Real champions defend their titles

[billeau2]

....damn

I have been in contact with the IBRO members for sometime now, and while I still use their prestige to back my claims quite often I have for quite a while now got the feeling "verification" has become code for we'll kick it around and if more of us like it than dislike it, it will become verified history.

At first the game was get source material. I was quoting books and articles that had sources mentioned, but not bringing those sources along.

They did teach me that sometimes authors just lie. Sometimes, book or article, they write a story they want to write and claim quotes or other bits of evidence came from a source. Then, when you check the source you do not find what is claimed at all, sometimes something close, sometimes the opposite, sometimes just totally unmentioned.

However, once I became schooled in the art of packaging source material in an easy to read fashion, it went from bring sources to okay, thank you for your research, we'll talk about it and get back to you.

Them being respected historians and such, who are honest to god fans too...really just mega fans with a bit of connection and resource, there is some trust there that they are doing some kind of due diligence.

However, when I read research I know came from me in their books sometimes I'm bothered by their word choice.

It does seem like this. If there's a real respected historian who happens to be covering something related in any way they will get say and it trickles down from there.

If you went to harvard I think you just get to tell guys like the IBRO what history is rather dictatorially based solely on your personal merit rather than the merit of the history.


It forces fans who just want to know simple things like who was the first LW champion or how the term champion itself evolved to mean best of rather than defender of, to be sort of like a detective and track down the story themselves.



IMO, I don't think there is an undisputed in gloved boxing history until Jeffries. Sullivan contented against a whole other sport let alone champion. England was still doing their own thing, as were most nations. The HW champion wasn't regional, they were the HW champion. The HW champion from Australia was the HW champion. The US champ was also the HW champion. Outside of colorline, they met, usually the US won, or, had the more famous fighter in a draw, and so it's easy to assume why US line of HW champions are now the world HW champions, but, in their time, Australian and English champions were not regional, they were disputes.

Jeffries is the man who beat the colored, the world claimants, the pretense, and the line we call lineal now. It was clever of him to fight black men before he was champion, even better of him to fight good black men. The same can be said for the pretense, he didn't really have to fight Sharkey to be the man, but, he did, and there was no more argument from the Earp innodent.

That said, I'm just a guy who gathers newspaper clippings and sends them to more respected fans to get verified, so, usually, when I say something like Sullivan was not undisputed and here's why, what I get is quotes posted at me that contradict me and are coming from more respected historians. When you come in armed with 'verified' information people just say thank you.

What you are is honest. With no agenda. Very few of us, those who look at research and development, that are in it for the truth. I learned this in the Ivory Tower. I learned it when reading great thinkers like Thomas Kuhn who said that science was a socially constructed enterprise. After all David Hume proved as much and was just respectfully worked around by Kant.

History became much the same when it was legitimately asked, who had the juice? the author? the reader? Who determined the truth, the meaning? did it belong to the author? to society? A great example of this "tangle" can be found in Kubricks "A ClockWork Orange" where the main protagonist, thinking about the Bible in a prison class smiles at the priest teaching, as the priest passes the aisle we see that the main progagonist indeed believes he has been inspired by the tale of Christ and the Christian's crucifiction. Then we see inside his mind as he imagines himself a Roman Guard whipping Christians and being fed fruit by nubile females.

From his perspective he has been deeply affected by the Bible...But probably not as the priest imagined lol.