trainers plying their trade. Why for instance, every year in the Golden Gloves Finals at MSG, there were THREE boxing rings operating at the very same time, so numerous were the fighters. So it stands to reason from such a LARGER boxing pool of experienced talent, the surviving winning champions had to be better than todays talent. Of course there are fighters who even today had certain attributes to excel in those days, but they would be few and far between...And then came the advent of television which slowly but surely eliminated hundreds of fight clubs across the USA. Boxing fans stood home sipping a brew and watched local boxers from the comfort of their home, which slowly and surely closed down the small boxing clubs across America and young boxers could no longer make a living while learning their craft...For example one of my favorite action fighters in the 1940s Beau Jack had FORTY THREE
bouts in his first TWO years learning his trade. And Beau was not the exception to the rule...So YES I agree in principle. The greater the pool of fighters, the better the caliber of stars that
reach the top applies. Steele, forged in fire is harder than metal not forged in fire...

 

Were there any superheavyweights between Primo Carnera , and James Douglas, who were better than Carnera?

I don’t think that there were.

I would even go as far as to say that there might have been better superheavyweights, between the reigns of Jess Willard and Primo Carnera.

We are not exactly looking at a linear trend here!

 

to my mind it is a fact that boxing has evolved since the first mcq bout, evolution is adaptation to environment and boxing has evolved due to changes in the world. As such fighters have evolved along with the sport, particularly relevant to changing techniques are round limits and equipment changes.

Fans of other sports might disagree but outside combat sports i know the basic history of a few and think the best teams/individuals from the 80's would get beat pretty easily by the best of today, put eddie mercx(about the most dominant athlete in any sport ever) in the modern peleton and he embarrasses himself with his tactics. however, unless i'm blind or ignorant the footage shows enough to pick a 70's fighter over his modern counterpart. That itself is a big statement, but nothing major changed from the 40's to the 70's, so how far can it go back?

That's a question I am still trying to answer myself, one of the only things i am sure of is that anyone saying evolution is the be and end all is talking from ignorance.


on peds: steroid cycles and other modern performance enhancing techniques make a huge difference to performance but two points are often left out of the discussion. 1 - peds were always available, you could have drug cheat v natural in 1895 the same as in 2015, the difference might be more in 2015 but the event is equally invalid. 2 - not everyone takes them, and not everyone takes the same stuff so there is no gradient, just points where new things came into or were tested out of a specific sport.

 

I really want to read this thread, but the posts are far too long lol

It's simple. Look at how basic the boxers were at the beginning of last century. Boxing experienced an evolution in all manners, decade by decade.
They however were in wars with eachother, with tougher gloves and fighting very often. This therefore conditions their bodies in a way that does not even compare to the way boxers have been in the recent few decades. The level of conditioning at the top level is night and day.
Boxers of old lacked fundamentals, but this developed over time.

We assume boxers of old were supermen who don't get warn down quickly in spite of their schedules, we assume they have athletic abilities that rivals the top boxers of today, for no reason.

The truth is, in todays era, fighters are past prime by 32 if they've been in a reasonable no. of wars at the top level....but we pretend the boxers of old do not undergo wear and tear.

 

:deal

Good post. Back in the days, it was just practically Americans against each other for over a century. There is more DIVERSE competition today than back in the good old years, this is just fact. You also have to take in to account that world class training is accessible to many more people, and there are many more people competing, although not competing too many times a year. As the worlds population increases, you have more people with the ability to become naturally great boxers, much more today than back in the day. Boxing has infiltrated markets never before seen in the past, you now have world class talent coming from many regions across the globe, back in the day it was scarce, and many Non-American talents were inferior in quality in the good old years. The boxing world has simply CAUGHT up, America is no longer the only nation that can produce top level talent. There are more athletically superior big men today, than back in the day.

Summarize:

1) Boxing today has infiltrated markets never before seen in the past.
2) The worlds population has increased tremendously, thus there are more people to choose from, and more people with the genetic/environmental traits that can become great boxers.
3) Access to top level talent is available to virtually ALL fighters, including the big guys.
4) The fall of the Iron curtain.
5) The boxing infrastructure of the worlds nations have caught up to that of the United States.
6) Many more nations will have similar levels of boxing infrastructure to that of the United States in the future, thus making competition much more intense as well.
7) The worlds population will continue to increase, so will participation rates, thus boxing will continue to evolve as more people are available.
8) There were more boxing bouts back in the day, but the level of competition was inferior, there were many more BUMS in the old days than there were now. There are many more people participating in boxing now than back in the day. Number of boxing bouts has nothing to do with number of participants, people fought many more times a year in the old days, now they only fight 2-3 times a year. There are many more reasons, but I put up the main ones. The only people who have a problem with this concept, are those who are brainwashed by nostalgia, Pro-American bigots who despise foreigners or some other type of supremacist :deal

 

this is kind of true, but what other pro sports could make a man rich 100 years ago? today you can be supremely athletic and become a millionaire from surfing, that wasn't always the case so the most athletically minded were focused into boxing.

 

Boxing has always been a sport where the pay was bad if you were a second tier fighter. You would have to be a TOP DRAW or a WORLD CHAMPION to be paid well. You pretty much had to be the best. There were MANY professions that could have made you rich 100 years ago, not all professions have to be athletically inclined. If Jack Dempsey was born today he might have become an accountant rather than a boxer, or maybe he would grow up poor and still take up boxing regardless :deal

 

the point is how many athletic professions could have made a top tier athlete a wage, let alone rich? the answer for a long time was boxing, then post 20's baseball and maybe soccer or cricket. Today is so many sports i don't know them all, I'm not trying to make a point either way, but it seems clear to me that the best athletes who wanted to make their living from sport would have boxed and as the 20th century progressed more and more other sports offered a decent wage. At lower levels maybe you're right, but in terms of how good the best are i think the point of increased overall talent pool is offset by the increase in places that pool is dispersed to is fair and should be considered.

in 1900 there was one sport to make money from, boxing. It doesn't matter if you are earning **** all at the lower level it is a lot more than earning nothing from a sport that doesn't exist yet.