Why is The Boxing Community so Nostalgic Compared to Other Sports Communities?

You’ve hit the nail on the head.

Even if it was an irrefutable fact that every fighter today was a better athlete than every guy of the past, then it still wouldn’t guarantee a certain win for the modern guy.

Because this is boxing.

The better athlete doesn’t always win.

In boxing, even the most skilled guy doesn’t always win.

It always comes down to styles.

Which means that even a fighter from 50 years ago would be able to beat certain guys today, if they possessed a style which was problematic.

 

Any knowledgeable fan should know for sure that any truly great fighter would be able to compete in any era.

Not everything older was better.

Not everything newer is better.

 

Nostalgics can be clearly identified.

The issue here, is that many people are also ignorant of the past, where they’ll just assume that everything modern is superior.

So the ironic thing is, they’re just as biased and ignorant as what nostalgics are.

 

Doping was rife in the 80’s and 90’s, but I think that it still is.

There seemed to be a lot more skilful fighters back then though.

That can’t be put down to purely doping.

 

It’s nothing to do with nostalgia or boxers getting worse.

It’s just that there’s many greats of the past who had superior skills to many of today’s guys.

There’s whole divisions today that are considerably weaker than in the past.

The sport hasn’t progressed for decades.

It just ebbs and flows.

Nostalgics are ignorant for sure. Just like the people who think that everything modern is better, and that it’s silly to think that a fighter of the past could beat a fighter of today, based upon sprinting and marathon times etc.

 

No amount of practice is going to turn a guy from being a decent fighter, into a Toney or McCallum etc.

The trainers have more of an impact than PEDS.

The guys of the 80’s and 90’s, especially at the middle weights, were just technically superior to today’s guys at those weights.

 

It also attracts ignorant people who just shut down the past and automatically assume that everything modern is superior.

 

This is definitely true. But if you know what you’re looking at, you can clearly observe that some of those older guys were just simply superior to some of today’s guys.

They were just better fighters, with better skills who were more proven.

 

It has gotten soft. The NBA is pretty much a jump shot/3 Point shooting league

 

But that's just the problem... who decides if someone knows, what he's looking at? If you agree, that boxing has devolved over the last several decades - does that mean, you know more about boxing history, than someone who doesn't support this idea? And who gets to be the judge, of who is right and who is wrong?

 

This is true & it applies to many other fans as well for different categories of things/sports, like you i also continuously noticed this.

 

Nice post, plus i am still shocked to notice people still caring or at least as highly for those guys to fight when they haven't for years, eg Andrade/Charlo - Wilder/AJ etc

You would think they would be so far over it & not even acknowledgement the topic, but nope it's also why as long as you have that willing majority out there then the fighters/promoters will continue to screw you.

 

There's still plenty of US fighters that are great & full of promise but i get your point also, kind of like how you see the NBA moving now with so many great international players coming through from there.

 

It's because the sport got worse, not because the nostalgia is inherently greater. You are reverse engineering the issue. But really, is LBJ better than Jordan? I don't think so. Has there been a clearly greater baseballer than Ty Cobb? I don't know that there has. Men were better. That's the thing. They're turning the frogs gay. Grip strength is going down. Testosterone is going down. All the wrong people are going down on all the wrong other people. This is mostly a down issue, except for the number of titles and weight classes, which is going UP.

 

Not everything moves inevitably in an upward trajectory over time. Writers today aren't necessarily as good as writers of yesteryear. Same with a lot of musicians. Big budget blockbusters suck today compared to even ten years ago though there's more money and better technology than ever before. Regarding boxing, it has way more metrics than something like sprinting or weightlifting so it's much harder to measure if any progress has been made or where. And it's much harder to rate fighters across eras since they're competing against other fighters from their eras, not against fixed records. You just have to go by subjective analysis which is always open to debate. Personally I agree with Bandeedo that the best periods were the 80s and 90s in terms of the peak of the sport. Right now the HW division especially is quite weak outside of the top guys. Someone like Jared Anderson is considered a top prospect, but he just looks very ordinary to me.