Why todays era is better than past eras. Discussion.

[billeau2]

Sheer numbers clearly indicate that their where fewer fighters and fewer fights in the old days. Since competition always makes quality rise how can anyone dispute that boxers, in general, are better today than they where in past eras?

Well a few things jump out at me BN:

a) What do we mean by professional? technically professional means to get paid....It is not really a standard of competancy. In fact, there have been times when olympic fighters were considered the equal in many respects at least in some countries, like Cuba for example. T Stevenson was never a professional fighter per se....neither was Savon.

b) Also per capita what were the levels of professional fighters in America as compared to the number now? this would be a good number to have. Remmeber the world didn't have a billion people for most of those years!

Lets start with that info....

[billeau2]

Well Bundana and I had a discussion on the subject in another forum. I believe that is a point. I somehow doubt that boxrec has gone through all the regional US papers let alone Worldwide, to gather every result from any bout. That would be a monumental task.

Still the numbers IMO, still is so much greater in todays era than in the past, that it would be unlikely to change that perception completely.



There might be better ways yes, but the point stands. If, for instance you take 10 fighters and let them fight each other in separate fights untill 1 emerges as the best (champion) and then do the same with 100 fighters.

If you then pair the 10-fighter champion with the 100-fighter champion surely the 100-fighter champ would be favoured.


Possible. Again the gap in absolute quantity is immense.

And are we sure there is a corelation to quality? Thats a tough one to prove...I would be interested if even a correlation could be established.

[LacedUp]

That would be quite an undertaking to work out, though... but if anyone has the time/energy to look into this, it would certainly be interesting to know!

The problem I have with today is that people get rich fighting low opposition, so why risk it?

Look at Peter Quillin. He hasn't fought one single top middleweight, yet can cash million dollar paychecks. Why fight GGG?

Back in the old days, people could make a significant amount more only by fighting top guys because TV wasn't paying millions for average fights.

Therefore I would imagine top fighters fight less top fighters today than before. That's my assumption, whether or not that can be proved by stats is different altogether.

[KnockoutNed]

Those numbers indicate that the amount of total recorded fights have actually significantly decreased from 2000 to 2010. As for earlier in the century, there may very well have been thousands of fights that went unrecorded. That is a distinct possibility.

In any case all this does not really assess quality. I think a better method would be to take a 10 year period in the history of a division, HW for example. Take for example the period of 1987-1997 and compare it to the last 10 years 2005-2015 and compare the top 10, 25, 30 etc.
It then become quite obvious at the very least that the quality of HW boxing has taken a nosedive.

[Bundana]

Those numbers indicate that the amount of total recorded fights have actually significantly decreased from 2000 to 2010. As for earlier in the century, there may very well have been thousands of fights that went unrecorded. That is a distinct possibility.

In any case all this does not really assess quality. I think a better method would be to take a 10 year period in the history of a division, HW for example. Take for example the period of 1987-1997 and compare it to the last 10 years 2005-2015 and compare the top 10, 25, 30 etc.
It then become quite obvious at the very least that the quality of HW boxing has taken a nosedive.

You're not reading the numbers correctly! 127123 was reached less than halfway through the present decade. These days we're averaging about 22,000 fights a year... so if that trend continues, we will have reached approx. 220,000 fights by the end of the decade. Markedly up from the 2000s.

But you're right... nothing of this proves anything about quality. But neither does comparing the top boxers of the last 10 years with the top boxers from an earlier 10-year period. Who will be the judge of which period produced the best boxers? If it's Elroy, then every boxer today beats every boxer from previous periods ko1. If it's Tracy Callis, then the best boxers fought 100+ years ago! There is no such thing as the "truth", when it comes to comparing fighters from different eras.

[Humean]

I would start by stating that I believe the amount of professional boxers that are not accounted for from Fleischer's time to be far greater than the present.

If BoxRec have the capabilities to publish the figures for active boxers in any given year, then we will have a much greater base for comparison.

Fleischer would rate approximately 2,600+ boxers each year in his yearly ratings, that would equate to roughly over half of the boxers he claimed he was aware of - I haven't spent any great time looking at this area until now and I think a considerable amount of time would be needed before reaching any form of conclusion.

I have took a brief look at 1941, for which I have only a vague reference, courtesy of Fleischer that 4,000 boxers were active at that time period.

Looking at his yearly welterweight ratings, he grouped 174 boxers over 7 groups.

28 of those boxers were non-US nationalities, including the likes of Mistos Grispos who was listed as from Greece despite being based in New York.

That makes for a over-inflated total 15% of non-US nationality boxers being ranked.

The rest then becomes guess work;

On the premise that Fleischer ranked over half of the boxers he knew of, we would have to believe there were no more than 348 active welterweights worldwide in 1941.

146 US boxers had already been ranked so what remaining percentage would be US and non-US?

Only 7 English boxers were ranked among the 174, what would be the total number of active English/British boxers at welterweight in 1941?

That is interesting about the number of fighters Fleischer was aware of. I'm not sure how incomplete the recording of shows in Western Europe were at that time but boxrec certainly seems to have recorded a lot. Even though the boxrec numbers of fights that Bundana has posted are still not complete there might be reason to think that the work done on recording the shows in the early 20th century are more complete, relatively speaking, because so many of the shows were in the US. I think there might be a lot more currently unrecorded shows from Latin America and Asia during the 50s, 60s and 70s.

I don't think the greater numbers equates with greater quality argument works anyway for a few reasons, one of which is that I think you simply just get more mediocre fighters rather than more high quality ones.

The problem I have with today is that people get rich fighting low opposition, so why risk it?

Look at Peter Quillin. He hasn't fought one single top middleweight, yet can cash million dollar paychecks. Why fight GGG?

Back in the old days, people could make a significant amount more only by fighting top guys because TV wasn't paying millions for average fights.

Therefore I would imagine top fighters fight less top fighters today than before. That's my assumption, whether or not that can be proved by stats is different altogether.

N'Dam is a top middleweight so at least give Quillin that one.

I think there is no doubt that the top fighters from the 30s and 40s tended to have more fights against the top fighters of their era than today and certainly less likely to fail to fight the very best opponents but I think that can be overstated. Besides I just don't think the average 'world level' fighter in the 30s or 40s was as good as their equivalent of today.

I've been compiling lists of the number of 'world level' fights and opponents that top fighters from the past and present have faced during their careers. Here is a list of the total numbers of opponents that the following fighters faced in their careers:

CANZONERI 43
ROBINSON 41
IKE WILLIAMS 36
ARCHIE MOORE 35
ARMSTRONG 35
JOE LOUIS 34
EZZARD CHARLES 33
JC CHAVEZ 32
ROY JONES JR 32
ARGUELLO 31
DURAN 29
DE LA HOYA 28
HOPKINS 28
MAYWEATHER 27
PACQUIAO 27
PEP 26
BIVINS 26
WHITAKER 24
LAMOTTA 24
**** TIGER 24
TRINIDAD 24
FOSTER 23
MCLARNIN 23
COTTO 23
JOFRE 22
KHAOSAI GALAXY 22
MARSHALL 22
NAPOLES 21
HAGLER 20
H. WILLIAMS 19
FENECH 18
FULLMER 17
JUNG-KOO CHANG 15
MARTINEZ 15
SPINKS 15
MONZON 14
BARNEY ROSS 13
CERDAN 13
WATANABE 12
CALZAGHE 12
KALAMBAY 12
VALDEZ 12
ZALE 9
PENDER 6

[KnockoutNed]

You're not reading the numbers correctly! 127123 was reached less than halfway through the present decade. These days we're averaging about 22,000 fights a year... so if that trend continues, we will have reached approx. 220,000 fights by the end of the decade. Markedly up from the 2000s.

But you're right... nothing of this proves anything about quality. But neither does comparing the top boxers of the last 10 years with the top boxers from an earlier 10-year period. Who will be the judge of which period produced the best boxers? If it's Elroy, then every boxer today beats every boxer from previous periods ko1. If it's Tracy Callis, then the best boxers fought 100+ years ago! There is no such thing as the "truth", when it comes to comparing fighters from different eras.

According to the numbers you posted by 2000 decade there were 185882 record fights and by 2010 decade there were 107123. That's a drop of 78759 between decades.



In your opinion what HW era was stronger?

(1987-1997)
Mike Tyson
Evander Holyfield
Lennox Lewis
Rid**** Bowe
Michael Moorer
Andrew Golota
Razor Ruddock
Ray Mercer
Tommy Morrison
George Foreman
Larry Holmes
Frank Bruno
Ike Ibeabuchi
David Tua
Tony Tucker
Tim Witherspoon
Oliver MCcall
Herbie Hide
Michael Grant
Shannon Briggs
Henry Akiwande
Tyrell Biggs
Mike Weaver
Francesco Damiani
Carl Williams

or
(2005-2015)
Vitali Klitschko
Wladimir Klitschko
Chris Byrd
Oleg Maskaev
Lamon Brewster
Sam Peter
Calvin Brock
Monte Barett
Nikolai Valuev
Hasim Rahman
Serguei Lyakhovich
Alexander Povetkin
David Haye
Bermane Stiverne
Eddie Chambers
Tyson Fury
Tomasz Adamek
Kubrat Pulev
Tony Thompson
Chris Arreola
Steve Cunningham
Alexander Dimitrenko
Juan Carlos Gomez
Sultan Ibragimov
Ruslan Chagaev

[Humean]

According to the numbers you posted by 2000 decade there were 185882 record fights and by 2010 decade there were 107123. That's a drop of 78759 between decades.



In your opinion what HW era was stronger?

(1987-1997)
Mike Tyson
Evander Holyfield
Lennox Lewis
Rid**** Bowe
Michael Moorer
Andrew Golota
Razor Ruddock
Ray Mercer
Tommy Morrison
George Foreman
Larry Holmes
Frank Bruno
Ike Ibeabuchi
David Tua
Tony Tucker
Tim Witherspoon
Oliver MCcall
Herbie Hide
Michael Grant
Shannon Briggs
Henry Akiwande
Tyrell Biggs
Mike Weaver
Francesco Damiani
Carl Williams

or
(2005-2015)
Vitali Klitschko
Wladimir Klitschko
Chris Byrd
Oleg Maskaev
Lamon Brewster
Sam Peter
Calvin Brock
Monte Barett
Nikolai Valuev
Hasim Rahman
Serguei Lyakhovich
Alexander Povetkin
David Haye
Bermane Stiverne
Eddie Chambers
Tyson Fury
Tomasz Adamek
Kubrat Pulev
Tony Thompson
Chris Arreola
Steve Cunningham
Alexander Dimitrenko
Juan Carlos Gomez
Sultan Ibragimov
Ruslan Chagaev

2010 refers to the decade, not the year, the decade from 2010-2020 is only half way through therefore the number of fights is obviously lower. At its current pace this decade will have more fights than the previous one.

[billeau2]

You're not reading the numbers correctly! 127123 was reached less than halfway through the present decade. These days we're averaging about 22,000 fights a year... so if that trend continues, we will have reached approx. 220,000 fights by the end of the decade. Markedly up from the 2000s.

But you're right... nothing of this proves anything about quality. But neither does comparing the top boxers of the last 10 years with the top boxers from an earlier 10-year period. Who will be the judge of which period produced the best boxers? If it's Elroy, then every boxer today beats every boxer from previous periods ko1. If it's Tracy Callis, then the best boxers fought 100+ years ago! There is no such thing as the "truth", when it comes to comparing fighters from different eras.

TRUTH is a monolithic, gigantic structure that sort of has the effect of Godzilla's pawprint on the Tokyo skyline....it destroys plurality, haphazards grey areas and is usually driven by many ulterior motives...However one can have "truths." Truths function to make statements that can be legitimized in any number of ways: sometimes objectively, other times, anecdotally, and even scientifically.

My father was a musician and played baritone horn well enough to be in the New York Philamonic, he was friends with Charles Mingus, etc and he will be the first to tell you that kids now a days play with a technical level of skill that is incomprable compared to the days he played....His opinion is anecdotal. The fact is that pedigogy has gotten better, more kids play music, there are more kids to play music, etc etc. The problem is as a society we cannot assume all trends follow the same pattern.

If one looks at boxing one can see that there are many developments that affect the level of talent in the sport. Unlike other sports like football (for example) boxing takes a lot of different skill sets to produce great fighters. While there are more people involved, and people that get paid (professional) there are also a lot more athletic endevours for the population to access, there are less and less coaching excellence in the sport, and many stal***** like the sometimes great olmypic program.... a program that now competes with professional fighters for time and energy, are not there for fighters.

Ray Corso is right on and I know this from my own experience as a martial artist because there is a similar problem: when karate was modified to let great players compete as kick boxers....karate skills went to sh11t. The next generation of teachers taught watered down karate for tournaments (kick boxing) and judo made a resurgence with MMA fighters along with Ju Jutsu.

You would be hard pressed to find decent street ready karate clubs now a days...despite many more people studying martial arts, including karate. Any one who is a fighter does MMA...when I was coming up as a teacher, in Baltimore there were plenty of clubs that had fighters who could put you on your ass so fast you would think the guys had three legs and six arms!!

Now? even the students of luminaries that I knew could kick it, practice in a manner where a wet paper bag would win... Again, more people, more fighters, and most of them these days are doing MMA. Does that mean that karate has not evolved? Well yeah it kind of does. Just like as in boxing many of the present teachers have not been taught and do not know how to fight with the techniques nor how to becom technically able to use the techniqes effectively.

[KnockoutNed]

2010 refers to the decade, not the year, the decade from 2010-2020 is only half way through therefore the number of fights is obviously lower. At its current pace this decade will have more fights than the previous one.

Yes I know that. My comment was on the decline between 2000 and 2010. However these numbers don't prove the quality of the boxers.