Who were most loyal to their trainer/cornermen?

Hagler and the Petronelli's. The Marvelous one was so loyal to the inept brothers he stood by them despite them costing him a draw with Vito and a lot of heat after the Duran bout.

 

Who was it?

 

See if you can find out for yourself. I will tell you, eventually.

 

I missed this, apologies. Better late than never.

I think that you are making your case based on your own assumptions instead of what I said. What I said was that compared to Louis and Hagler, Jones was simply not as loyal. What's more, I said that if you want to limit the scope to "over the past 20 years" than I'd agree with you.

Excellent points.

However, you chose to ignore several examples after the first two sentences about modern pr*cks who you and I probably share disdain for personally, but recognize their professional talent without the taint of bias. Boxing is full of egotists, scoundrels, psychotics, rapists, clowns, and brutes. Your assumption that my distaste for Jones' personality somehow poisons the validity of my arguments about his career is, I think, a poor man's way of dealing with those arguments.

 

What is this? The "Gospel according to Panama Lewis"?

If you and I agree to meet and fight without weapons, and you bring a pipe, I'd call you a coward before I did my utmost to lodge that pipe up your butt.

"Clearly winning" is not more important than moral values unless you are either a Satanist or a Nihilist. By my experience, your ideas about the culture of boxers are way off. There is honor among fighters -they recognize it for what it is and they do practice it. You see it in their touching gloves after a hard fought round. You see it when they embrace after a fight. You see it in the mutual respect they have for one another. You see it all over the place. There are exceptions... but most fighters resemble Alexis Arguello and his honor than they do Tyson in his "f*ch the world" attitude.

If you snuck in an advantage -not like using retaliatory low blows or rabbit punching, but something that would enhance the power of your blows by say a multiple of 2, then you could do serious, long-term or permanent damage to another human being. Steroids greatly enhances human strength. The blows of a boxer are already designed to give maximum damage, they have many decades of evolutionary enhancement and efficiency behind them -steroids greatly increase the risk of injury and death as a result of those blows. If some fighters remove the stuffing from their gloves or put an iron bolt in one of them, should you do the same just in case? Doing so is not only immoral -it is criminal. Panama Lewis had a "will to win". And he was a piece of sh*t for what he did to Billy Collins, nothing more than that. Same goes for Resto. I see similarity in those fighters who make steroids part of their regiment.

Steroids are illegal for a reason. If they are legalized for boxers, then you will see the sport undergo a cataclysmic change. It would resemble the 1900s again and for good reason. The avoidance of blows will become far more important than putting the fragile human face in the way of them... because the blows will have far more force in them. If boxing remained the same -in close and more active than it was then, then there will be more fatalities and the abolitionists will make noise. Boxing is dangerous enough as it is.

Those of us who want to protect the sport and it's practitioners (and I know that you are among them!) have an obligation --a moral obligation-- to condemn the use of steroids and do what we can to have testing mandated in every state and every country with fierce cosequences for those who use them.

 

Yich! S Tough enough to work a corner under the best of circumstances, but with all that Shakespearean drama, sounds like a nightmare.

 

This thread put me in mind of something I'd like to share:

On a frigid afternoon in the mid '40s, I climbed the 13 steps to Stillman’s Gym to learn how to box and emulate local idols, Rocky Graziano and Jake LaMotta.

The gatekeeper at the head of the stairs, collecting quarters for entrance, was manager Jack Curley, under the gimlet eye of Lou Stillman, seated on a raised chair next to ring # 1.

I paid and asked Jack Curley if he could set me up with a trainer.

After appraising me like pawnbroker, he crooked a finger at a character the image of the Penguin in a Batman comic book.

“Izzy, see what the kid’s got.”

He must have been 40ish, 'bout 5-7 – bulging wall-eyes, the drained pallor of a lifetime in airless gyms, and dark, kinky-curly hair threatening to uncoil but bulldogged down and parted in the middle like a ‘20s bootlegger.

His nose was much too long for his face and pointy as a dart. He had no chin, no neck, was shaped like a pear and his stomach hiked up his trousers to his chest. He wore what must have been a white T-shirt at one time and an unbuttoned cardigan sweater with a towel thrown over his shoulder.

Rocking back on his heels, he shuffled over, chest out, straight up and flatfooted; his shoes pointing outward like a Garment Center salesman. The only thing missing was the Penguin's umbrella.

He was my coach for the years I trained at Stillman’s. His name was Izzy Blank, and he looked after me like a son.

Though Izzy never gained the notoriety of a Charley Goldman, Ray Arcel, Whitey Bimstein, and the like, he was respected and embraced by the fraternity and was spared, for the most part, from Stillman’s wrath

As good or bad as I ever got, Izzy never allowed me to forget what he thought unpardonable: As a teenager, I did what all the other kids did, I carried a condom in my wallet-- not that I had chance to use it-- but it was expected.

One day while changing, the rubber fell out of my wallet onto the floor and Izzy saw it. If I did anything after that that didn't live up to his expectation, he shrugged: "Sure! How can he fight? He's in the saddle!"

I had to do three times what anybody else did. If I so much as took a deep breathe: "The kid's in the saddle!"

Izzy Blank died a few years ago…still unsung -- a funny, dear man that was my professor at the University of Eighth Ave.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP6AwknmjkU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0_HOWlGD6o

 

Beautiful, JG.

 

I think that you and Chris raise good points.

I think for the good of the sport everythig you say is spot on. Yet, I can understand Chris's will to win at all costs notion.

The problem for boxing is that the lion has no teeth. No governing body really seems to have any real power and the promoters don't care.

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My immediate thought was Marvin Hagler, who showed loyalty and class by staying with the Petronelli brothers throughout his career.

 

I'd call it righteous indignation -not towards you personally but towards what your views suggest in my mind. I see less difference between using steroids and putting a bolt in your glove than I do between using steroids and hitting low.

I do not think that you are fully recognizing the real danger of stepping into the ring against a fighter with steroid-enhanced power and speed.

I said "if" steroid-use becomes prevalent among boxers. I don't believe it has. You may believe that it has, but neither of us have any idea of who was on it, when, and during what fights. Ezzard's point about the anarchic state of enforcement among the governing bodies is true. And that article is disturbing. If it's true, would you re-evaluate Jones' prime? Jones reluctance to really mix it up may not have been due to his worry about ending up like McClellan... it may have also been because he didn't want to have a ring death on his conscience... or perhaps it was both. If he was juiced when he fought Paz et al., he was lucky not to have killed anyone. Many including me have described Jones' speed and power as almost supernatural. If it was anything more than natural then I think he's a coward and a cheater. And I'd sent Tarver a medal.

I hate to toot horns but I've stepped into the ring countless times against professionals ranging from the WW to HW and was at a distinct disadvantage against anyone over middleweight. For me, and every fighter I've ever met, we box because of the risk, not to participate in some shady shenanigans to gain unfair advantages to guarantee a "win" -it's about the thrill of battle, because winning by cheating isn't winning, it's cheating. It's about your reputation, and self respect. Boxers are alone in there with their thoughts, and the thought of leaving a ring knowing that you hurt a fellow boxer is hard enough. I suspect that far fewer than you theorize would be okay after putting a fellow boxer in a coma, knowing that they went in there juiced up.

I never, nor have ever heard it said by another fighter anything approaching the idea of "I better do steroids because the other guy may be doing them." That kind of speculation is a thinly veiled excuse to gain an unfair advantage. If as many fighters thought like that as you suppose, then Panama Lewis would have legions with him, as would Luis Resto (who was, like countless boxers, a relatively light hitter). Winning isn't everything -fighting well and honorably is. Again, Arguellos outnumber Tysons in boxing. Thank God.

Codes of honor develop in battle more so than it does in sports... and I'd consider boxing more battle than sport.

Yes, there is far more temptation to use drugs at the upper level. I myself wasn't thinking about fame and celebrity and most guys I sparred and knew weren't either... they were just trying to eat and practice something that they loved and that defined them. But the superstars have at least as much temptation to use the steroids as aging starlets do in getting face-lifts and botox.

As per Holyfield: Let's say he used them since 1988, and they were part of his regiment to become a HW. I would absolutely support his being banned from the HoF and friggin excommunicated from whatever church he's in. I'd erase his name from my HW list of ATGs... because we would have no idea what his rate of success would have been sans performance enhancing drugs.

Toney: I suspect that he juiced because of a little fear about facing the big boys. He's still great because of what he did between 160 and 190. Unless he was on them during his whole career. If he was then, same goes for him.

An ethical assertion: We cannot excuse a man caught doing steriods because he believed that his opponent might have been on steroids. One is certain, the other is speculative. Nor should we excuse him even if his opponent was on steroids. Both should be suffer the consequences.

Agreed. Well said. I have no opinion about steroid use per se, except that it is stupid because there are undetermined health risks involved (like shrinking scrotums) --even though I am adamant about boxers suffering consequences for use that is both heavy and certain. And that is due to respect for boxers and the sport itself. What's more, I thnk that it's easier to test in boxing and keep it clean and God knows we need that!

Very true. (I got lucky. I have floaters in my vision, a deviated septum, and scars around my eyes. That's it.)

"My life and my honor flow as one. Take my honor from me and my life is done." ~ Spencer

I will refrain from a theological discourse about Christianity, specifically the doctrine of fallen man and the universality and redundancy of sin. Suffice it to say that extending one's hand to God (be it in public or private) should not invite catcalls when that hand proves itself still human and therefore still prone to sin.

Your well-crafted defense of your case had me worried. I thought you might be on them yourself! Glad to see that you aren't!

Steroids, at the very least, clouds the issue and prevent us from measuring a fighter's true and actual ability. At worst, it injects the sport of boxing with more danger and therefore more brutality... how much it does this is unimportant. It is a poison in the sport -literally and figuratively.

Negative. Would you recommend it?

 

Keep it up with the quality sparring on here guys. :good

 

Man, I think Chris is roiding. He's typing so quickly.