Tyson-Dempsey comparison

[url]https://www.si.com/longform/2015/1985/tyson/img/image7.jpg[/url]

[url]http://media.gettyimages.com/photos/boxing-portrait-of-mike-tyson-eating-dinner-with-his-surrogate-mother-picture-id170751884[/url]

 

Mike grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn and was arrested 38 times by the time he was 13. He didn't move upstate until his mother died when he was 16.

Brownsville had a murder rate of 148 per 100,000 in the late 1980's. That's worse than modern day El Salvador.

[url]http://www.brooklynvisualheritage.org/sites/default/files/images/blackout.jpg[/url]

True story.

 

I consider a lack of infrastructure to support sustainable flow of basic resources to the world population as a scarcity issue.

It's not enough to have endless tomatoes. You have to develop a way to get the tomatoes to everyone in perpetuity.

 

That we are all heartless *******s?

No, I disagree. We are a product of our environment, our constraints, and our time period.

It doesn't mean that we shouldn't expect more of ourselves. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't strive steadfastedly for progress.

But Rome wasn't built in a day.
We come from wilderness, not an ideal Utpoia.

 

There's a difference between recognizing what our predecessors did wrong, and fixing it with the benefit of knowledge and experience. Versus calling them all evil, and ignoring the conditions that influenced the values which we deem wrong today.

Many people didn't know better.
Like the baby doesn't know better when it spills the drink.

 

I guess that's fair. We can recognize that (some of) our predecessors were ignorant, racist white supremacists with backwards views and condemnable values, without calling them evil or ignoring the conditions that influenced their values.

 

There were black newspapers printed just for black people? Were they printed by rich black people and why would Dempsey be reading them?

 

I understand what you're saying, but that only works if there is no prevailing evidence to the contrary, and thus you're blindly ignorant that something is wrong, i.e. baby spilling milk has no clue. There was plenty of scientific evidence at the time illustrating that people of color were ___ and ____ and ____. There was public outcry from plenty of states long before the civil war that took exception to the views that some of white America felt. Plus we had examples of a good many people of color "acting" like they "should" and being fine upstanding citizens. There were already plenty of examples of people of color, when given the opportunity of an education, invented things and generally did just fine in comparison. It's not like stuff wasn't known, and books weren't written about it, they were, it was out there, and he stole chose to have the views he did. Not the same Rez, and you know it.

 

And I think it's also important to note that there were vile people who went beyond the sociological conditions, who do deserve to be condemned. Especially the ones at the top, who were smart enough to know that humans are inherently equal, but who used racism as a tool for exploitation and greed, and caused unfathomable suffering to innocent people for generations.

 

He was living with D'Amato before that. Being fed in that big white house by that old rich white lady. D'Amato became his legal guardian when his mother died.

Tyson's mother lived on welfare, that's when the government just straight out hand you money to feed your kids. They didn't have back when Dempsey was a kid, of course.

Being arrested doesn't equate to material poverty. So I'm not sure where you coming from or going with that one.

It's ridiculous that you're even trying to contest the basic claim that Dempsey's motivation as a fighter was more material than Tyson's. I'm sure Mike Tyson would have a good laugh about that one. Dempsey was a hungry fighter who lived in times of real poverty.

 

Mike Tyson was a multi millionaire living in a mansion in the late 1980s.

Brownsville, Brooklyn doesn't even have 100,000 residents.
El Salvador is a country of 6.8 million.

Now put the murder figures of the most murderous similarly sized section of El Salvador (if you can find them, I doubt it) up against late 1980s Brownsville for a direct and meaningful comparison.

Or carry on using your terribly flawed methodology to spout this hyperbole.

 

They were printed for black readers, yes. (The writers I assume were black too.)
I don't know who owned and printed them.

I don't know which newspapers Dempsey read or if he read any. But that isn't the point. People in the big newspapers would keep up on what was being said in the black newspapers too, and repeat some of it or not, perhaps depending on the political flavour or readership of the paper. Dempsey was called a coward for not fighting Wills by white reporters too. And its only fair to credit the black press for their consistent campaigning to get black fighters a fair shake. They spread the word and used their influence.

 

Jack Dempsey was an itinerant worker living a hand-to-mouth existence and working long hours to feed himself from a young age. Not unusual for boxers of his time to start their careers like that. These guys were literally fighting for money to get a meal and a bed and maybe send some money to parents. I guess Dempsey stayed pretty much on that level maybe as late as 1917 or 1918. He may have had a few reasonable paydays in the meantime but he had to fight and work long hours to eat consistently. The poverty was real. No handouts existed.

Therefore his boxing career was motivated by immediate and urgent poverty.
And I think he developed his vicious desperate attacks out of that motivation primarily.

 

I'm not surprised. Lewis hadn't been beaten in 7 odd years and umpteen fights and was the lineal heavyweight champion of the world and about 6 defenses of it deep. Louis was "just" a contender and on the up and up.

 

That's one way of looking at it.

I think both Tyson and Louis were young and undefeated and considered virtually invincible. Schmeling and Douglas put on sustained excellence performances to defeat them.
I see Rahman Lewis differently to that.


I'd rate Schmeling and Douglas performances among some of the best in heavyweight history.
Not knocking Rahman but I don't quite rate his knock out of Lewis on that level.
He deserves credit to though, I can't argue with that.