Who were some of the best heavyweight fighters that weren’t from the United States?

Nobody with pretensions to honesty would include the Schaaf fight!

 

This is just ridiculous.

 

For all that has been written about Schaff going into that fight, I have a hard time believing all of it. watching how well he actually performed in it. Yes it is tragic. Schaff most likely carried some kind of undetected brain injury going into it as is often the case in similar situations but it was undetected all the same. I don’t believe he went into the ring running a temperature. He could not have got through the medical otherwise. It is more probable that two world class fighters met after passing their medical that the fight was going the way it always was going to had there been no undetected brain injury. Just as Benny Parat and Micheal Watson, Gerald McClellan And others all had.

Unless you have the autopsy, I’m going to take that Schaff win at face value up to the sudden ending. Schaff was a legitimate contender and until the sudden strange ending he appeared to operate and function well enough without taking a beating. That’s my takeaway from viewing the film and I strongly believe viewing it will leave anybody with the same conclusion. It was a freak, one in a million incident for him to drop from one punch like that. Up until then Primo was winning.

There used to be another poster who took me to task on this very question called @mcvey I wonder if you knew him?

 

We have the autopsy report,what more would you require? Or do you think a fight fit Schaaf would go down from, and not rise from a Carnera jab?
Do you just discount the ringside comments of fake ?Hype Igoe saying ,"the only way I'll beleive this is if he dies?
Come on be honest here.

 

Does the autopsy say he had meningitis? Have you seen it?

Yes The comment from hype igoe really goes along with the view that until then Schaff had been fighting well.

 

Yes it does actually ,and he had a severe case of flu just prior to the fight,in my view Buckley and Sharkey were criminal in taking that fight. Read reports of the fight, Schaaf is described as being strangely lethargic and getting caught with punches he should have avoided .

 

So you’re saying Dave Allen could have been heavyweight champion of the world in the thirties?

 

He was no worse than Braddock.

 

you need to watch the fight.
Schaff knocked out his last two opponents. He fought every 6 -8 weeks after the Max Baer fight, 3 fights in 6 months. This business that everyone should have known he was injured is horsesh!t. He was winning fights and passing medical examinations. Schaff was built like an Adonis, he posed for artists that made bronze statues of greek gods. Like all ring tragedies the problems schsff had were not outwardly apparent going into the fight. Shaff had regained his form as a contender.

*edit
I have read that the autopsy showed that microscopic traces of spinal meeningitis agrivated by punches in the carnera fight caused the swelling of the brain. Tiny traces of bacteria -untraceable before the fight- together with punches, were what was really responsible. nobody knew that having a long fight that night would be fatal.

Had it been a 10 round or 12 round fight Primo would have won on points, Schaff would have went on with his career.

 

I would suggest he is.

 

He is much worse than Braddock, and Allen was totally out of shape when he fought Ortiz.

 

Braddock was always a real good pro. His career did take a different direction at one point where he was on the outside of the money circuit and had to make a living in the competitive fringes where everyone could fight but nobody could get High profile matches against somebody they were already guaranteed to beat. The kinds of fights most people don’t realise are a privileged route (financed by big money backers) that pave the way for well groomed darlings of the division. Miraculously he got called up as a replacement in this big league, where he won. and he was fortunate his “comeback story” was marketable enough to open doors for him again. In truth, he, like a lot of fighters, was always good enough, but just wasn’t getting the breaks to prove it. Any number of fighters in the outer circuit might have won the same fight. However, Braddock was given this route, a path no doubt meant for another prospect, and he just kept winning. Remaining marketable and interesting enough to earn a title fight, and win that. The cherry on the cake for me, was how much of a fight he put up against joe Louis, probably the best heavyweight of them all, proving Jimmy really had deserved to be where he was. Apart from Schmeling, Braddock fared better against Louis than either of the recent champions had.

 

I never mentioned the Baer fight so why did you? Schaaf posed foer the William Muldoon Trophy and this porves that several years later after a serious bout of meningitis and a bad case of flu he was fit to fight ?
Don't mention horse **** to me, I saw the autopsy report in an article on the fight 15 years ago.And I've seen the fight and read the ringside reports of it!
Buckley and Sharkey knew Schaaf had not been in training and they knew his immediate past history influenza.
"Meanwhile, there remained some discrepancy over the exact cause of death: some medical experts saying it was caused by injuries received during this bout; others that Shaaf already had some tumor, cyst, lesion or old injury of the brain which contributed to his death. In fact, Schaaf had suffered a bout of influenza leading up to the fight and was in a weakened state."

"He died on [url]Valentine's Day[/url]. An autopsy revealed that Schaaf had [url]meningitis[/url], a swelling of the brain, and he was still recovering from a severe case of [url]influenza[/url] when he entered the ring with Carnera"[url][[/url]