wouter wrote: ↑25 Jul 2008, 07:36
My2Sense wrote:wouter wrote:
Just who is that 5'8 175-pounder you're referring to?
How about Sam Langford?
You made it sound as if 5'8 and 175 lbs ever was the standard for heavyweights. In fact Langford was constantly outsized in his era, but managed to win anyway. Like I said, I find it very hard to rate the 'old-timers' because of the lack of footedge of them. If size alone were the deciding factor and bigger meant automatically better, why bother fighting at all?
Expressed in height, reach, and rock-hard, ripped to the gills weight -- a significant size difference gives a boxer a significant advantage. You're NOT going to be Heavyweight Champion if you're 5'4" tall -- no matter how talented you are in every other aspect of the science.
If an exceedingly outstanding athlete over 7 feet tall, with tremendous intelligence, punching power, flexibility, and mobility, appeared on the Heavyweight scene, he would probably not get big name Heavyweights to share a ring with him. In that respect size would be a real disadvantage -- since Pro Boxing is a business more than a sport. A youthful Sonny Liston was successfully avoided by Floyd Patterson for years. Liston would still have been successful in later decades, but he wouldn't stand out as a holy terror like he did in the 1950's, an era of small Heavyweights.
But since size and strength allowed Liston to beat smaller people up, Liston himself commented that he probably didn't develop as a boxer to the extent that he should have and could have -- had he not been a terrific puncher who could simply run smaller Heavyweights like Patterson over very quickly. George Foreman was a counterpart in the early 70's. Foreman laid waste to men like Frazier, so he thought he didn't need the Sweet Science. How wrong he was -- and vowed to be a better and smarter boxer prior to his "take the long road" comeback.
There are at least 30 other physical and mental attributes that significantly contribute to a boxer's (or any professional athlete's) success. And taken together, they outweigh sheer size as an advantage -- or Louis wouldn't have wasted Baer and Carnera, who relied on sheer size, strength, and ability to absorb punishment to beat 90% of their adversaries and win the top prize in the sport... When they met an extremely able boxer-puncher who had one of history's greatest trainers, and only a year of dedicated devotion to the science, they were figured out quickly.
