BoxRec

I am not sure why we are talking about the heights of heavyweights on this thread but anyway:

I took the top 10 from the year 1935. 2 of the the fighters I couldn't find heights for. I took the other 8 and the champion, and figured out their average. It came to just about 6'2 and 3/4 inches tall. Only one heavyweight in the top 10 was listed under 6'1.

Btw, Charles is listed as an inch taller than Jones.

Senya13 wrote:Most boxers have a weight division listed for them in the table at the top of the page with their record. Those, who were listed as heavyweights were included in these calculations.
It's a lame excuse about last 30 years, as fighters of the past who have the height listed for them, are pretty much random. Nobody was trying to enter the height only for shorter heavyweights and omit the taller ones. Even more likely is that most of the well-known heavyweights of the past had the height listed for them, so average height was more like height of average more or less top heavyweight.

You looked up every Heavyweight on boxrec??

Impressive!

dr_devious wrote:

elmersalsa wrote:

dr_devious wrote: No, Jones is not better than Whittaker p4p but he dominated for more of the 90s. Whittakers peak years were late 80s-early90s.
In the 90s and early part of this decade Jones was viewed as fighter of the decade, his later losses caused a revision of history.
A lot of the views on this site are speculation, based on opinions, some more knowledgeable than others. Jones dominated his opposition until late in his career. I think its a fair bet unless someone like Benn or McClellan caught up with him in a hypothetical match that nobody from his era would have outboxed him, or beat him down.

Still, Whitaker flourished in the middle 90s with a victory over Julio Cesar Vazquez. He won his third world title in the decade. Jones was the BEST in the late 90s, circa 1997-99. But almost for the MOST PART OF THE DECADE, Whitaker was the pound per pound king with Julio Cesar Chavez. He cleaned up the lightweight division in the 90s BETTER than what Jones did at 175, fighting guys that were MEDIOCRE at best.

How can a guy that ONLY fought 2 great fighters in his prime is BETTER than one that beat and fought 9 of them, beating them and dominating them in MASTERPIECE FASHION?.....I DO NOT GET IT.

Read what I said, I didnt say that Jones was better than Whittaker, just that he had more longevity in the decade.
Which 9 great fighters did Whittaker beat? He may have beaten 9 very good fighters, but not 9 greats

Whitaker beat Julio Cesar Chavez (even though it was called a DUBIOUS DRAW), beat Azumah Nelson and beat EXCELLENT fighters like Jose Luis Ramirez, Buddy McGirt, Julio Cesar Vazquez, Rafael Pineda, Greg Haugen and SOLID contenders like Harold Brazier, and Anthony Jones

Jones ONLY beat 2 or 3 good fighters in his boxing career.

dempseyfire wrote:You looked up every Heavyweight on boxrec??
Impressive!

I did not. One person had downloaded an offline version of all of boxrec pages back then, parsed them to put into his own database, and ran some SQL-queries on them somebody on one Russian forum asked him about.

Senya13 wrote:So no proof of most boxers on anabolic steroids? Careful with your accusations.
Do anagolic steroids help to increase average height of heavyweights too? I posted average height of heavyweights by decades before, it was gradually increasing.

Nice try but that's a slight of hand...

I said most are on something... Purposely vague so I qualified it with all are on substances banned or otherwise.

And nobody said anything about increased height.

I repeat again, where's the evidence that either 'most' (meaning 50% + 1 person) or 'all' today's boxers are on something 'banned'? How often do you hear boxers get caught having used banned substances, as compared to other sports (where it might be true)?

Senya13 wrote:I repeat again, where's the evidence that either 'most' (meaning 50% + 1 person) or 'all' today's boxers are on something 'banned'? How often do you hear boxers get caught having used banned substances, as compared to other sports (where it might be true)?

All I can provide is circumstantial evidence. You know that, which is why you jumped on it because you wanted to move away from the accusations against Jones.

Anyway, from observation, from conversations with professional sportsmen and trainers and from the number of cases that come to light.

If you really think that the WB-whatever are a sound police force and that people like a powerful promoter cannot get these things swept under the carpet or that the the whole business of performance enhancement (and the technologies behind getting perpetrators through the tests) is not rife in professional ranks of any competitive sport then maybe I've overestimated you.

I'll also point out that I said 'banned or otherwise'.

Senya13 wrote:

dempseyfire wrote:You looked up every Heavyweight on boxrec??
Impressive!

I did not. One person had downloaded an offline version of all of boxrec pages back then, parsed them to put into his own database, and ran some SQL-queries on them somebody on one Russian forum asked him about.

Can this be translated into English?

I've often wondered if boxrec would allow querie to be made on the database.

I would love to know the percentage of fights won by the guy with longer reach (for example). There are loads od stats that could be generated and would be tremendously interesting. All would be moments away for anyone with access to the database. Who is the dba? Is it Buzz?

Ezzard wrote:All I can provide is circumstantial evidence.

Boxing-related, or sports in general?

Senya13 wrote:Average height of heavyweights, based on data from boxrec database at the end of 2005:
1880-1899 - 177 cm (5'9 1/2")
1900-1919 - 178 cm (5'10")
1920-1939 - 179 cm (5'10 1/2")
1940-1959 - 180 cm (5'10 3/4")
1960-1979 - 181 cm (5'11 1/4")
1980-1999 - 184 cm (6' 1/2")
2000-2005 - 188 cm (6'2")

Average weight:
1880-1899 - 81,3 kg (179lb)
1900-1919 - 84,57 kg (186lb)
1920-1939 - 84,80 kg (187lb)
1940-1959 - 85,72 kg (189lb)
1960-1979 - 88,78 kg (196lb)
1980-1999 - 96,42 kg (213lb)
2000-2005 - 101,62 kg (224lb)

These date are entirely fictional.

Pardon me?

wouter wrote:

Senya13 wrote:Average height of heavyweights, based on data from boxrec database at the end of 2005:
1880-1899 - 177 cm (5'9 1/2")
1900-1919 - 178 cm (5'10")
1920-1939 - 179 cm (5'10 1/2")
1940-1959 - 180 cm (5'10 3/4")
1960-1979 - 181 cm (5'11 1/4")
1980-1999 - 184 cm (6' 1/2")
2000-2005 - 188 cm (6'2")

Average weight:
1880-1899 - 81,3 kg (179lb)
1900-1919 - 84,57 kg (186lb)
1920-1939 - 84,80 kg (187lb)
1940-1959 - 85,72 kg (189lb)
1960-1979 - 88,78 kg (196lb)
1980-1999 - 96,42 kg (213lb)
2000-2005 - 101,62 kg (224lb)

These date are entirely fictional.

I presumed as much.

Try listing all fighters who have 200 or more fights listed at boxrec (at the end of 2005, their stats might have changed now) without having a copy of the database.

You think he was bluffing? That that's an easy task to make a list of fighters with 200+ bouts (I asked him to give me that list, as I was interested in such thing)? I can ask that person (if he still has that database) to give a list of fighters with maximum weight. Something like
date1 fighter1 weight1
date2 fighter2 weight2
and so on.
You can't do that without a copy of boxrec database that you can run SQL-queries on. Then we can ask JohnShep to give the same list based on data that is in the database right now, if possible only for weights that were added no later than the end of 2005.

I think the problem is that you aren't being very clear what you are talking about.

You mention fighters with 200+ fights, do you mean you are only including fighters with 200 or more fights?
Are saying that he took random 200 fights from each period and averaged them? Or what?

You are mentioning terms such as SQL queries that mean nothing to me and probably not much to most other people.

It would help if we had a better idea of how you (or whoever this person you are referring to) are coming to these averages.

Be clear, and be specific.

Fighters with 200+ fights is exactly that. Fighters from boxrec database who have at least 200 fights listed for them in their record. Len Wickwar had the most bouts, followed by Reggie Strickland, Jack Britton, Johnny Dundee and so on down to Kid Azteca and Ray Robinson who had exactly 200 fights listed in their boxrec records (at the end of 2005).

SQL is a language you use to access a database, when you want to get some information from it. If I want to get a list of 50 maximum weights of fighters, I'll write something like

SELECT weight_of_boxer_1 weight, name_of_boxer_1 boxername, date_of_bout fightdate
FROM list_of_bouts
WHERE weight_of_boxer_1 IS NOT NULL
UNION
SELECT weight_of_boxer_2 weight, name_of_boxer_2 boxername, date_of_bout fightdate
FROM list_of_bouts
WHERE weight_of_boxer_2 IS NOT NULL
ORDER BY weight DESC


that will sort all weights of boxers where it is known (WHERE weight IS NOT NULL) from highest to lowest (ORDER BY weight DESC , DESC stands for descending order), and produce a list of "weight, boxer, date", from which you can take the first 50 or however many you want.

I have access to the BoxRec database.

If anyone has some kind of interesting stat they think they can pull out of it, let me know.

Reproducing the same stats I posted above, based on today's data, would be nice.
Something like

1) select all boxers who are listed in "Division: heavyweight".

2) sum up all known weights for these boxers from all of their bouts during that time span (even if some of them took place at light heavyweight or even lower weights, this shouldn't distort the stats too much considering the size of the sampling involved will measure in tens or hundreds of thousands), and divide it by the quantity of all weights that were summed up, getting a simple average.

3) Do the same thing for height of heavyweight boxers.

Some fighters listed at "Division: Heavyweight" may have only had a very small percentage of their fights at Heavyweight.. but they are classified as such because that is where they had their accomplishments..

How about.. All bouts that are designated to have taken place at Heavyweight?

I question handling height in this manner... I could see doing that by year of debut date.

Heavyweight limit varied in time. In Fitzsimmons' time everything above 158 lb (or what the limit was back then) was considered heavyweight.
Not all bouts have a weight assigned to them, to my knowledge. I often come across fights where exact weight numbers are given, but the 'division' field is empty or even lists a different division from what it should be based strictly on weight numbers.

Average height for boxers designated as heavyweight

Categorized using their debut date (so a boxer is only counted once)

Average bout weight for boxers (not bouts) designated as heavyweights

Categorized using the bout date

Someone asked about reach...

Reach matters

Bouts included were either wins or losses. No draws, or no contests. Each boxer has a valid reach on record.



Interesting how it goes down at 10". Perhaps some "Freak" like matchups enter into the picture here... this combined with the small sample set causes a drop off.

JCS wrote:Average height for boxers designated as heavyweight
Categorized using their debut date (so a boxer is only counted once)

Thank you, but could you also do it the way I described too? Not just by debut date, but by all of their bouts within that time span, because that's what an average heavyweight height will be.
Put it this way, if we have two groups A and B, which have equal number of heavyweight boxers in them, but group A contains boxers with height 5'11', and group B - only 6'1". Boxers from group A have 50 bouts on average during the timespan that is being considered, and group B - 25 bouts on average. By your algorithm, average height will be exactly 6'0", but if we used a time machine to visit heavyweight bouts from that time, we'd see fights with shorter boxers more often, so we would conclude that average height is actually below 6'0".