BoxRec

I've just come across a photo of Don McCorkindale shaking hands with Larry Gains. Both are usually listed as 6'1" tall but in this photo, despite wearing heeled dress shoes, McCorkindale seems to be about 5 or 6 inches shorter than Gains who towers over him. So either McCorkindale was shorter than recorded or Gains was much taller. I've seen a pic of McCorkindale standing alongside George Cook who was 5'9" and he is taller by a bit. Maybe 5'11 1/4"? From video Gains seems a shade taller than Jack Petersen who was supposedly 6' 1 1/2" and appears a wee bit shorter than 6' 3 1/2" tall Phil Scott. One newspaper article from 1926 listed Gains as about 6' 2" with an 80" reach. Judging from other video of Gains with Len Harvey (6'), Tommy Farr (6' 1 1/2") and Primo Carnera (6' 5 1/2"), I'm thinking Gains was probably closer to 6' 2 1/2" which makes McCorkindale shorter than his listed 6' 1".

Difficult to know. I have seen the pic of him with Cook, and McCorkindale looks at least 3, but probably close to 4 inches taller, so probably over 6 feet tall, and possibly 6'1''.
Full length pics of McCorkindale and Primo Carnera both without shoes shaking hands at the weigh-in generally seems to support his height of 6'1''.
A full length pic of McCorkindale and Walter Neusel seems to support a height of between 6'0'' and 6'1''
Pic of Mc Corkindale with 5'10 Paulino Uzcudun show McCorkindale to be quite a bit taller, supporting a height of over 6 feet.

The Gains photo is weird, and there must be something very wrong there.
Otherwise, Gains would be much much larger than Primo Carnera even. The weights also tell a story. Gains averaged only 8lbs heavier than McCorkindale in their first 2 fights, with unfortunately no weights recorded for their 3rd.

I wonder if they have the wrong fighter and it isn't McCorkindale at all? While having a look, I noticed that a picture of Young Stribling was incorrectly captioned as being that of McCorkindale. Half the problem is that most men in those days had very similar haircuts, and all slicked their hair, and we are dealing with B&W photos.

On another note, this is why again the metric measurements are just better...with the old way there was the temptation and the actual practice of "rounding up" to the nearest inch, which invariably meant upwards, so that a guy who is 6'2 and a quarter magically becomes 6'3, even though he is actually closer to, and it would be more accurate to call him 6'2''. He might be up against a guy who is an eyelash under 6'4, which is rounded to 6'4. So although there is now only officially an inch difference of 6'4'' vs 6'3'', in reality it is really almost double that, approaching 2 inches. I reckon that is to blame for a lot of discrepancies, and unfortunately it still seems to be prevalent today where people still use the old (antiquated) methods.
Rounding a centimeter off doesn't give such wide discrepencies.
For what it's worth, Boxrec have Gains at 189cm and McCorkindale at 185cm.

It's definitely McCorkindale in the picture with Gains. I matched him with another closeup and it was dead-on. One thing about McCorkindale I've noticed is he used to comb his hair really high in some photos giving him an extra few inches in height. I know press agents often exaggerated a fighter's height to make him more impressive in print. In the old days a guy had to be at least six feet tall to be considered large, especially a heavyweight boxer. They embellish height all the time in pro sports, even now. No way is Mike Tyson 5' 11" and Jim Jeffries was never 6' 3" as I've seen in online anecdotes.

Cap wrote:It's definitely McCorkindale in the picture with Gains. I matched him with another closeup and it was dead-on.

If you look closely at the picture, you'll see that Gains is not standing on the ground but on some kind of platform.

wouter wrote:

Cap wrote:It's definitely McCorkindale in the picture with Gains. I matched him with another closeup and it was dead-on.

If you look closely at the picture, you'll see that Gains is not standing on the ground but on some kind of platform.

Granted, but it doesn't appear to be much more than half an inch thick at best, not enough to explain the big difference in height.

Cap wrote:Granted, but it doesn't appear to be much more than half an inch thick at best, not enough to explain the big difference in height.

It's much higher than half an inch.