Can we compare modern boxers to the Greats of yesteryear?

Last weekend’s Heavyweight Championship fight between Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury has been hailed as one of the best for years, and with Anthony Joshua holding the other championship belts, there are echoes of great rivalries of the past: Evander Holyfield, Lennox Lewis and Ruddock Bowe, even the ‘golden years’ of Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman. This of course prompts the age-old and agreeably futile question: how do today’s champions rate when compared to past ones? It’s a game that most sports fans play, picking their best of all-time team and so on. Back in the late Sixties it even spawned a computer-generated fight between Rocky Marciano, the champion of the mid-Fifties, and Muhammad Ali. I remember watching this bizarre affair, though I can’t remember who the computer decided should win.

One fairly obvious difference between the Present and the Past is that today’s Heavyweights are bigger and heavier. It’s true that Jess Willard, champion in the second decade of the twentieth century, stood at 6 foot 7, but this was unusual, and Jack Dempsey who knocked him out rather quickly was at least eight inches shorter, and didn’t weigh much over 13 stone. The only other really big champion of the first half of the twentieth century was the Italian, Primo Carnera, known, derisively or perhaps affectionately, as “The Ambling Alp”. He wasn’t much of a boxer or fighter, and was controlled by the Mob and horribly ripped off. He survived and had a later career as a successful wrestler and in the movies. You can see him in that nice British comedy of Jewish life in the East End of London, “A Kid for Two Farthings”, from a novella by Wolf Mankowitz. It’s a charming film, directed by Carol Reed and starring Celia Johnson, Diana Dors and David Kossoff.

Still nobody would rank Carnera among even the top hundred who have fought for the Heavyweight Title, and some of the twenty-five whom Joe Louis beat in his twelve-year reign at the top probably weren’t much good either. This is not surprising. There have rarely been many good heavyweights at the same time. Quite a few forgettable British champions have been granted title fights with, usually, sad results. The American Boxing Press tended to dismiss them as “horizontal heavyweights”. This wasn’t always fair. The Welshman Tommy Farr went the distance – 15 rounds in those days – with Joe Louis, and a points defeat at the hands of “the Brown Bomber” rates as an honourable effort, Louis dismissing most of his challengers rather quickly. For some he remains the greatest of all Heavyweights. Others go further back to the first Black champion, Jack Johnson, whose capture of the title in 1908 set off race riots. Johnson was later charged with violation of the Mann Act by transporting a woman across a State line for immoral purposes, found guilty by an all-white jury and sentenced to a term in prison. Sensibly he skipped bail and headed for Paris where he was received as a celebrity. He did however return to the US after the war and served a year of his sentence. President Trump, to his credit, has recently granted Johnson a posthumous pardon. There is film of Johnson’s fight against the former champion, Jim Jefferies, who was persuaded to come out of retirement in 1910 to teach the uppity Black a lesson, but Johnson, a master of defensive boxing, with a pretty good punch too, won this (first) “Fight of the Century”.

To some extent, for reasons I’ll come to, comparison of champions across the years makes more sense in boxing than in most sports, even though, as I say, today’s heavyweights are mostly several inches taller and several stones heavier than the likes of Johnson, Dempsey, Louis, Marciano, Sonny Liston, Muhammed Ali, Joe Frazier and Mike Tyson. If you subscribe to the old boxing adage that “a good big ‘un will always beat a good little ‘un”, then you might argue that none of the above, outstanding in their own time as they may have been, could hold their own against Fury, Wilder and Joshua. Even Muhammad Ali in his best years would have been conceding weight and height to today’s champions. Those of us who were young when he beat the fearsome Sonny Liston to become champion may choose to believe that Ali in his first spell as champion, before, that’s to say, he was stripped of his title and barred from the ring for refusing to be drafted to fight in Vietnam, was, as he boasted, simply “the Greatest”, even while we may feel a pricking of doubt, fearing that today’s fighters’ advantages of height and weight might be too much for him.

Of course, such considerations don’t apply when comparing boxers of past and present at the lower weights, and then such comparisons seem more valid. This is because boxing has changed, or developed, less than most other sports. Though, doubtless, fighters today train differently and may follow a nutritionist-approved diet plan, there has nevertheless been little, if any, technological development in boxing, nothing for instance of the kind which enabled an acquaintance who won the Scottish Boys Golf Championship forty or almost fifty years ago to tell me the other day that, with today’s clubs and golf ball, he hits his drives as far as he did when he was in his twenties. Moreover, he added, it’s not just distance. His approach shots are more accurate – entirely thanks to improvement in golf-club technology.

Likewise, as I’ve remarked in these columns before, a cricket bat is so weighted today that a defensive push may go for a boundary and a mishit fly for six. But there has been no comparable technological advance in the fight game, which means that the sort of comparisons made possible by film and memory (no matter how often memory plays one false) are not ridiculous. So, if you declare that Sugar Ray Robinson would have beaten any of today’s middleweight champions (assuming both men to be in their prime), you are at least comparing like with like. Today’s boxers have no evident advantages over champions of the past.

In contrast comparing Bobby Jones with Tiger Woods, you are comparing golfers who were really playing a different game – different in equipment, courses and demands. It becomes nonsensical to claim that one was greater than the other, just as it is futile (if fun) to argue that Rod Laver or John McEnroe, given today’s equipment, would beat Roger Federer or Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon. This reflection won’t of course prevent us from indulging in such arguments and enjoying them. Fantasy sport may be rather silly, but we mostly enjoy it. “Who should open with Len Hutton in the best England Test team of your lifetime?” “Good question, needs deep thinking. Wisden will help of course, but it’s not just a question of statistics. You have to take conditions and the quality of the opposition’s pace attack into account. Yes, it’s what Sherlock would have called a three-pipe problem.”