EP23 Boxing with Ghosts
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It's Hardcore History Addendum. I have threatened for a long time to introduce a bunch of sort of niche subjects into the Hardcore History Addendum feed. It's why we established this alternative feed.

feed to begin with. Right. So instead of having to have a show that could hold one's attention for four or five hours or multi parts in a series, something we could just do as a throwaway, you know, sort of it'll be somebody's favorite show someday kind of show, but not necessarily a broad appeal show when we release it. And I think today's might fit that bill. I've been threatening to do a show on boxing for a long time.

And this is a show on boxing. But I think the way we're going to frame it might drag a bunch of you non-boxing fans into the conversation also.

And I was trying to think of the logical starting point to this. And I'm going to say maybe the middle 1990s, where I had one of those conversations that every one of you out there that's a sports fan has probably had at one time or another. It just happened to be with somebody who I thought was particularly well-suited to explain to me the intricacies of the situation.

In the middle of 1990s, I had a radio show that bumped up against a sports show right afterwards. And the sports show right afterwards was hosted by a former NFL football player who played in the 1970s and the 1980s. And this, as I said, was the 1990s. The football player's name was Russ Francis. And Russ was a tight end with the New England Patriots and then with the San Francisco 49ers. And he won a Super Bowl with the 49ers.

And Russ and I would often just sort of chit-chat between the shows a little bit. And then one day we got into this subject and he became so heated and so into the conversation that he just said, because his show was about to start, and normally we would have cut our conversation off by that point, you just need to come on and we just need to continue this discussion from where we're having it. Because he was so worked up over it. But I understand why, especially because it literally was questioning whether or not he was good enough to

to play, you know, currently. Now, currently at that time was like the middle 1990s. So it's a 20th century currently, as opposed to the 21st century now. But the subject is timeless, isn't it? Could the people from the past match up today with the modern baseball players or basketball players or football players or track and field athletes, right? Standard conversation.

And the general attitude out there, if I could, you know, sum up the majority viewpoint is that they could not.

Or conversely, that the very best of an earlier era would be an average player today. So, yes, maybe some people from the 1950s or 1960s could play in the NFL today. Right. The great Jim Brown could play in the NFL today, but he wouldn't be the great Jim Brown. He might be the more average Jim Brown. So that's how that line of thinking goes.

Now, Francis's viewpoint, as you might imagine, was you darn right the people from the 70s at least could play in the middle 1990s.

And Russ got really animated about what makes a good football player and all these things. And it wasn't always, as you might imagine, the measurables, the weight, the height, the speed, how high they jumped, all that stuff. A lot of it was the intangibles, right? The attitude, the toughness, all that kind of stuff. But I mean, I remember specifically we mentioned Jack Lambert, who

who even in the 1970s was an undersized linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers. I think he was like 215 or something. And, you know, Russ was like, are you telling me Jack Lambert can't play?

And maybe you move Jack Lambert to a different position, right? Maybe today he's a strong safety. I don't know. But in a sport like football, at a certain point, the players from the past are just going to be too slow to compete, right? Or you're either big or you're fast, but you're not big and fast. And today they are big and fast. So,

Football is a perfect example of a sport where the players of yesteryear on average were a lot smaller, a lot slower, maybe less athletic, certainly not taking advantage of the latest nutrition and training methods and all that kind of stuff. And I think you could pretty much make a case that that same sort of state of affairs is the same situation you will find in 99 percent of the sports and athletic competitions out there, except for one exception.

And that's what I think makes it kind of an interesting conversation today. And that exception is amongst boxers, professional fighters who box. And I say that because MMA and all those things are very big today, but that's not boxing. Boxing, by the way, is an age-old sport. Let's understand that. I mean, you can go to your... I was just at the...

art museum, the Met in New York, and they had a statue of a Greek Olympian boxer from like the 400s BCEs. And you see from a distance that he's a boxer. He's still got, they didn't wear boxing gloves. They would just sort of wrap their knuckles and stuff. But you see it from a distance, you know, wow, that's a boxer. So it goes back a long way. And boxing has certain

elements in the sport that make it inherently exciting and something that it's hard to take your eyes off of. So forget what's involved in terms of the fighting part for a minute and just look at the rules of the game and see how different boxing is. So, for example, I can't think and maybe I'm overlooking an obvious example, so I apologize if I am. I can't think of another sport where there's no minimum time limit, where you can sit down at a match or a game and it can be over in one second.

right you you buy the ticket you take the commute you buy the popcorn you sit down you're ready to enjoy the show and it's over right when it starts i can't think of another sport that does that but that's boxing famously happens all the time first round knockout how quickly did mike tyson knock out michael spinks was it like 90 seconds that happened to floyd patterson twice against sunny liston right boom over

And you might say, well, that's a ripoff. Yet at the same time, it forces you to be interested. Anything could happen at any time, right? You can't just take your eyes off it like a tennis match for a while. You might miss a point. No, you might miss the fight. And that works very well with the other part of the rules of boxing that make it

inherently more watchable than a lot of other sports. And that is that you can never get so far behind that you can't instantly win. You could be down the equivalent of 100 to nothing with, you know, 30 seconds left and win.

That's happened a lot of times too. I mean, most famously, and I had a friend in the bathroom when it happened, so it's a perfect example to use, was when George Foreman won his second heavyweight championship of the world. And he was in like mid-40s, 45 years old, I think. So that was part of the storyline. And he was fighting a much younger fighter, of course, much better shape, more modern trained, the whole thing. And George lost every round. Right.

I mean, it was a wipeout. My friend goes to the bathroom, the fight's almost over, and George Foreman with, well, as far as the audience was concerned, with two punches, puts the heavyweight champion of the world down on his back. The heavyweight champion of the world does not get up, and George Foreman is the champion after losing 100 to nothing would have been the equivalent. So that's going to make the kind of sport right there, regardless of what it is you do in the sport, inherently kind of interesting and dramatic.

Now, I'm going to sound like a NASCAR fan when I say this because the car racing fans always tell the non-car racing fans, you know, I know you think we're watching for the crashes, but we're not. It's the same way with me in boxing. I'm not watching for the violence. I know that's hard to believe. I don't like the violence. And fights where it gets too violent, I look at as the kind of things you stop, right? When one person is outclassed, you stop it.

But I got interested in boxing like so many of my generation did when there was a transcendental figure in the sport. Somebody that just famously pulled in non-boxing fans. When I was a kid, Muhammad Ali was huge.

He was probably the biggest sporting figure, arguably the biggest sporting figure who's ever lived. Top five, certainly. And so during the time period when I was growing up, I might have had no interest in boxing at all, but I had an interest in him. And

And, you know, you combine some of the things people like about someone like Conor McGregor and all these, you know, quippy, funny, can't take your eyes off him, very entertaining. You like him, he sets it, or you hate him, and he sets up the drama for the fight. One of his idols, or one of the people he modeled his whole shtick after was the professional wrestler Gorgeous George. So there was all of those elements in play where he got you wanting to watch the fight. And then over time...

as you watch enough Muhammad Ali fights, you start noticing the intricacies of the sport, which is always sort of the key, right? The pathway to becoming a fan of any sport, understanding the little things, the chrome. And for me, what A.J. Liebling referred to as the sweet science became endlessly fascinating, right? The idea of brain over brawn,

of people who were smaller or weaker or less athletic but because they were better craftsmen could beat the um you know the bullies in the ring i mean it was there became a lot of reasons to find the sport attractive and over time i've found myself looking at it more and more like um the old line there was a fight fan a famous fight fan who said that uh boxing was his guilty pleasure

Well, there's more and more guilt and a lot less pleasure, especially nowadays when, to quote Mike Silver, who's a famous knowledgeable boxing historian and writer, it's like a human demolition derby out there now. And that's not what I watch it for. So I don't want to see a bunch of guys who don't have any good defense getting hit all over the place. Right. It's not the sweet science anymore at that point.

In any case, that's how I got into the sport. And like everything I do and I know many of you, once I get into something like this, the history of it and learning about the early days and how we got from there to here, all that stuff becomes endlessly fascinating to me. And so I've long read a lot about the subject and paid attention to old fight films and tried to educate myself.

And in reading one of my favorite books on the entire subject of boxing, I came across that Russ Francis could the athletes of the past compete with the athletes of today argument in a book that I just thought made the most counterintuitive case you've ever heard on the subject.

If you're into boxing, especially any kind of combat sports or the subject in general of, you know, human athletic performance over time, you might really enjoy Mike Silver's book, The Arc of Boxing, The Rise and Decline of the Sweet Science.

Now, Silver is a famous guy in the boxing world. He's been a promoter, an inspector with the New York State Athletic Commission, lots of articles on boxing, everything for the New York Times, Ring Magazine, Boxing Monthly, ESPN. The guy is a known boxing expert. And what he does in this book is

is try to make a case that boxing is the one athletic competition in the modern world where the people of the past are superior to the people who do it today. And the argument isn't just fascinating, but the way he makes it is too. He went as anyone, you know, when you step back and think about it and say, well, who's qualified to make this case? And the answer is no one person is.

So Silver went out and got multiple, I mean, I think it's like 20 to 30 trainers, former champions of the past, promoters, experts on the subject, and brought them into the conversation in a kind of a blended oral history where they help make a lot of the points. And it is absolutely fascinating.

the first part to understand is that in most of boxing it is absolutely a perfect setup to have comparison of performance over the eras because most of boxing has weight classes right so if you are fighting in the 140 pound weight class today well we can compare you to a boxer fighting in the 140 pound weight class 50 years ago right

the whole bigger, stronger, faster dynamic doesn't apply as much when you're taking into account people of the same weight over eras, right? In football today, your average offensive line is probably like 6'6", whereas 50 or 60 years ago it was probably like 6'2". There's no rule on that, so it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. But a 140-pound weight class is a pretty hard limit, right? So the fact that boxing has weight classes like that

is a better apples and apples comparison over the different eras if you're wanting to get into training and nutrition and all the intangibles but even and i find this to be perhaps the most shocking aspect of what mike silver is saying in the art of boxing even in the one category where they're you know it's everything like 190 or 187 in the old days and above you

And it doesn't matter how big you are. He's suggesting that the people of the past would destroy the people of the present. I mean, look at the size differences. And I, you know, when you want to talk about something as nuanced and as intricate and that involves as many different factors.

characters including the history of the sport as this you want to get experts on the same way that mike silver wanted to get experts on to help make his case i want to get experts on to help make my case so we talked to mike silver for a little bit about some of this stuff for example giant heavyweights of today fighting not so giant heavyweights of the past

I was watching a fight the other night on YouTube, an older one. It's funny saying older one, about a Tyson Fury, Deontay Wilder fight. And it's a 6'9 tall guy with an 85-inch reach against a 6'7 guy with an 83-inch reach. How could somebody like a Joe Louis...

from one of the great ages of boxing and one of the great heavyweight champions at like 6'1.5", 76-inch reach. Could a guy like that compete with those two massive modern boxers? Okay, well, Joe Louis did fight two opponents who...

were pretty much the same size. One was Primo Carnera, who was about 6'6", weighed 270 pounds. And Lewis annihilated him in six rounds. The fight's on YouTube. You can check it out. Another was Buddy Bear, who I believe was 6'7", weighed about 250 pounds. And Lewis stopped him first time in the sixth round and the second time in the first round.

Okay. The problem is that many people think that size is everything in boxing. If somebody's, let me put it this way, the old adage, a good big fighter can always defeat a good little fighter, provided they are

equal in ability. Okay. But in the case of these big heavyweights and I'll give Tyson Fury his due, he moves very unusual for, for a guy his size, he's light on his feet. He moves around. He's not a stationary target, but you know, he was dropped twice, two or three times by Wilder. Um, it's, it's a question of, can the smaller fighter who is, uh,

more accomplished as a boxer, knows how to get under the punches, get inside. A guy that size, you could say, well, let's say somebody 200 pounds, six foot one, a really outstanding heavyweight is fighting a larger opponent who doesn't have his skill. That smaller opponent will see that big guy is just a bigger target. He would actually have, Lewis had more trouble with smaller quick fighters, right?

than he did with huge monsters like Carnera and Buddy Bear. The same thing with Jack Dempsey, whose nickname was the Giant Killer.

Jack Dempsey, when he won the title, he weighed about 185 pounds, tremendous puncher, very fast. And he annihilated Jess Willard, who was over 6 foot 6 inches tall and 250 pounds.

That film is available on YouTube. You quote Georgie Benton saying famously, too, that if you're over 200 pounds, you have all the power you need, and it doesn't matter how much bigger the opponent gets at that point. That's true. It's a matter of physics. Now, look, if you're going to match a 125-pound featherweight against a 160-pound middleweight, then you've got a problem because that 125-pound featherweight just doesn't have enough mass.

and musculature to generate to hurt that 160-pound fighter. It just would be uneven. But Benton is right. Once you get to 200 pounds, you have enough mass

and muscularity and strength to hurt anybody, especially if you can put that 200 pounds into a punch as Joe Lewis did. And so as a Marciano who weighed about 190. Had about a 68 inch reach. Right. The shortest reach of any heavyweight champion in history. So it's, you know, I, in my book, in the arc of boxing, I, I went into boxing history and listed about 50 fights, 50 where, uh,

Down through the years where a fighter, a heavyweight, was outweighed from anywhere from 25 to 100 pounds, where the smaller opponent defeated the heavier opponent.

And in each case, nowadays, if you would look at those matches on paper, you would say, no way is that 195 to 210-pound heavyweight going to take apart this 275-pound heavyweight. Well, that's not the way it happened. Boxing is an art and a science. There's speed involved. There's technique and, very important, technique.

heart, the ability to take a punch. Experience. And of course, experience, naturally, experience. All these come into play

To give you an idea of how much this taller, faster, stronger dynamic has been around, this idea that if you just get bigger people, they'll naturally be the heavyweight champion of the world. There was a fight that almost came off that was going to happen between Muhammad Ali. I think it was the early 70s, I'm guessing here, between Muhammad Ali and professional basketball player Wilt Chamberlain.

Now Wilt was a great all-around athlete at over seven foot tall and the idea was that an over seven foot tall great athlete will give a professional boxer who's more like six foot three a really hard time.

And the press conference gets set up, and I guess the story is that Ali was being very good on his best behavior because he wanted the fight to come off too. And when Wilt Chamberlain entered the room, he stood up in front of the cameras, pointed at him, and just yelled, Timber! And the book I read said Chamberlain's whole demeanor and color changed. He turned around, walked out, the fight was off.

So maybe even the bigger guy realizes that size is just one factor when you're talking about something like boxing. The experience question is much more fascinating to me, though, and gets into some of these other issues that take this out of the realm of a simple boxing or even a simple sports examination.

There's something about human craftsmanship involved here and how deeply someone's knowledge and how much experience can count. So let me give you an example of what I mean. And Silver is all over this in his book. If I had to name the number one thing that he considers the most important difference for why a boxer of the past can overcome any of the things, any of the advantages a modern boxer would have, experience is the number one thing.

Because it is so incredibly different. I mean, it's not a little bit more experience. It's multiples of the amount of experience. So, for example, in the early days, you had just like you do today, you'd have amateur boxing and a lot of these people would fight a lot of amateur fights, like three rounders. And then they would move into the pros and they would fight unbelievable numbers of fights. Harry Greb had 299 fights.

299 professional fights. He won more than 260 of them, by the way. Guys win championships today with 18 fights, 19 fights, 20 fights. Now, you can be the greatest athlete that's ever been produced.

But a guy with 299 fights is going to have some tools in his toolbox to offset your God-given natural abilities. First of all, to say that that's not true is to ignore how much better the modern-day fighter with 18 or 20 fights would be if you gave them 200 or 300 fights, right? They're going to be that much better, too. So the experience counts for something, and you got a lot more of it back then.

Then you add another element that silver is all over, and it is the kind of experience you get. This is another aspect of sports training that's fascinating far beyond just the niche of boxing. It's this idea about how much better competition makes you better, right? How steel sharpens steel, as the saying goes. I think silver uses the analogy of playing tennis with some

people that are not as good as you are and over time that means you're getting away with mistakes and your game gets sloppy because it doesn't matter if you're playing poorly you're still going to win as opposed to playing against people that are better than you are and simply do not embarrass yourself and to have a chance of competing you have to really tighten your game up right it encourages um a better performance right steel sharpens steel

But boxing doesn't even pretend to do that. It's the only sport I can think of where the idea of having the best face the best is not necessarily a hundred percent good thing. There might be some downsides. Do I really want my undefeated guy fighting that really tough challenger who can beat him when I can have him fight a bunch of stiffs who have no chance of beating him and make a

even more money and not lose the championship. I mean, there's a, let's just say there's cross purposes on the question of steel sharpening steel in boxing in a way that there isn't in most other sports. Everyone understands that

We've expanded the number of weight classes since the old days. It used to be like eight. Now there's a lot more than eight. And we have more sanctioning bodies than ever, right? I can think of some off the top of my head, WBC, WBA, IBC, IBF. I mean, it's just, and all of them with their own champions. And so we have a lot more challengers in the old days and a lot fewer championship slots. Today, we have a lot more championship slots for fewer challengers.

It means that the talent pool is diluted. And in the old days, by the time somebody got a chance to face the champion to try to win the title, they had had usually dozens more fights on average than the people today. And they had fought people who were on average better.

themselves more battle-tested more experienced and better fighters the steel had sharpened the steel and by the time you had people facing off at the top levels these were people who not only had tons of experience who not only had fought people that forced them to up their game these are people that fought so often that their skills were sharp

And this is another one of those really unquantifiable things. How do you try to figure out the difference between a fighter that fights every three weeks and a fighter that fights twice a year? You know it's going to have an impact, but you can't really quantify how much. If a tennis player, to go back to the tennis analogy, only had two tennis matches a year, even if you practiced a lot, I'm going to assume you're not going to be as sharp as if you had three tennis matches a month, right?

In the old days, these guys fought a lot. Nowadays, they don't fight much at all. How much does something like that impact what would happen if we could bring a fighter from the past out of the time machine today and put him in a ring with the fighters of the present? Mike Silver had some thoughts about this question of sharpness and what's known as ring rust and what a difference it might have made.

And you brought up sharpness, too, a lack of sharpness, because some of these fighters back in the day who were more like lunch pail, go-to-work, hardhat-type, blue-collar guys are fighting every three weeks or something. And these days, one of the great fighters is probably going to have one or two fights a year. How much does the ring rust kill you in those kinds of situations? I mean, if you bring your fighter back out of the—if you bring Harry Greb out of the time machine today, put him in against a welterweight or a middleweight today, what's

what are we going to notice? I mean, is he a much better defensive fighter than the modern guy? How's that going to look to us?

Harry Greb is not the perfect example to do that. Harry Greb, like Muhammad Ali, like Henry Armstrong, had a style of his own. It couldn't be duplicated. He was an outlier. He had a style that nobody could solve. Nobody could even imitate him successfully. So I would say go back to the more traditional fighters. Tony Canzuneri.

Tony Canzoneri, Barney Ross, Mickey Walker, Tommy Loughran, even, you know, those type of fighters, Ike Williams. Benny Leonard, who looked like an insurance salesman. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Just didn't look like a fighter at all. But these, when you say about, you know, fighting twice a year as opposed to, you know, twice a month, which a lot of those guys did well,

One of the most important aspects of being successful in boxing is timing, your ability to time a punch. Okay. And there is such a thing as ring rust. We've seen it with, with when Muhammad Ali came back after three and a half year layoff, he was rusty. He was getting hit with punches that he never would have gotten hit with. It, you know, you have to start, uh,

fighting more often to get your timing down, your sense of judgment and distance. This, with repetitive fights, space not too far apart, this is automatic. If you're only fighting two or three times a year, fight space four or five months apart, it becomes more difficult to get the timing down. So of course, the fighters who fought more often would have, that would be a distinct advantage.

Just in their sense of timing and ability to judge distance, just because they were more active. As I say, like anybody, whether it's a surgeon, a salesman, anybody who is doing it more often will be more proficient at it.

in addition to the part where he's quoting these many different expert voices which is extremely effective one of the other things that silver will do sometimes in the book the ark of boxing is really utilize photographs in a way that make his point for him and one of the ones that's the most jarring is he has two photographs on opposite sides of the page from each other on the left side is a picture of sylvester stallone from one of the rocky movies not rocky one one of the later ones

And he looks like a giant, you know, bodybuilder. Six-pack abs, big, you know, arms, the whole thing. And he's flexing in the shot with a, I think he has a championship belt around his waist. This is the conception, right, of a boxer. But on the right-hand side of the page is an actual photo from the 1930s, I think, of Jack Dempsey.

The ferocious Jack Dempsey, the guy Mike Tyson liked so much, and with the exception of the peekaboo style, which was a custom auto thing, he often said he influenced his approach to, you know, how he went after opponents to what Jack Dempsey did with both hands, right? Punching with bad intentions. But when you look at Dempsey's body, especially juxtaposed with

Next to the Rocky image, which is our popular conception, Jack Dempsey doesn't look like he's got a boxer's build at all. And yet Jack Dempsey has the right build for boxing in the same way that there's a build you want or that you acquire naturally if you just swim and you're a swimmer. In boxing, if you just do the boxing and the exercises that boxers have always done and all those kinds of things, you look like Jack Dempsey. It was the introduction of a whole bunch of things

that boxers never did, like weight training, that would turn somebody into the Stallone Hollywood caricature. But here's what's weird. Silver says in his book that people saw the Rocky movies, young boxers, and decided when they went into boxing that they wanted to look like that.

What's more, you have this growth starting in about the early 1980s with these real sort of fatty, let's call them fatty nutrition and diet.

strength experts and don't get me wrong there's real experts who go to school for many many years to do this job but what silver points out is that unlike every other sport because of the interplay and all the different things that go into boxing it's really hard to just simply say wow well you need this muscle strength and so we'll develop a machine that just works that much it doesn't really work that way

What's more, you're trying to do something in boxing that doesn't lend itself to most of the sorts of strengthening kinds of exercises that work out so well in so many other sports. For example, have you ever played a game of hot hands? That's what we call it in the U.S., although I know that the other countries have different names. But it's the game where you put your hands, palms up, and then somebody puts their hands, palms down on your hands.

And then you, the person with the hands facing upward, try to slap the hands of the person whose hands are touching yours before they can pull their hands away. If they pull their hands away and you fake them out, you get to slap their hands. If they get slapped, they have to keep playing. If they can pull their hands away before you can slap them, you have to exchange positions with them. But that game is based on quick reflexes, movement, and speed. You know, speed of you

using your hands, right? That's a good analogy for what boxing does well. And anything that would slow down how quickly you could get your hands out of the way in a game of hot hands would also hurt you in a boxing match.

And interestingly enough, on another page, Silver has a photo of a ballet dancer, a male ballet dancer, who also used to happen to be a boxer. And the ballet dancer talks about how the very same sorts of strength and musculature that a ballet dancer has is exactly the kind that makes a killer boxer. And it looks much more like Jack Dempsey than Rocky Balboa looks like

you know, any of the boxers from the golden age of boxing. The other thing that you don't have, and it's another one of these aspects of the lost martial arts. If you're a fan of say Western sword fighting from the middle ages, which I am, you'll know that that's a lost art.

that somewhere along the line, we stopped teaching people the, you know, thousands of year old techniques of fighting with a Western style sword. And experts have been trying and reenactors have been trying through the use of the few technical manuals that existed from back then to try to piece together what it must have been like, right? Something that the Kendo swordsmen in the Far East have managed to keep alive in terms of their timeline of historical, you know, knowledge, the craft,

that's been lost in western long sword fighting in the same way that the old trainers who used to train all the great champions in what is universally acknowledged as the golden age of boxing their skills have died out

There's nobody to teach the young boxers today the conditioning and the art itself. The finer points is the way Mike Silver puts it, right? The little teeny things that, you know, when you add up all the little teeny things make all the difference in a big fight. Those people aren't around anymore. They have literally gone the way of the...

dodo and because of that even if you wanted to try to recreate this being from 50 75 years ago you know that if you could take the dna and bring them back to life you couldn't recreate this person because we wouldn't have anybody to impart the skills to them that they learned in their formative years

Then there's the other thing that modern technology brings to the table, steroids, you know, artificial chemical enhancements that someone today might employ.

And there was some interesting material that was in Silver's book about this, too, where he talked about some boxers who may or may not. People don't generally advertise this stuff, have tried to take the shortcut of something like steroids to help them in the ring, only to find out that it looks like that's the best way to phrase this. There are no studies, but it looks like what happens to boxers who use steroids is they run out of gas.

And some of these boxers that were rumored to be on the stuff ran out of gas famously in some of these fights. So that's an interesting aspect, too. So you say, well, these days they'd be using human growth hormone still might not let you beat Tony Zale back in the day for Sugar Ray Robinson. I don't know what you're going to do to beat Sugar Ray Robinson. And that whole question of the hot hand skill, like what do you need to play hot hands? If you're just born hot.

Like good at that. You're just born good at it. Muhammad Ali had one of the fastest jabs you ever saw. You can't fix that with weights, right? Pushups and chin-ups aren't going to make that faster. And Sugar Ray Robinson had the same thing. That sort of punch speed or punch power. Silver has a line in his book where he goes over all these great old punchers, people that were absolute murderers.

And then says none of them ever touched a weight. He writes, quote, Old school trainers understood that pumping up the size of arm, back, leg and shoulder muscles with an aggressive weight training program did not correlate to an increase in power.

Punching power, he writes, is a function of balance, leverage, coordination, speed, and timing. A boxer has to be able to snap his punches. The most effective punchers in the history of the sport, Joe Lewis, Jack Dempsey, Rocky Marciano, Sonny Liston, Jimmy Wilde, Bob Fitzsimmons,

Stanley Ketchell, Sugar Ray Robinson, Sandy Sadler, Archie Moore, Henry Armstrong, Bob Foster, Alexis Arguello, Roberto Duran never included weight training in their daily workout routines. None of these super punchers had the type of unnatural bulging muscularity one often sees among today's boxers."

boxing, the key is to develop speed. And most fighters, when they go into it, they have enough strength through their regular training. They don't need weightlifting. The old time trainers disdained weightlifting. It was damaging to the fighter. It slowed them up. And just to give you an example, if I can quote from my book here about, you know, athletes today being bigger, stronger, faster, why doesn't that apply to boxing? Aren't all athletes better today? You

Boxing is on a different level. On a superficial level, the newer is always better attitude towards athletic excellence, I'm quoting here from my book, appears to be valid, except for one important caveat. A boxer's performance, unlike that of a swimmer, track and field athlete, or weightlifter, cannot be defined in terms of finite measurement.

Boxing's interaction of athleticism, experience, technique, and psychology is a far more complex activity than just running, jumping, lifting, or throwing. And to blithely state that today's top professional boxers are better than their predecessors simply because measurable athletic performance has improved in other sports is

whose winners are determined by a stopwatch, ruler, or scale, is analogous to suggesting a singer is great only because he is capable of reaching a higher note than anyone else. Of course, no reasonable person would agree with that statement because it totally ignores the complex nuances of the singer's craft, such as timbre, inflection, vocal range, and phrasing. Yet

that many people without even realizing it apply the same logic to boxing, oblivious as they are to the complex nuances of the boxer's craft. See, when you have people, a lack of quality teachers, people who don't really know what to do, they begin to grasp at certain ideas that they don't really understand. So it's crazy as it sounds, the Rocky films influence these younger trainers who

who said, hey, football players are using weight training. Why shouldn't boxers? They need to get stronger. They didn't understand that with weight training, the boxers begin to throw their punches in a wider arc. They can't get them off fast enough. The old-time trainers who lived this sport day in and day out, their whole lives, they understood that wasn't to be done.

Nobody trained better than Rocky Marciano, okay, or Joe Louis. As Joe Frazier, I quote Joe Frazier in my book, he said, if it was good enough for them, it's good enough for me. And he trained in the old school way. So modern methods don't necessarily mean better. And that's certainly the case in boxing, which has devolved, not evolved. What that Joe Frazier quote by Silver points out, though, is that when it comes to something like

Physical conditioning, that's all recoverable or preservable stuff, right? That's information that someone can write down and you could open the gym tomorrow like Frazier did and say, we're only going to build you up the old fashioned way and have enough information to do it.

That's not lost information. It might be considered outdated by some, but it's known. What is truly lost, though, is the stuff that would have made the boxers of the past so much better. It's the technique, right? It's the little things. And this is in Silver's book, and he has several different quotes. I mean, for example, he quotes one of his experts in the book is Mike Capriano Jr.,

was the son of one of these great trainers, the guy who trained Jake LaMotta, the Raging Bull, in addition to a lot of other people. And then Junior followed in his father's footsteps, becoming an amateur fighter trainer manager. He was the head coach for the Camp Lejeune Marine Corps boxing team, which

And he says about the little techniques. So let's not talk in generalities. What do we mean when we say little techniques? And Capriano Jr. says, quote, There are no super skilled boxers like Tippi Larkin, Billy Graham or Maxi Shapiro. I don't see them around. There were many different types of fighters and you'd see many different styles. And that's probably what made them better fighters.

I don't see anyone with that type of skill today in any weight division. Some of today's fighters look good and they seem to have the natural instincts and maybe somebody is teaching them, but I don't see the moves. They need more seasoning. He continues, quote, You don't see a fighter bend and weave in anymore.

I mean, we might see somebody bob back and forth and move in, but that's not your classic bend and weave move. Even Tyson never did that. He'd bob back and forth, but he just distracted you. And then he'd throw one of those overhand punches. Tyson bullied his way in. He bobbed, but he didn't weave. He tried to overpower you. And then when he couldn't overpower you, he got stymied. Tyson really had no moves.

We don't see fighters today sliding in, he says. We don't see the feints, the hook off a feint, step to the right and uppercut, moving, grabbing the elbow and spinning the fighter. We don't see any of that today because it's gone and nobody knows how to teach it. You don't see any of these fighters making the same moves as the old time fighters. Absolutely not. The fans today never saw these fighters. End quote. He then says that craftiness...

is missing you know there's ring craftiness he says quote craftiness is missing more meaning archie moore moore was crafty dempsey was crafty roberto duran had great instincts and was crafty not fainting no body punches and no craftiness these are the hallmarks of today's top fighters end quote

Now, this all kind of sounds like sour grapes when you hear it, but these guys all know it sounds like sour grapes. And so they continually say it's not just some old man saying they were better in my day. Ask anybody.

Well, one of the people and again, this is one of the things I really like about the book. These experts in air quotes come from a wide variety of backgrounds, but they usually box themselves at one time or another. But one of these guys in the book, Ted Linsky, is a Ph.D. neuroscientist who also used to box.

And he has an interesting way of addressing the questions that I often come up with in my own mind, which is I'm kind of a humanitarian kind of nice guy. So why would I like a sport with so much, you know, human demolition? And his point is that's not what the sport's supposed to be. And the fact that it is human demolition now is a perfect example that shows you right to your face. It's not what it used to be. And Linsky, the neuroscientist, says, quote,

If today's fans were shown some full-length films of Sugar Ray Robinson, they would think that it's something different and unusual, but they wouldn't understand what he was doing. It's a different language. There's always been fighting, he says, but boxing was something different. I very rarely watch fights anymore these days. I can't watch an entire fight. It's kind of depressing to watch.

But if this was what boxing was when I was a kid, I would be embarrassed for having spent so much time watching it, because it's nothing but brutality. There's no beauty in this. It's fighting, nothing else. There used to be skill and grace in conjunction with the brutality. Even sluggers were smart. Take a look at Reuben Hurricane Carter. He didn't take a punch to land a punch.

"'You know,' he says, "'we've had discussions about people being actually knowledgeable about boxing. "'If you watch fights nowadays as a fan, "'if you can sit through an entire fight, then you don't know boxing. "'I don't care if you know statistics. "'I don't care if you could give me the history back to the Romans.'

you don't understand boxing itself. If you can sit and watch this thing, what boxing has become, and what fighting is, then you don't like boxing. You like fighting. You like brawling. And it's not the same thing. If you compare what boxing once was and what it has become, this is checkers in comparison to chess."

But in the same way that the training of these boxers is a lost art, right? The institutional memory is gone. You can actually say the same thing about the people who watch the sport, as was implied in the quote we just read. Today's boxing fan not only wouldn't know what they were looking at, they might not like it when they saw it. And I asked Mike Silver about that too.

I'm wondering if they would like what they saw, if they saw a good match, because you had mentioned, you used a phrase that I like, and I'm going to steal, a human demolition derby. When you were talking about some of these brawls where it might be a bloodlust enjoyment kind of thing, but you mentioned yourself, and I believe you quote somebody else saying that they don't want to watch that, that you might think that race car fans are watching for the crackups, but

boxing fans who in the old days were watching for can a guy hit and not be hit back is he defensively skilled can he move well um these days if you saw a fight like that modern fight fans who grew up in the post tyson era might think that that's a boring fight that what you want are two guys with no defense would a modern fight fan enjoy a well-fought fight from the 1940s

No, no, very few would. In fact, if they watched Willie Pepp in the fight, they might not know what he's doing. To them, being used to Slugfest and the Arturo Gatti-type fighter, not to diminish him, he had great heart, but the skill level was basically that of a tough guy that just tried to outpunch his opponent. I'm not sure they would recognize what Willie Pepp was doing.

in the ring. It's the, the younger fans. And again, a lot of it has to do with the fact that mixed martial arts is gaining in popularity that the fight fans today want to see knockouts. Um, and home runs in baseball. And I mean, you can take it across the board.

you got it. And, and power serves and, you know, tennis and, uh, and it's, it, they just want to see the power. They want to see the knockouts and that's, you know, that's, what's exciting to them. They're, they're not interested in seeing a guy flitting, you know, moving in and out, jabbing, not getting hit. And, and that's a shame because boxing is an art and it's, it's a brutal sport. I mean,

I mean, I'm not diminishing the danger of it at all. In fact, I'm writing a current book that deals with the danger of boxing and how to mitigate those dangers under the current circumstances. And there's certain things that can be done. I don't know if the sport will allow it or do it. But no, your premise is correct. I think that's not what they want to see. And that's sad because it just means more damage.

In addition, and this applies to all sports, but more so in boxing, the intangibles are such a huge part of things, right?

Maybe not more than the measurables. It depends on the sport, right? You can say that the five foot nine inch kid who wants to be an NBA center has everything you want but the height, but that might not be enough. But you might say the reverse about the seven foot five inch tall person, too, right? That he's got all the measurables, but none of the intangibles. In boxing, the intangibles are...

Well, more important than in any other sport you can think of because one of the intangibles is somebody is hurting you physically. And what that means is the kind of people who can be good athletes in boxing have to have something that most other sports don't require. You have to be able to take physical punishment, damage, and somebody attacking you physically

and still perform at a high athletic level. There's both mental and physical toughness involved, and part of the reason why this earlier era may actually have an advantage is the unquantifiable question, something we talk in the history shows about a lot, because it's clearly there, but you can't measure it or quantify it, and that's the question of toughness.

I was intrigued by one of the points made in the book that the reason defense was so much better back in the day is not just because it's something you want to have and nobody wants to get hit, but because these people fought so often and needed the money so badly, right? You could just make enough for rent with a fight maybe in some of these eras that you had to be able to fight in three weeks or a month to pay your next rent so you couldn't be too beat up in this fight. Same thing with the trainers. They had to make sure their boxer could box because they needed to eat, right?

So there were all these economic incentives to perform a certain way athletically. It's interesting. The mental toughness part, though, is unlike, you know, anything else I've run into in any other sport. And think about, I remember when I was watching a film on, it was NFL Films film, about the sort of football players that they had in the 1950s. And they made a big deal to point out that so many of these people had actually been in the Second World War and seen combat there.

And that after combat, the sport of football had a sort of a different feel to it than when they were college players and young, wide-eyed kids. Well, you could make the same case about all these fighters. I mean, the greatest eras in boxing are after both World Wars.

If these people weren't combat veterans themselves, they came from a society that produced those kinds of people and then a depression. So there's two quotes from this book that stood out to me. The first one was by one of Muhammad Ali's Olympic teammates in the 1960 Rome Olympics that fought for the United States, Wilbur Skeeter McClure.

And I like his because he lays out the entire premise of this conversation we're having, the idea that in every other sport you can think of, the athletes have gotten better except this one. And he's quoted by Mike Silver in the book as saying, quote,

Boxing, in my opinion, is the only sport in which the participants haven't gotten better since the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Football players today are better than the ones who were playing in the 50s. It's the same with basketball and baseball. The fighters of today couldn't even hold a candle to the fighters of the 1960s and 1970s. They just couldn't do it. They were too tough and too strong and too savvy and too skilled.

Part of the reason is owing to the fact that they fought more frequently. You have champions today who fight once or twice a year. Anybody who applies his craft to any trade or profession and performs it only twice a year can't be good. You just cannot develop that way. End quote. The other quote, and I read this one to Mr. Silver and got his reaction in the next episode.

was from boxing trainer Teddy Atlas, who, by the way, once upon a time started with a very young Mike Tyson, right?

And Teddy Atlas is trying to address this preoccupation that we all have. And we're trained to have, right? We live in the era of measurables. How, how high did that guy jump? What's his height? What's his weight? What's his 40 time. And Teddy Atlas is basically saying, forget about that. You have people here who are mental monsters that you're going up against in the sport where that's a key. There's your key measurable, right? Are you, are you a mental monster and how much of a mental monster are you? And Atlas,

atlas says quote so my question to the guys of today's era that say that size is too much is where are these big heavyweights ever going to find a way to deal with that experience where are they ever going to find a way to deal with that science where are they ever going to find a way to deal with that mental toughness because today's fighters are depleted of these qualities now italicized depleted of it

the old timers had all of those qualities in that earlier era they had the experience and they knew how to deal with these things so my question would be who's in danger here and

End quote. He means the very big super heavyweights of today or the relatively small heavyweights of the earlier era. Now, we'd mentioned, though, that heavyweights a little bit different because that's the only weight class where there's no maximum. In the other weight class, 140 pound fighter in 1940 would still be fighting 140 pound fighter today. So that might even make things like mental toughness and all that and even weightlessness.

you know, larger determinant of how things turned out. But Atlas continues about this size question in the super heavyweight division. Quote, before you talk to me about the 240 pounder versus the 190 or 205 pounder, my first question would be before we could even sanction this match to explain it to me, because I don't think it would be fair to the bigger fighter,

explain to me how this 240 pound brat this spoiled brat is going to deal with this monster he means from the past who has 160 fights who's fought every good fighter in the world since he's been fighting who knows every trick in the book and who's as mentally tough as a piece of steel explain that to me end quote mike silver had a few thoughts about that

It's so true. So true. Teddy hit it right on the nail on the head with that. The fighters were not only that is, again, this is an aspect that's different than other sports. You could be a legendary great basketball player. Okay. And yet not have what we would call in boxing heart, you know, it's, it's a sport that requires great skill, but, you know,

you know, what a boxer is trying to do athletically, he's also getting hit in the face while he's doing it, or he's getting a terrific punch for the, for the solar plexus or to the liver. He, he has to accept that type of pain and, and keep going. And it takes, that's why I, I've always admired boxers. It, it takes a certain,

type of individual to have that within them and to be successful in this sport. It is the toughest sport in the world, bar none. And the fighters, you can go into the technique, the greater technique, the more experience, but as you mentioned the phrase greatest generation, the

They also had the mental toughness, and that is a huge part of boxing. And to go through the type of monsters they had to go through to become, not champion, just to become a contender, the depth of competition was so severe that when you made it, you know you had an accomplished fighter there. You didn't have a guy coming out of the amateurs fighting 12 fights and winning a title.

Oh, you had to go through 40, 50, 60, 70 fights minimum, experience all type of styles. And he had to display the heart or in bare knuckle days, they used to call it bottom. So I love that phrase, the head bottom. So these are aspects that

must be taken into account when you're judging a great fighter. And I think to give a modern day example, Mike Tyson had all the physical assets of any great fighter that ever lived. I mean, he was just, you know, just a solid physical specimen that was just really impressive. Tremendous puncher could take a great punch, but in the words of custom auto, Teddy Atlas's mentor, uh,

He really lacked the character. When the going got tough, he bit an ear, okay, looking for a way out. So having the great physical skills, which might get you by, which will get you by in another sport, it will...

Keep you from attaining greatness as a boxer. I mean true greatness, not what they call in greatness today. There are very few great boxers over the past 25, 30 years. A few. However, in the days when the competition was much more severe, those fighters were genuinely great. And we're talking about, we know who they are.

I'm not sure that we do, though. And this gets back to my earlier question about if we saw true boxing greatness, would a modern audience even recognize it? I mean, go to some of the boxing discussion boards out there in the fighting world.

message boards and you'll read a lot of people who will think that mike tyson would beat anybody ever now i say this as a person that really enjoyed mike tyson fights and he was quite a breath of fresh air when he first showed up we'd had a lot of years of um

fights without spectacular knockouts, at least at the highest levels of the heavyweight division. And so he was a very sort of a different vibe. And like Ali, there was a lot to the guy that made him compelling, either for good or bad reasons. You wanted to root for him or against him. And his fights once again sort of reawakened a wider interest in boxing than just amongst the so-called boxing fans. But here's the thing.

Eddie Fudge, who was one of the last of the great golden age trainers. I have a bunch of books about boxing trainers. And Eddie Fudge is like one of the last of the people, you know, in some of the chapters of these books, right? Sort of the last of an era. And Fudge is one of these guys who boxed himself as a lighter weight guy in the era of Joe Lewis. And he sparred with Joe Lewis and they were friends. So he remembers that era.

But then he stayed as this great trainer, you know, for many, many years afterwards. He was training heavyweight champions, you know, long after Mike Tyson was on the scene. He trained Riddick Bowe, for example.

And Mark Cram, who was one of the great boxing writers, when he was writing for Esquire magazine, cornered Futch and asked him basically, was Mike Tyson one of the best five heavyweights of all time? So we're not talking about, you know, any weight class. We're just saying, you know, top five heavyweights. And this, again, from a man who boxed them, coached them all the way into the modern era, knew Tyson's style very well.

And he said, quote, No, Joe Lewis had too much in either hand for Mike. Short, deadly combinations that shake you to your shoes. With Muhammad Ali, Mike wouldn't hit him with a hand grenade.

Jersey Joe Walcott would have been too smart for him. Sonny Liston was too big and powerful and had a jarring jab. Rocky Marciano would be hit, that's for sure, but Mike would see violence in spades, end quote. Well, let me add that I don't think he'd be able to handle George Foreman either. So I'm not sure we're in a position to

in this day and age because for the same reason that these boxers can't fight like the boxers of the past because of the lost knowledge, we can't judge a fight like fight fans of the past for the exact same reason. This is obviously discussion like sports top 10 lists are that is designed to provoke

conversation, maybe even a friendly argument over appetizers. But that's sort of what makes this wonderful. As I said at the very beginning of this show, this is the kind of subject sports fans have enjoyed talking about forever. You could get Russ Francis to preempt the topic on his show if you could get him, you know, engrossed in a conversation like this.

The one thing I will suggest, though, is it's not a great conversation to have until you've read Silver's book. And I asked him what the reaction was amongst the fight fan audience, and he says it was a generational reaction. Older fans agreed with him. Younger fans were almost insulted that the modern fighters that they liked are being denigrated.

But he said they also tended to be people who didn't read the book, that they came to that conclusion by simply, you know, thinking bigger, stronger, faster. Of course, they're better today. So I would suggest reading the book. But then I'd love to hear your thoughts on Twitter at Hardcore History. And we can talk about this a little bit, because to me, this is one of the most fascinating sports related topics out there. And I think boxing is the only one where you could really make the counterintuitive argument that.

that in this one case, maybe it's the exception that proves the rule, right?

Did I use that phrase properly? I think I did. If you like the arc of boxing, though, you might be interested in some of Mike Silver's other books. And you can go to his website, by the way, at MikeSilverBoxing.com if you want to see any of this. But he wrote The Night the Referee Hit Back, Memorable Moments from the World of Boxing. He also wrote Stars in the Ring, Jewish Champions in the Golden Age in Boxing. And there's another ethnic group amongst the many, many ethnic groups. You forget, has a...

permanent standing, you know, claim to a chunk of boxing history. You think of all, it's such an international sport, isn't it? I mean, you go from guys like Manny Pacquiao, who is a hero in his home country in the Philippines, a guy like Roberto Duran, who's a hero in, you know, Panama, to the Eastern Bloc boxers who weren't really a part of the pro years during the Cold War, to boxers in Germany. I mean, which country? Italian boxers are world-famous, Irish boxers. I mean, Italy,

Has there ever been a sport like that? Let me add one more caveat that might suggest that the best boxers who ever lived were from a long time ago. And that's the color barrier that existed for a while. And Silver brings this up, too, that affected African-American fighters because and this is an interesting socio cultural aspect of American sporting history also. But boxing was one of the first areas where

where African-Americans were able to dominate. I mean, you know, you had the very early era, the great white hope era, where a guy like Jack Johnson can become heavyweight champion of the world around the time of the first world war. And then Joe Lewis can become, I believe, the first big African-American hero to the whole country.

These are huge things. But some of the greatest boxers who ever lived, maybe the greatest boxers who ever lived, according to many people, never got a chance at the title, both for racial reasons, because there was a time when some of these white boxers wouldn't fight black boxers, but not just that, but because they were so good. And in boxing, you can ditch people who are good. Look at a guy like Charlie Burley or Holman Williams. These are guys who...

Some of the great boxers ducked. Black boxers, too. Sugar Ray Robinson, when somebody suggested he fight, I think it was Charlie Burley and not Holman Williams, he said, I thought you were my friend. Don't tell me to box that guy. So what ended up happening is these boxers that nobody would fight would often have to fight each other over and over again. You know, you want to fight? Well, Charlie Burley's still available because no one will fight him. So Williams and Burley would fight a bunch of times. And you want to talk about steel sharpening steel?

It's very possible you bring one of those champions, uncrowned champions, never allowed to fight for the title champions. No one wanted a piece of them champions back from 40, 50, 60, 70 years ago. And no one would want a piece of them today either.

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