I dont get Harry Greb's boxing Record

[EzzardFan]

great post.im a stats junkie.
but in sports,more does not usually equate to better.especially in boxing.so just cause theyre 238 boxers who are licensed doesnt mean thats 238 potential opponents.you would have to divide 238 by the # of divisions to even began to get a more proper estimate,and taht doesnt even take activity level into account.alotta guys just boxed on the side.i know plenty licensed boxers who have never fought a pro fight.you also must factor in that their are more belts for less boxers which also makes it easier but the difference wont be felt at the top.it will be at the bottom were quality suffers

just noticed your screen name.ezzard was 1 hell of a fighter.skills and power.shame he doesnt get much credit.he's 1 of the few old timers whom i would call legit

Here are some more stats, just for you, although I think some others *AHEM* might also find them interesting:

PLEASE NOTE: THESE NUMBERS ARE AT TIME OF FIRST TITLE WIN, NOT CAREER TOTALS:

Harry Greb - 234 official bouts. 2,078 rounds. 104 hours of officially recorded fight time.

Bernard Hopkins - 29 recorded bouts. 131 rounds. 6.5 hours of officially recorded fight time.

THE FOLLOWING NUMBERS ARE CAREER TOTALS:

Harry Greb - 299 official bouts. 2,590 rounds. 129.5 hours of officially recorded fight time.

Bernard Hopkins - 57 recorded bouts. 408 rounds. 20.4 hours of officially recorded fight time.

***

I rest my case.

[bklynboy]

Part of the problem is that many people subscribe to the belief that sports people are constantly evolving and getting better each year. There is certainly some evidence of this in terms of sports like athletics where we see a measured incremental improvement in most events over time. Although certain track & field events pitch people against each other, they mostly remain isolated in separate lanes and the intention is that they do not physically impede each other (although sometimes they do).

Then there are sports like tennis and football where people debate whether the players of today are better than the players of yesterday. Could peak Federer beat peak Borg? Is Ronaldo better than Pele? Those comparisons are much less clear cut because the athletes are pitted directly against each other, and sometimes form part of a larger team. There are a several orders of magnitude more variables and complexity involved in measuring performance.

Boxing is perhaps the hardest of all sports in which to assess the relative performance of individuals from different periods. Boxers don't just impede each other, or play against each other, they attempt to knock each other unconscious.

Todays athletes also tend to look more defined. This is down to two three things:

1) Weight training being promoted to add extra muscle.
2) The cult of the 6-pack.
3) The athletes being deliberately photographed when at their most cut, shaved, oiled, starved, and even airbrushed.

If you look at photos of boxers pre-1980s fighting you can see that they possess impressive physiques. When these same guys are photographed out of the ring they look average. Anyone who has trained knows that at certain times we look more cut and more defined than we usually do. That's how those old before and after photos work! One of the changes in the 1980s was that boxers started to be treated more like movie/rock stars in terms of how they were photographed. If I google Britney Spears then two types of photo show up, in some of them she looks like a goddess in other more candid shots, she looks like something you'd have to tie a pork chop to in order to encourage your dog to play with her.

This whole fashion also coincided with 1980s body builder as invincible action hero fad. In the 1970s heros looked like Steve McQueen or Paul Newman. In the 1980s they looked like Schwarzenegger... or his big rival Stallone, who of course played Rocky. The further into the 1980s we got, the bigger Rocky's biceps got. The public then developed the impression that a heavyweight champion should resemble something drawn by Marvel Comics. This was great marketing for what, up until then, had been the relatively niche body building industry. People looked at those body builder physiques and thought "WOW he must be really strong", an "I wouldn't like to take a punch from him". Some people then began looking to body builders to train them, so that they could develop that much coveted physique. Of course the reality was built with steroids.

The marketing industry can never be accused of missing a trick. Here we have a popular culture promoting a certain umm 'healthy' look as being desirable, a drug that produces the desired look in 12 weeks, a bunch of people who have taken that drug running round calling themselves "physical trainers" whatever that is, and people queueing up to purchase their services. All they had to do was come up with a bunch of gadgets, sit back and let the money roll in.

Look in the attic of anyone over 40 and there's probably a bunch of exercise gadgets lodged up there. At least half of them will be devoted to the abdominal muscles. The same muscles whose chief purpose is to squeeze the **** out of our bowels and into the toilet bowl. Take any healthy muscular adult, strip off half their body fat so that their 6-pack is on display and they will instantly look much bigger and stronger (despite being smaller).

The result of all this "advancements in training and nutrition (and photoshop)"TM is that 21st Century boxers look like they'd be capable of taking their early 20th Century counterparts and pulling them apart limb from limb. Well they'd certainly beat them quite easily in a body building contest, that much is for sure.

The reality is quite different.

Excellent, excellent post

[StarshipTrooper]

A question to ponder: Are the athletes really getting better or is the equipment they use and the conditions that they perform under getting better? We know track and field athletes today run on much better surfaces and use much better track shoes all of which are geared to improve speed and performance. In tennis, players no longer use the heavy wooden rackets but instead use alloy rackets that weigh next to nothing and greatly improve serve velocity. In golf, players use clubs and balls that are all scientifically geared to maximize distance. In football, kickers kick from grass surfaces that are better than the artificial turf from 30 years ago hence distance and accuracy improves. In baseball, players use bats that are scientifically designed to improve bat speed. So are athletes really getting better or are their tools and working conditions constantly improving? Food for thought Gentlemen.

Poet

[bklynboy]

A question to ponder: Are the athletes really getting better or is the equipment they use and the conditions that they perform under getting better? We know track and field athletes today run on much better surfaces and use much better track shoes all of which are geared to improve speed and performance. In tennis, players no longer use the heavy wooden rackets but instead use alloy rackets that weigh next to nothing and greatly improve serve velocity. In golf, players use clubs and balls that are all scientifically geared to maximize distance. In football, kickers kick from grass surfaces that are better than the artificial turf from 30 years ago hence distance and accuracy improves. In baseball, players use bats that are scientifically designed to improve bat speed. So are athletes really getting better or are their tools and working conditions constantly improving? Food for thought Gentlemen.

Poet

We can add bodysuits in swimming (making comparison times more difficult); the Vancouver speed skating track had sensors in and zoned cooling coils allowing the track to be PERFECT: harder in the areas where it should be harder and softer in other areas.

The flip-side to this argument (that athletes are not getting better) is in gymnastics, ice skating, snowboarding, free-style skiing where training methods have allowed this generation of competitors to do far more than earlier competitors.

Many things have changed over 80 years but people have not evolved.

[StarshipTrooper]

We can add bodysuits in swimming (making comparison times more difficult); the Vancouver speed skating track had sensors in and zoned cooling coils allowing the track to be PERFECT: harder in the areas where it should be harder and softer in other areas.

The flip-side to this argument (that athletes are not getting better) is in gymnastics, ice skating, snowboarding, free-style skiing where training methods have allowed this generation of competitors to do far more than earlier competitors.

Many things have changed over 80 years but people have not evolved.

Yeah, biological evolution takes place of hundreds of thousands of years not a few short decades.

Poet

[EzzardFan]

A question to ponder: Are the athletes really getting better or is the equipment they use and the conditions that they perform under getting better? We know track and field athletes today run on much better surfaces and use much better track shoes all of which are geared to improve speed and performance. In tennis, players no longer use the heavy wooden rackets but instead use alloy rackets that weigh next to nothing and greatly improve serve velocity. In golf, players use clubs and balls that are all scientifically geared to maximize distance. In football, kickers kick from grass surfaces that are better than the artificial turf from 30 years ago hence distance and accuracy improves. In baseball, players use bats that are scientifically designed to improve bat speed. So are athletes really getting better or are their tools and working conditions constantly improving? Food for thought Gentlemen.

Poet

We're also much more accurate at measuring performance, particularly time. In a certain sports like tennis, many people feel that the technology has spoiled the game, by focusing more on the serve rather than the clever stuff. I'd have to agree with this. These days it seems like tennis favours the bigger stronger player and we no longer see the epic battles of the Borg-McEnroe era (which I am old enough to remember).

If sports science and sports nutrition has really improved physical performance so much then why do we no longer see boxers throwing the sheer volume of punches over the course of 15 rounds that the likes of Greb, Armstrong, Marciano, and Frazier did.

Also if you watch marathon runners, cyclists, and tennis players they're always drinking out of hit-tech containers labelled Red Bull or Lucozade Sport, but what's actually in the container is good old water - another triumph of marketing over the truth. Whenever an athlete like Herschel Walker claims not to have used modern sports science and nutrition to build his impressive physique but instead resorted to good old pushups, a bunch of faceless zealots call him a liar, like what he claims is somehow impossible!

In another thread on this forum recently:

http://www.boxingscene.com/forums/sh...9&postcount=68

Which not only plain nonsense but very insulting to the ATG boxers concerned.

[StarshipTrooper]

We're also much more accurate at measuring performance, particularly time. In a certain sports like tennis, many people feel that the technology has spoiled the game, by focusing more on the serve rather than the clever stuff. I'd have to agree with this. These days it seems like tennis favours the bigger stronger player and we no longer see the epic battles of the Borg-McEnroe era (which I am old enough to remember).

If sports science and sports nutrition has really improved physical performance so much then why do we no longer see boxers throwing the sheer volume of punches over the course of 15 rounds that the likes of Greb, Armstrong, Marciano, and Frazier did.

Also if you watch marathon runners, cyclists, and tennis players they're always drinking out of hit-tech containers labelled Red Bull or Lucozade Sport, but what's actually in the container is good old water. Another triumph of marketing over truth. And whenever an athlete like Herschel Walker claims not to have used modern sports science and nutrition to build his impressive physique but instead resorted to good old pushups, a bunch of faceless zealots call him a liar, like what he claims is somehow impossible!

In another thread on this forum recently:

http://www.boxingscene.com/forums/sh...7&postcount=66

http://www.boxingscene.com/forums/sh...9&postcount=68

Which not only plain nonsense but very insulting to the ATG boxers concerned.

I remember what Herschel's physique looked like in the early 1980s before all the "modern" training techniques and quite frankly he was ripped back then. So was Bo Jackson (still the finest athlete I've ever laid eyes on).

Poet

[StarshipTrooper]

Whenever an athlete like Herschel Walker claims not to have used modern sports science and nutrition to build his impressive physique but instead resorted to good old pushups, a bunch of faceless zealots call him a liar, like what he claims is somehow impossible!

Actually it's rather ironic you bring up Herschel as I'm currently compiling the stats from the USFL's 1983 season

Poet

[r.burgundy]

We're also much more accurate at measuring performance, particularly time. In a certain sports like tennis, many people feel that the technology has spoiled the game, by focusing more on the serve rather than the clever stuff. I'd have to agree with this. These days it seems like tennis favours the bigger stronger player and we no longer see the epic battles of the Borg-McEnroe era (which I am old enough to remember).

If sports science and sports nutrition has really improved physical performance so much then why do we no longer see boxers throwing the sheer volume of punches over the course of 15 rounds that the likes of Greb, Armstrong, Marciano, and Frazier did.

Also if you watch marathon runners, cyclists, and tennis players they're always drinking out of hit-tech containers labelled Red Bull or Lucozade Sport, but what's actually in the container is good old water - another triumph of marketing over the truth. Whenever an athlete like Herschel Walker claims not to have used modern sports science and nutrition to build his impressive physique but instead resorted to good old pushups, a bunch of faceless zealots call him a liar, like what he claims is somehow impossible!

In another thread on this forum recently:

http://www.boxingscene.com/forums/sh...9&postcount=68

Which not only plain nonsense but very insulting to the ATG boxers concerned.

where much more accurate at measurement because we can review video"cough,cough"

boxers throw less punches because alot of them are bigger and stronger and defense has evolved.fighters fight at a more measured pace.paticularly the bigger weight classes

[StarshipTrooper]

fighters fight at a more measured pace.paticularly the bigger weight classes

Translation: They have **** stamina and would have a heart attack if they had to fight at a furious pace for 15 rounds. They should try losing that extra 50 pounds of lard they carry into the ring.

Poet