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I think it's an interesting matchup. but watching Wilder get bullied with those Jabs was something else though.. I have to imagine Holmes humiliates Wilder.
This fight made me want to see Prime Holmes vs Wilder.
- Thread starter RoyCisneros
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Weight lifting as well as track and field have been overrun with PEDs for over half a century now. With Track there's also the issue of the materials they run on. It's been said that Jessie Owens (who was definitely clean) would run in the 9.9 second range on a modern track with modern shoes. This has been scientifically proven. We're talking about a guy that ran in the 1930's that might have won a medal in the 2020 summer games.
In young sports like MMA or Skateboarding, you can clearly see that people are getting more skilled and different techniques are pushing the bar along with training regiments, but boxing is a very old sport. Not much has changed in boxing over the last 100 years, and hardy anything has changed over the last 50. Yes, there is a bigger pool of athletes as our population increases, but the popularity of boxing is significantly less than it was when guys like Larry Homes or Joe Fraizer were growing up. Add to this that sports like basketball soccer and football pay huge amounts of money and are far more popular than Boxing now. Guys like Joe Lewis or Sonny Liston would probably have played college football instead of learning the sweet science in Todays world.
At the end of the day, we have seen some big guys dominate the sport the last couple decades, but it's not like all the guys in the golden era of boxing were smaller fighters. Take Ken Norton for example. 6'3" 220lbs. Dude had an 80" reach and was built like a Greek God. It's just silly to think that a guy like that couldn't physically match up with Wilder. When you consider that he was technically a MUCH better fighter than Wilder, it's hard to think that Wilder just knocks his head off like George Foreman did with the level of technique Wilder demonstrates.
What makes Fury so interesting is that he's the first really big guy with great speed and technique. The Klitschko brothers were great punchers and great technicians, but they didn't move like Fury. Eventually, we're going to get a real freak in Boxing. We're going to get a guy like Fury that's built like Karl Malone. When that happens, Fighters like Holmes or Ali matching up with something like that are going to be unrealistic, but that hasn't happened
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Fairly easy win for Stormin Norman.
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How the fuck did holmes get up from that shavers bomb??? Incredible
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I think that going back to the 30's and 40's maybe there's better nutrition and training practices but per weight class it doesn't make as much a difference except in HW. Nowadays the biggest HWs are more athletic and would have a weight class or two advantage over a guy like Joe Louis.
For the most part if we account for size, especially day before weigh in weight gains, the ATGs from the Golden era could compete with modern fighters. So a guy like Roy Jones when he was a MW wouldn't be matched up against Robinson but someone like Charles at LHW, and when he was a LHW a guy like Louis.
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Wilder's a great puncher but I still think boxing ability trumps any physical attribute. Even against a short guy like Tyson, that could work his way inside and attack the body, Wilder would likely wilt. The biggest knock on Deontay is his quality of opposition. It really is quite poor in an ATG context.
I'll use Judah as an example of a guy who didn't have very good matchmaking in terms of improving and toughening a fighter. He did have big fights but for the most part his other opponents were third rate and he was able to go full force to blast them out quickly. It didn't prepare him for the big fights and if you only watched those you'd think he was the biggest puncher in division history.
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Sure, PED's play a part, even the legal ones that you can buy at GNC, but they are still a factor we must keep in mind if we are talking about the time 'time machine' scenario, wherein we could take this Wilder and transport him back to the late 70's/early 80's to face Holmes. I also agree modern boxers - like UFC fighters - would be in much larger weight classes back then as weight cutting methods and the size of fighters have gotten larger. Most of your heavyweights during Ali's size, or even Mike Tyson, was really a modern cruiserweight. Usyk would have been considered a giant back then, but is considered a very small heavyweight now a day. But as the saying goes "a good big horse beat a good small horse", and we must keep this mind.
Everyone is a product of their surroundings and only as good as the data put in them. Had Mike Tyson ended up wit Emmanuel Stewart and not Cus, his style would have been entirely different. And had he been born today and had access to Roy Jones Jr, Loma, Tyson Fury, the ability to travel to Russia or Detroit to train, his style would have been very different and he most likely would be a cruiser weight. So in this sense, if James Corbett lived now a days, he would have access to all types of training, fights of the past and present, could even take online webinars on how to master new styles, on top of the entire physical component of modernity.
There is nearly 8 billion people in the world now and a large number of them have iPhones, internet connection, superior diets and living conditions than 40 years ago, and access to boxing if not the ability to do it. Boxing used to be reserved for a very small group of people before, and in a world of half our current population, but now it is a cool thing to do (see the Paul brothers/celeb boxing takeover), there is cray money in it, and we are seeing people from Asia/China, Africa, Russia and other countries that were not really competing in the 80' and prior owing to socio or political reasons. We never got to see Ali vs Stevenson or Vystostky, however, we see these modern fighters fight the best of these previous communist countries.
The huge increase in talent pool, plus everyone's contact to limitless boxing knowledge and technique, has in my view increased the skill level as well. We never saw someone like Lomachenko until now, as he was the slow culmination of years upon years of knowledge from a variety of boxers and tried to culminate them together, much like Beethoven drew from Mozart, Bach, Handel and the composers before him vs coming up with something brand new, or only having access to just one local teacher. Like music, there is an art component to box, but at the same time there is the measurable component: i.e. how fast they can punch/move, how much they weight, their fitness levels be measured etc.
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We're in the space age now so no, obviously things are better nowadays, but just blindly waving away the abilities and accomplishments of the old school fighters as irrelevant nowadays is misguided. At the end of the day this is a sport, so a vast athletic advantage will count for a lot, but there were supremely conditioned and athletic boxers of the past that went 20 rounds and even to the finish. As far as technical ability there are fighters from 80 years ago that were maestros and have not been surpassed.
exactly. It’s case by case. I’m just alluding to the crowd that instantly goes “fighter from the past destroys current champ”
reminds me of my history teacher when I was 13, he was all about Ali being much better than Tyson, Tyson sucked! and now a days Tyson is apparently a legend and would destroy wilder, wilder sucks! And in a few years wilders right hand will be the craziest punch ever and the current fighter at that moment will suck.
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Boxing is a sport in decline, so it's not so obvious that newer is better. Most of the greats of the 50's, 60's and 70's would have never boxed in today's era due to how lucrative the NFL, NBA, and MLB have become.
I did the math once and a boxer would have to be paid over 1 billion dollars per fight to create an equivalent parallel to how much more lucrative boxing was to the NFL in the 1970s
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There is even a thread here about Wilder destroying Liston. Never underestimate the delusion of Wilder fanboys.
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Holmes was suspectible to getting caught with right hand bombs, so it would be interesting. But I think we know that unless Wilder hits the jackpot, he's getting outboxed badly.
It probably ends up looking like something similar to Holmes-Cooney or Holmes-Shavers.
It probably ends up looking like something similar to Holmes-Cooney or Holmes-Shavers.
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Most people don't seem to understand that boxing was drawing America's premier athletes back in the "golden eras". Boxers made the most money compared to anybody. Nowadays, boxing, especially heavyweight boxing, is basically full of guys who flunked out doing other sports and decided to give boxing a shot while being in their early to mid 20's, like Deontay Wilder.
We're not comparing the greatest athletes of the 60's and 70's with the greatest athletes of 2020's. It's more like the greatest athletes from those times, against the C or D-tier athletes from modern times. Heavyweight boxing and MMA would look a lot different if they were drawing the best athletes from American football, basketball, etc. to partake in the sport of boxing or MMA at an early age.
This is true but only up to a point. There have always been freak boxers in boxing that did relatively well even after top tier athletes. That and the fact that the top two boxers of the hw division, fury and Usyk, wouldn’t be caught dead playing American football in any era, regardless of how much money they are paying. Same with Vitali and Wladimir and Lennox. These guys were born to fight due to how they were brought up. It’s not like one day they sat down and decided “which sport should I triumph in to become rich?”
i think it’s the same with Ali, who literally got into boxing when someone stole his bike si he decided to learn to defend himself.
I agree with you as far as the lower tiers, there are more Michael grants and Deontay wilders today than back then, due to football taking a lot of the big boy athletes, so the “not as good” group decides to give boxing a shot.
but at the end of the day the actual top fighters will always be born fighters no matter which era.
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By the 1940s, certainly by the 50s, we’ve seen everything under the sun when it comes to boxing, I don’t see anything new technically since.
They also were better conditioned fighters, on account of going 15 rounds.
The big difference is the hours of available footage and frequency of fights making the sport more strategic, and steroids.
You can tell me that you see a lot of holes in the game of an old digger and you would be correct, but that’s probably because it’s their 3rd fight that month and they’re not training for anyone in particular and can get caught by unremarkable fighters as a result.
They also were better conditioned fighters, on account of going 15 rounds.
The big difference is the hours of available footage and frequency of fights making the sport more strategic, and steroids.
You can tell me that you see a lot of holes in the game of an old digger and you would be correct, but that’s probably because it’s their 3rd fight that month and they’re not training for anyone in particular and can get caught by unremarkable fighters as a result.
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Holmes would ko him
