Tunney - Wills who ducked who?

Senya, what year do you think would have given Wills the best opportunity to defeat Dempsey?

Stylistically I think he'd always find it difficult short of landing a knockout blow.

 

I haven't read much on Wills. I have the reports for most of his bouts, but like the majority of fighters I researched I looked up and downloaded the reports without actually reading them.

 

that's the reason I now rank h2h. I was sick of the chore that reading became.

 

We seem to differ significantly on what constitutes a duck here.

There are actually very few scenarios where I would throw the charge at a contender.

A contender does not have a title that anybody wants, and they are free to navigate a path of their choice to a title shot.

 

It's even worse than that if you want to fully understand the context of the bouts, where you not only need to read the next-day reports, but at least a few days of pre-fight write-ups. Next step, even more laborous, and which absolute majority of historians choose to do not - research at least some fights of each opponent of the fighter you are researching, to know their styles, how they were viewed by contemporary writers, etc etc, so you know how worthy a victory over that opponent was. It requires so much time and efforts that most people prefer to skip this step and only, at best, give a short overview of that opponent's record (basically what you can see on their boxrec page). It may take a lifetime to research someone like Gans or Leonard or Greb that way.

 

I set up a spreadsheet to try and track all my research.

I couldn't keep on top of it. Honestly I was researching boxers and spending hours pouring over reports and records and to what end?

I was that mind numbed I don't remember which man I was researching, but I just deleted my spreadsheet and decided from now on I'm only ranking on footage so I can at least enjoy my research.

 

My way is to have a doc-file on each boxer I researched, where I just list the sources I have chronologically, without actual text of what each source said (unless I was willing to re-type it). The sources being pdf or image files on my HDD, which I can read later if needed. So it'd look something like this (small part of Harry Wills file)

1922-01-01 The Sunday Oregonian (Portland, OR) (page II1)
1922-01-02 Chicago Daily Tribune (Chicago, IL) (page 28) – Edward Doherty
1922-01-02 Morning Oregonian (Portland, OR) (page 8)
1922-01-01 Oregon Sunday Journal (Portland, OR) (page II6)
1922-01-02 Bill Tate Arena, Milwaukie, OR, USA L-DQ 1 10
referee: Tom Louttit
Wills was disqualified for knocking Tate down after the referee's call to break; Both fighters agreed to a rematch four days later, at no cost to the fans.
Tate claims the Black Heavyweight Title.
1922-01-03 Chicago Daily Tribune (Chicago, IL) (page 24) – Edward Doherty
1922-01-03 Morning Oregonian (Portland, OR) (page 14) – L.H. Gregory
1922-01-03 Oregon Daily Journal (Portland, OR) (page 12) – George Berts
1922-01-04 Morning Oregonian (Portland, OR) (page 12)
1922-01-04 Oregon Daily Journal (Portland, OR) (page 12)
1922-01-05 Morning Oregonian (Portland, OR) (page 12)
1922-01-05 Oregon Daily Journal (Portland, OR) (page 16)
1922-01-06 Morning Oregonian (Portland, OR) (page 16)
1922-01-06 Oregon Daily Journal (Portland, OR) (page 12)
1922-01-06 Bill Tate Arena, Milwaukie, OR, USA D-PTS 10 10
Both fighters claimed the Black Heavyweight title in this bout. Wills bled from a cut over his right eye from the 5th round on. Wills was knocked down for no count in the 9th from a rabbit punch.
(Both fought without pay because of that Monday night fiasco four days previous.)
1922-01-07 Morning Oregonian (Portland, OR) (page 14)
1922-01-07 Oregon Daily Journal (Portland, OR) (page 8) – George Berts

 

Did you lot get the feeling that researching a fighter became like homework.

Not just that but never ending homework.

For me, I'm never gonna write a book so that level of research became moot. It became onerous. It dampened my enthusiasm for the sport.

My spreadsheet had all the hof fighters, their records, their opponents records and any sources I could find on them.

Just became too big a task. Whereas now I just have to watch fights.

 

If you do minimum research, say, just looking up one or two next-day reports for each fight, it'll just take a few days for someone like Harry Wills (you can skip his early career and the last few bouts on his record), where you would end up with just 150-200 files and know more about him than 99% of people here.