Why Dont Fighters Fight As Often Like The Oldtimers Did?

Because everyone on the world can watch it on television or via the Internet these days.. in the old days, you had to fight at various locations so that people could actually see you. A lot of those fights were against relative soft touches, but mainly to get recognition.


Another reason, quite simply, is because today, most of them can. We live in higher luxury today and often a prospect is offered a good financial contract more easily.

 

That's correct Chris.

I will also ad that it was unusual for a fighter to start in the amateurs in those days, therefore basic experience was often acquired upon turning pro and fighting more often.

 

In addition to the valid reasons explained above, let it be further pointed out that there were just plain more boxers back then, and boxing as a whole was a much more popular and prolific sport, with a lot more fight cards and fight venues, meaning that there was all-around much more immediately-available opposition and opportunity for fight after fight in close succession. For example, when Rocky Marciano started his active professional boxing campaign in Providence, Rhode Island, there was a fight card pretty much every week at the same local venue, allowing him to fight 11 times in six months, 9 of them in that same venue and the other two in nearby ones. Nowadays, there are pretty much no boxing venues which hold cards more than about once a month. Hence, in order to fight on a once-a-month-or-better basis, a guy would have to be pretty much constantly traveling and scouring for opposition. Back then, when there were local fighters aplenty and local cards all the time, the opportunity to put together frequent fights was overwhelmingly stronger.

 

I think it has a lot to do with keeping the fighter's record intact so that in their future they can achieve some big pay days as an attraction, I think it is hard to hype a fighter that has a number of losses even if they were to quality opponents.

Imagine trying to hype a fighter like Jersey Joe Walcott against someone like Wlad in place of Tony Thompson, who had less losses to his career than Wlad, the normal buying public would think that the much smaller Jersey Joe would be a mismatch and not buy the pay per view, when in fact he is a far superior fighter to Thompson

 

Fights have a dozen times more hype behind them then fights used to have, hence massive current day paydays that can't be replicated if one of our modern fighters was fighting 150-200 times. The US would be several times more broke then it is if that was the case.