It seems fighters were smaller back then in weight classes. It appears they fought closer to there natural weight. Now boxers go to extremes to make weight. And if they don't make weight they are labeled fat and lazy even though they train harder than before and are fitter than 99% of the ones talking ****
Well the question is in the title Then I say it's ignorant to say that modern fighters who don't make weight are fat and lazy when in fact they actually trained harder and go through weight cutting while earlier boxers fought at their natural weight. Don't look much into it
They had same day weigh ins back in the day. Nowadays fighters try and boil down as low as possible, so they can rehydrate by a lot of weight. Canelo Alvarez can weigh in at 154, and rehydrate to 172 afterwards. Which means he would never have fought at JMW in an earlier era.
Past fighters usually were quite muscular because of their bodyfat %. Nowdays you have guys like Rios who cant make weight but clearly have love handles on them :-(
Let's first settle the "race" issue - race or ethnicity has absolutely NOTHING to do with this matter. Now as for the topic at hand, the reason why we saw so little weight cutting back in the old days was because boxers were FAR busier. You could have a championships match one night and have the rematch in two weeks or less. This did not give time for the boxers to kick around in the corner saloon or fatten up at the neighborhood greasy spoon or fast food [sic] joint like they do today. Most ate home cooked meals and their managers kept a watchful eye on them to insure that they stuck to a wholesome diet. They kept up their training regimen all year around which kept their waistlines trim. No need for weight cutting when that happened. How I wish we could have those days in the squared circle again!
Funny stuff. In reality, weight cutting isn't due to fighters "fattening up" between fights, though some do that. Weight cutting is about getting down to an artificially low weight at the weigh-in (by draining the body of water weight) and then gaining back a whole lot of weight in the 30-plus hours between the weigh-in and the fight. The result is that bigger guys are able to squeeze into divisions that they couldn't make healthily with same-day weigh-ins. Initially, this meant that some guys were able to gain a big size advantage over their opponents. Eventually, most guys below heavyweight started doing it, so now it's mostly a question of how much weight they put on after the weigh-in. The differences between "rehydrated" weights sometimes exceed the spreads between weight classes, which enables bigger size differences in the ring than would be possible with same-day weigh-ins.
The elimination of same-day weigh-ins appears to have resulted in greater weight differences between boxers far too often at the time they fight each other. As a result, I believe that the lack of same-day weigh-ins does much to defeat the purpose of having weight divisions in boxing. - Chuck Johnston
