KIDS THESE DAYS: THE GREATEST BOXERS' INVISIBILITY TO MY GENERATION

Kids these days don’t have the proper respect that they should.  Or rather, they don’t have the proper education that they should.  My generation is ga-ga over guys like Roy Jones Jr. and Floyd Mayweather and readily consider them top pound-for-pound all time greats.  I’m simply tired of hearing that Roy Jones Jr. is one of the greatest that ever lived and being dismissed as “foolish” (only in more colorful tones) when I make assertions to the contrary.  Why is this?  Why has the memory of such greats as Ezzard Charles, Gene Tunney, Harry Greb, Henry Armstrong, Willie Pep, and Sugar Ray Robinson faded so badly?  I have a few explanations.

Reason one:  Muhammad Ali.  Ali certainly was an exceptional fighter.  For most of the 1960’s he was unmatched in ability and stamina (Although in ’67 when he was stripped, a young brawler named Joe Frazier was rapidly moving up the ranks).  Muhammad Ali’s greatest trait however was his mouth.  Ali was first and foremost a showman and his dynamic and charismatic personality, not to mention boundless ego, created a shadow that is so great, few fighters before or since are even mentioned in the same breathe as Ali.  Which, of course, is a mistake. 

This opens up the next problem facing my generation:  lack of history and the loss of those who were there.  Jack Johnson, who was Ali’s equal and hero, won the Heavyweight championship of the world 100 years ago.  I doubt any person who was at his fight with Tommy Burns in Australia is still alive.  Worse yet is that film was more than in it’s infancy when he fought so only a few bits and pieces of Johnson’s legacy remain intact.  This problem is being remedied, somewhat, by the recent trend of publishing biographies about the old-timers.  Unfortunately it is hard to make a comparison between a book and TV footage, and, as Angelo Dundee says, you cannot judge a fighter by what you see on TV.  Dundee asserts that you have to see the fighter in question fighting live in order to judge their ability.  Therefore few people remain alive today who even saw Marciano fight, let alone Louis, Dempsey, or Greb. 

This is the next problem, over-exposure in today’s media.  Everyone of Roy Jones Jr.’s knockouts from amateur to champion, and everyone of Mike Tyson’s knockouts from amateur to champion have been recorded and played back to us in some way or another.  This wealth of exposure and continued replaying of these fighters (based on the availability of footage of them) has us seeing these spectacular knockouts over and over.  When you see the same guy knocking out people again and again, you get to thinking that they’re pretty good.  Marciano on the other hand, one of the greatest of all time, only has about eight or nine knockouts still available to us on tape.  Why?  Because in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s you didn’t get on TV unless you were one of the best, and virtually no one had home movie cameras.  Also, if you did get on TV your performance was just as likely to get taped over because they needed the reel for the next program.  Graziano-Zale I and II and Ezzard Charles’s three great fights with Moore have no surviving film clips.  The level of visibility just isn’t there for the old timers, especially because Ali, Tyson, and Jones are still alive and mentioned to us in one way or another through television and the internet.

So why am I harping about the old guys when I myself was born a full three years after Ali’s last fight?  After all I most certainly wasn’t there for Louis-Schmelling, Marciano-Walcott and Dempsey-Firpo.  I’ve done a lot of reading, mostly about the old-timers, and my information comes from people who were there.  And they all say the same thing:  fighters today aren’t what fighters used to be.  This, to an extent, is true, and it is somewhat sad that I respect the fighters who lived and died before I was even born more than the ones in my own lifetime.  Before I put my foot any further in my mouth, let me state that boxing is the most difficult sport, period.  Just because I think Sugar Shane Mosely isn’t as good as Sugar Ray Robinson, or that Roy Jones isn’t an Ezzard Charles, doesn’t prevent me from holding those two athletes above those steroid-ridden sissies who play baseball, the criminals of basketball, and those spoiled brat jerks who play football.  Roy may be pushing 40 and he’s my ten or eleven all time light-heavyweight, but I’ll take him over Ray Lewis any day of the week.  That being said, I’ll return to my previous rant.

So what made the fighters of the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s (Boxing’s golden era) so good?  First off there was a much larger talent pool.  Today, any kid with the potential to become a good fighter will probably end up playing football, basketball, baseball, or, god forbid, MMA.  All four of those sports have more recognizable “heroes” and easily joined youth leagues (except MMA) than boxing.  The big three (football, baseball, and basketall) routinely report million-dollar salaries and hype their athlete’s to no end.  The economically depressed (which has always provided us with the greatest athlete’s) look towards other sports than boxing for a way out.

The fighters who made up Boxing’s golden age were the children of dirt-poor European immigrants or black kids who came up in Detroit and Harlem after the great migration.  Either way, the gods of the golden age grew up in the ghettos, fighting other kids, and figuring out that they could make a way for themselves with their fists.  Gymnasiums and athletic clubs at the time only had boxing equipment.  Treadmills, weight machines, and dieticians didn’t exist. When you went to the gym, you went there to box.  The amateur program also was much larger and the Golden Gloves national champions were almost as famous as the professionals. 

This larger talent pool meant another thing:  more fights.  Willie Pep clocked 241 professional bouts, the most in modern ring history.  Archie Moore had 221, and Sugar Ray Robinson had 202 fights.  These are extreme examples, but the average fighter of that era had between sixty and one-hundred fights in their career.  In fact, Marciano’s 49-0 was considered an incredibly short career.  Floyd Mayweather’s 38 – 0 seems absurdly low, or maybe incomplete, in comparison to the men of yesteryear. 

More fights also meant you could lose.  Today, one mistimed loss can set a fighter back years.  In the old days, if you lost and needed redemption, you fought the guy the next week, and maybe next month, and maybe a few more times after that.  Rivalries routinely had six to ten fights in a series.  The extreme example is that Charlie Goldman fought his chief rival, George Kitson, sixty times.  Pep may have gone 1-3 against Sandy Saddler, but he is generally regarded as the best that featherweight ever had to offer.  LaMotta dropped five against Sugar Ray Robinson, but he’s still on a lot of top-ten middleweight lists. 

Another problem today is the over-saturation of the sports market.  Sports in America is no longer an athletic pursuit, but big business.  The participants routinely demand more money, while the owners try newer and more aggressive ways pack in the fans and expand their markets.  The problem is that today there are just too many sports.  Football, baseball, basketball, Hockey, MMA, Olympics, Golf, Tennis, NASCAR, and college sports.  Take that together and you have ten different sports or sport categories, and I didn’t even mention Boxing.  What ten or twelve year old is going to go read about some guy he’s never even heard of who fought for a title a hundred years ago when the TV is telling him everything he needs to know about his hero Eli Manning?  Once again the visibility issue comes to the fore.

Overall, I think that the fighters of yesteryear were better.  A deeper talent pool presented tougher opponents, and more fights garnered more experience.  They may have disappeared from the mainstream memory, but those old timers gave everything they had and many died broke, blind, and dumb because of the grueling schedules they fought.  It is both unfair and disrespectful to those who established boxing as a great sport to consider fighters who had less opposition and less fights greater when we don’t even know how good either group really is, and comparisons between the two are difficult to say the least.  If young people like myself don’t pick up some books or go the Ring’s archives and read some Nat Fliescher, who will carry on the memory of Friday’s Heroes?  What will happen to Sugar Ray’s, Rocky’s, Tiger’s, and Joe’s that made boxing great?  Kids these days…it’s not that we’re a bad or inferior generation, we just need an education.

For the Record:

My Top Ten Pound for Pound:

1. Sugar Ray Robinson
2. Henry Armstrong
3. Willie Pep
4. Harry Greb
5. Sam Langford
6. Benny Leonard
7. Mickie Walker
8. Roberto Duran
9. Joe Gans
10. Julio Cezar Chavez, Sr.