Bart Barry recently wrote, “It’s not like anyone with access to YouTube could mistake this era for a great one.”
Modern boxers, more than athletes in other sports, suffer from comparisons with the past. No one looks at Los Angeles Angels superstar Mike Trout and complains, “He isn’t as good as Mickey Mantle was.” People accept and appreciate Mike Trout for what he is. And that’s true of other sports. But in boxing, elite fighters are constantly judged against their long-ago predecessors and hear, “So and so would have beaten him.”
At times, boxing fans over-romanticize the past. Previous “golden ages” of boxing weren’t always so golden. There was a five-year period from 1932 to 1937 when the heavyweight championship resided with Jack Sharkey, Primo Carnera, Max Baer, and James Braddock. The light-heavyweight champions immediately preceding Billy Conn were Bob Olin, John Henry Lewis, and Melio Bettina. I could go on. And on.
Was Benny Leonard a great fighter for his time? Absolutely. But put Benny Leonard in his prime (his prime being the 1920’s) in the ring against Vasyl Lomachenko, and I’m betting on Lomachenko. That’s not to say that Lomachenko is as great in his era as Leonard was in his. It’s to say that times change.
Terence Crawford, Vasyl Lomachenko, Canelo Alvarez, Gennady Golovkin, Errol Spence, and their brethren would have been competitive in any era. They might not have beaten the best, but they would have been competitive against them. The same hold true for Andre Ward, Floyd Mayweather, and Bernard Hopkins.
Was Ray Leonard (who peaked in the 1980s) better than any welterweight fighting today? Absolutely. But Ray Leonard was also arguably better than any welterweight ever except Sugar Ray Robinson.
By and large, athletes today are better than their counterparts were decades ago. Babe Ruth is widely regarded as the greatest baseball player ever. Put Ruth in the game now against pitchers who are attacking him with forkballs, sliders, fastballs, split-finger fastballs, two-seam fastballs, cut fastballs, curveballs, knuckleballs, and change-ups, and I doubt that he’d have a .342 career batting average. The men who won gold medals in swimming at the 1932 Olympics wouldn’t have qualified for the women’s finals at the past three Olympic games.
Where do boxers fit into the equation?
Today’s fighters are better conditioned than their predecessors as a consequence of advances in nutrition and conditioning technique.
Boxing technique is a different matter.
“You can look back over time and see how technique evolved,” trainer-commentator Teddy Atlas offers. “It didn’t happen all at once. You see it advance in stages. Fighters learning to use their legs. Fighters learning to punch effectively to the body. Fighters learning to move their head. Jack Johnson was a great pioneer for black people. But he was also a great pioneer in blending defense with offense and controlling the distance between himself and his opponent. Benny Leonard made history as a great Jewish fighter, but he also advanced boxing technique.”
Hall-of-Fame matchmaker Bruce Trampler is in accord and says, “Fighters like Joe Gans, Jack Johnson, and Benny Leonard had skill sets that were advanced for their era but wouldn’t be today. I think the postwar 1940s and 1950s were the era when, overall, fighters had the best technique. I don’t think there have been any significant breakthroughs in technique since then.”
As for today, Trampler declares, “The knowledge is still available. But I don’t think fighters today are as well-rounded as a group as they once were. The coaching is inferior to what it used to be, so most fighters aren’t being taught what they should be about technique.”
And there’s another factor in play today that has led to a decline in the number of great fighters.
Athletes in all sports get better when they compete against the best. In tennis, for example, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic have learned from their battles and pushed each other to new heights
Boxers, like other athletes, learn and improve their skills by competing against the best. When boxing was boxing (as the saying goes), fighters had to go in tough and beat other, equally talented fighters to be considered great.
But boxing’s current business model deprives fighters of the opportunity to prove and improve upon their skills by fighting other great fighters. Now slick PR and marketing create the illusion of greatness.
Part of the beauty of sports is that a team or individual athlete has to compete successfully at the highest level to be acknowledged as great.
Baseball’s historically great teams won the World Series. Football’s historically great teams won the Super Bowl. In basketball, the Holy Grail is the NBA Championship. Great athletes excel in their sports’ flagship events whether in team competition or individual endeavors like track and field, tennis, and golf.
There’s sad irony in the fact that boxing—the world’s purest sport—has been manipulated by parochial economic interests to the point where it no longer has that level of competition. Except on rare occasions, the best no longer fight the best. We no longer know which fighters are great. Instead, we’re left to speculate as to which fighters might someday be great or might have been great if only they’d fought the best.
In that regard, Teddy Atlas observes, “No matter how good a trainer a fighter has, no matter how hard he works in the gym, a fighter learns what’s most important about the craft of boxing in fights. There’s no teacher like the fight itself. And the problem we have today is that the priorities aren’t centered around fighters learning the craft of boxing. They’re about navigating a fighter to a belt and getting him a name while traveling down the easiest path possible. And that hurts because tough hard great fights make great fighters, and tough hard great fights make great fighters greater.”
“Ray Leonard became a greater fighter because of what he learned fighting Roberto Duran,” Atlas continues. “Then he took what he learned fighting Duran and used it to beat Thomas Hearns. After that, he took what he learned fighting Duran and Hearns and it helped him beat Marvin Hagler. And he fought Wilfred Benitez before he fought any of those guys. It was the hard fights, not the easy ones, that led Leonard to understand that there was always one more move he could make and taught him how to make that move to turn things around and win. Great fighters aren’t born great or trained to greatness, although, obviously, natural physical gifts and a good teacher are important. Great fighters are forged in the fire.”