Were boxers better in the 80s

Because basketball is a relative new sport. So there was still lots of room for improvement. Boxing has been around for thousands of years. The Queensberry rules since 1867. Basketball wasn’t even invented until 1891.

If you look at boxing from around 1910 like Jack Johnson, as great as he was, the sport has developed massively since.

We might not be in the Golden Era but it’s not the worst.

 

Because most of the great trainers are no longer around

 

There are fighters today who could beat fighters of the past ( and Vice verse ) ….but we can’t really evaluate them until they’ve retired

 

Not everything survives over time, or gets better. Some things wither and die. Boxing is absolutely one of those things.

 

This & it's not even close.

 

The skill level of some of these eastern euro and asian fighters is quite high, but all in all the sport is losing popularity. The talent pool is drying out. The best are not fighting each other. Corruption is rampant at the highest level.

 

This crops up all of the time.

Great fighters are great fighters that would have mixed success in any era, depending on how they matched up stylistically.

Yes, many of the best fighters of the 80’s would make a huge impact today.

Many of those guys were superior fighters to many of today’s guys.

There’s more than a few divisions from the 80’s and 90’s, which were stronger with better fighters than what there are today.

The sport has regressed more than it’s progressed from that era.

Boxing doesn’t progress like other sports do.

Boxing is also a stand alone sport, where two fighters pit their skills and styles against each other, which means that the sport can never be compared to sports like sprinting, where athletes are racing between 2 points in the quickest possible time in a sport that’s timed in milliseconds. They’re simply incomparable.

 

Why?

Because it’s a fight.

It’s boxing.

In boxing, the biggest guy doesn’t always win. Neither does the heaviest, the strongest or the most athletic. Neither does the fastest. In boxing, even the more skilled guy doesn’t always win.

The sport throws out mixed results based upon styles.

How the guys match up on the night stylistically.

Hearns crushed Duran with ease.

Barkley beat Hearns twice, despite having nowhere near the level of technical ability that Hearns had.

Duran then beat Barkley.

That meant that Duran had beaten the guy, who’d beaten the guy who’d crushed him.

That’s the beauty of the sport.

Which means that even if it was an irrefutable fact that every modern fighter was athletically superior to everyone of the past, it still wouldn’t guarantee a victory for every modern guy over every older guy.

Styles make fights.

Every fighter, even great ones, have a stylistic nemesis.

No fighter in history could ever retire undefeated, had they have fought all of the best ever guys at their weight, throughout the entire history of the sport.

Too many great fighters.

Too many styles to overcome.

Based upon recorded times in sports like sprinting, people will state that a sprinter or a marathon runner from 30 years ago wouldn’t be able to beat today’s athletes.

Yet I would bet my house that there’s be SOME fighters from even 50 years ago, who’d be able to beat some guys of today.

My favourite divisions have always been the MW and SMW divisions.

Just go and do a quick comparison of today’s divisions, compared to the divisions from the 90’s.

The strength, depth and quality of the 90’s was by far superior.

This has also happened in other divisions too.

There has been no noticeable progression in this sport for decades.

 

There’s less interest though.

Less gyms in every community etc.

 

Since the fall of The Wall, the number of boxers that can be found in BoxRec's database, has gone nowhere but up. As has the number of countries hosting pro boxing. How can this be seen as a dwindling of the talent pool?

 

The time and amount of fights and level of fighting was better and the attitude a little more like warriors. They are a little more spoiled now as are people in general, so that will affect that top level..

 

Of course, every fighter needs to be judged on a case-by-case basis but every era gets underrated as not being a patch on the previous one and people still want the era that got them into boxing to remain the best forever and ever!!!!. It happened in the 80s too...and before that...and before that, etc.

People act like, say, around 1966/67 Ali's title defence opponents were lauded, when in reality, it was often called another bum of the month club and even Zora Folley- a guy who recently had a thread calling him the 'gold standard for contender status' on here, was dismissed (by Nat Fleischer) as 'the most futile world title opponent since Johnny Paycheck' (all those years before).

Whenever a magazine had a contest such as "1992 vs 1967", the earlier years always won more often- "Tiger beats Hearns...Griffith beat Toney, etc"- same with 1987 vs 1977 and so on. Some other examples from the 70s- Boxing International (Randy Gordon, Stanley Weston, Peter King et al) Jack Dempsey KO8 Sonny Liston; Gene Tunney Draw-15 Muhammad Ali. I'm pretty sure years on they're not the consensus predictions.

 

What specifically do you see that is superior today to the skills of the 80's?