What type of an athlete was John L Sullivan?

What's backwards is eating a huge meal three times a day and going to sleep afterward three times a day.

Eat, then walk 12 miles and run a mile. He probably had 100 pounds of undigested meat in his intestines when he died.

 

You do understand that this photograph was taken some years after Sullivan's last fight?

That aside, I don't agree with your assertion that a man from that era, could not be an exceptional athlete.

The contemporary ideas about sports nutrition were confused, but athletes from that era achieve all kinds of incredible feats.

Hoe many modern fighters would be able to fight for three hours I wonder?

 

Modern fighters spar and do actual training for hours. Going for long walks and eating big meals and taking long naps and then hitting a ball for two hours wasn't exactly intense training.

I posted the Burns-O'Brien fight the other day. In the ONE WHOLE HOUR of fighting in that fight, I think more punches landed in the first round of Hagler-Hearns.

I get that they were pioneers. They should be appreciated. But people take those newspaper accounts and imagine those guys fighting like boxers today do for 12 rounds. And they just didn't. They weren't super humans. They were guys who WERE NOT in as good shape as fighters today.

If they had fights that lasted for three hours, it's because for two of those three hours nobody was getting hit. They were just pushing and pulling and hugging and mauling trying to catch their breath to throw a punch here and there.

We can see that in footage that does exist.

They weren't these superior athletes. Newspaper writers knew nobody could disagree with what they wrote if they weren't there themselves. It was an era literally known as Yellow Journalism because most of the stories written were exagerrated all out of proportion to get readers to choose their papers.

And fans today read them like they were absolute truths.

People back then didn't see many pro fights. Watching two guys go at it in the ring, I'm sure, was thrilling no matter how the fight played out or what the fighters did.

Everyone today has seen more boxing than all those people. You can go online and watch more boxing today than most of them saw in their lives.

John L. Sullivan wasn't a great athlete.

 

Yes, I was commenting on the hand speed reference regarding Jeffries. Sullivan actually looks like he has faster hands than Jeffries (even in that clip) because in the "sparring footage" Jeffries didn't throw anything.

I've been watching these clips for 40 years. I know who they all are.

 

Underappreciated points that don't get mentioned nearly enough.

 

The guys from this jurassic eras were brutal, they could fight for 25- 50 rounds and these guys had a job besides of boxing, they drunk a lot, did eat like pigs and visited prostitutes previous to the important fights and still they had the stamina.
They were real men.
John L.was a monster

 

That's huge overstatement.

 

Sullivan did immense amounts of sparring.

It was basically all that he did between major fights, so I don't think that your criticism stacks up.

Obviously the punch output is going to be lower in a longer fight, but just moving around and holding your hands up takes it out of you.

Having said that, some early fighters like Bat Nelson, did manage similar punch outputs to modern fighters, over 40 rounds or more.

Again I would have to disagree.

In terms of pure stamina, the old timers have got the modernists beat.

They had to, just to be able to function over those sorts of distances.

Pushing pulling, hugging and mauling, tire you out as much as throwing punches does.

You are basically trying to argue that a 10k specialist has better stamina than a marathon runner, because he moves at a faster pace during his races.

He does, but like with a boxer, the bottom line is what is possible over his distance.

I would always treat articles of the period with caution, but they are the only primary evidence that we have, or will ever have.

Therefore we have to take them seriously, especially when multiple reports corroborate one another.

There are notable exceptions.

There were people who claimed to have seen most of Sullivan's major fights.

Again I cannot agree with this.

 

What do you think that modern fighters do?

They will often eat a large meal of steak and pasta, do road work in the morning, and some sort of pad work in the afternoon.

Sullivan's training regime seems to be somewhat similar to a modern heavyweights.

Obviously they had a few strange ideas, but that goes with the territory.

 

Bear in mind that a fifteen round fight lasts for about an hour.

Sullivan fought one bare knuckle bout that lasted more than two hours in extreme heat, and another that lasted more than three hours in the driving rain!

It takes an exceptional fighter to do this sort of thing!

 

I don't understand how can anybody question Sullivan's athletic potential. He had to be special to accomplish things he did and on top of that he also trained very hard to stay in good shape.

It looks like some people really think that people are more advanced 150 years later.

 

Tremendous athlete

 

Um, they are.