BoxRec

I was watching the NFL playoffs Sunday and I started thinking about the evolution of sports. It's been discussed on the forum before,but here's some of the things that are running through my mind.

As for the team sports I grew up with(baseball,football,basketball) It's not hard to say because of the size speed and strength of players today that,for example,the New England Patriots could beat the 67 Packers. Even the accuracy of field goals is remarkable. The strategy,situation players,different looks on defense and offense. You guys get my drift. Baseball:I remember shortstops looking like Pee Wee Reese and Luis Aparicio. Basketball in the 60's was dominated because the Celtics were a running team. Guards were 6' 1"" and forwards 6' 5". Most centers were clods. Now every team can fly down the court. Sometimes I think I'm watching an acrobatic exhibition of 7' players.

We know boxing is an individual sport. But has it kept pace with other individual sports such as track and field for example? I know people will use the argument that steroids are a factor with modern day sports,but it may not be that important to a fighter.Boxing is harder to figure because ,for example,a welterweight still has to make 147 and a middleweight 160. Sweating off pounds is always a factor in boxing. That I think is one of the reasons,consciously or not, we have such heated debates about who was the best.

So the only division we can more accurately use as a barometer is the heavyweight division because there is no weight limitation. So are heavyweights better today or let's say,for the sake of an argument,the 1950's.

I've read on the forum that the greatest era for heavies was the 70's:Ali,Frazier,Foreman. Was it? And if it was, that was 30 years ago. I watched Ali/Bonavena the other night. Yank Durham who was doing the color with Howard Cosell had the fight even going into the 15th. Remember,if Ali loses that fight,there's no big fight with Frazier and maybe the history of the heavyweight division would have dramatically changed. But what amazed me was Bonavena. A big strong cumbersome man with very primitive boxing skills. He almost beat Ali,who is often mentioned as the greatest heavy. When I was watching Bonavena,he reminded me of Don Cockell. Marciano,at 185,beat him easily.

Were the heavyweights of the 70's the best ever? If so,what does that say about today's heavies? Maybe the big men of yester year,especially black fighters, should get a closer look. Langford,Jeanette,MvVey,Wills never got their shot. If they would have been the champ at one time or another,could we analyze the division clearer?

Has boxing evolved into a better sport? What's your opinion. Remember,keep your punches up.

First, I don't agree with the premise the the other sports mentioned are better now than they ever have been.

Baseball has been about the same quality for 100 years. If Luis Aparichio and Pee Wee Reese (both small for their era) were playing today, they would be two of the best shortstops.

The NFL is pretty much the same for atleast the last 30 years. Yes fieldgoal kicking is better, thought that is more to do with soccer style kicking being more accurrate than straight on.
Offensive lineman are of course much bigger, which is partially because of steriods, which is another discussion. However, quarterbacks on average don't throw the ball better, receivers on average don't catch it better.
If you watch NFL games from say the 1970's you don't see much difference.

Basketball is clearly worse than it was. The centers in the NBA from the 1960's weren't "clods". Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell were world class athletes. Walt Bellamy and Nate Thurmond were very good as well.
In the last decade or so, we have seen records set for shooting futility. The was a college game a couple of weeks ago where a team scored 20 points. You may think you are watching an acrobatic exhibition of 7 footers, but they can't get the ball in the basket.

Today there are few good jump shooters, very few big men that can play post, the great athletes can't run a fastbreak. If you have ESPN Classic, you can see that basketball has declined significantly over the past couple of decades.

As for boxing, well first of all Bonavena was a good fighter, but certainly not the best of his era. The Ali fight wasn't certainly not dead even going into the last round, and Ali still rusty after coming back from his 3 year layoff. Bonavena was much better than Don Cockell. If Bonavena was fighting in a week era, he could have been a champion. This decade he surely would have won some WBS belt.

The 1970's were the best era for the heavyweight division. You have 3 of the Top 10 heavyweights of all time that were close enough to their prime. (Frazier,Ali, and Foreman. This isn't even including Holmes)
You had a lot of depth (Norton, Shavers,Quarry,Young,Lyle,Bonavena etc.)
The 1980's was mediocre, and the 1990's had several good heavyweights; unfortunetly for whatever reason most of the top heavyweights of the 1990's didn't fight each other.

This decade is by far the worst decade of heavyweight boxing in a long time. Watch the fights, it's that simple. There is simply an appalling lack of skill. How many great heavyweight fights have their been since Holyfield-Bowe?

This usually runs in cycles. Some decades have good depth in the heavyweight division, but little in the lower weights and vice versa. Who knows? Maybe the next decade will be very good in the heavyweight division.

Sports do evolve for awhile in the their first few decades. New strategies and methods are being developed. However, at a certain point, improvement decreases and finally stops. Baseball and boxing are so old that the quality hasn't improved since the early 1900's.
The NFL didn't start until 1920, and the NBA didn't start until the mid 1940's. There was great improvement for a couple of decades and then it has stopped.

Football and basketball are much newer sports (I'd go so far to say that before the late 1950s football and basketball were pretty much different games than we you see today based on rule changes, strategy etc.)

After a certain period of time, a sport hits a crescendo and either stays put or declines. The NFL did sometime in the late 1970s. I don't see the Patriots having an easy time vs the 84 49ers one bit. Montana and Co. were a helluva lot more talented and tougher than the 2008 Giants or Chargers I'll tell you that.

Do the San Antonio Spurs beat the Lakers or Bulls of the late 80s?? I don't see that one bit.

Boxing since the 19teens has been the same sport more or less and actually declined drastically in popularity (as opposed to basketball and football), leading to it's overall decline.

You can't use Ali-Bonavena, of all fights, to suggest that Ali somehow couldn't compete with later Heavyweights. Ali-Bonavena was one of Ali's worst performances, he looked atrocious. Ali had returned from his exile and was very rusty, as he was in his first Frazier fight. The Ali who fought Patterson the first time wouldn't lose a round in today's' Heavyweight division. I think its a little important to try and understand the background to certain fights, which I think most modern viewers fail to do when they watch old time fighters, particularly Ali. I could just as well watch Holyfield, one of the best Heavyweights of the last twenty years, fight Michael Moorer and argue that modern Heavyweights, as a result of Holyfield's poor showing, couldn't compete with old time Heavyweights, when the fact is Holyfield was in poor health in that fight.

An older, fatter Foreman was getting into competitive fights with 90's Heavyweights, imagine him in his prime fighting some of those men.

And that's just the Heavyweight division. The lower weight classes have not kept up pace, either. Just compare the champions of today to the champions of just 20 years ago. In most cases they were far better then than they are now.