Most prolific active boxer of recent times?

[donnydarkoIRL]

Modern fighters are much less susceptible to wear tear and permanent damage than their past counterparts.
Past fighters fought TOO regularly and in the interests of safety, no elite fighter should fight more than three times a year.

[Dizaster]

Modern fighters are much less susceptible to wear tear and permanent damage than their past counterparts.
Past fighters fought TOO regularly and in the interests of safety, no elite fighter should fight more than three times a year.

True True.... Back 20, 30, 40 years ago, less was known about head trauma and things like that, and permanent damage to the brain... Which wouldn't immediately be apparant to the fighters until many years after their retirements..

Back then it would have surely been looked at differently.. More of a "working class" full time job.. You train for a few weeks, do a fight, get paid. Train another couple of weeks, do a fight, get paid.... Now it's an elite sport, for elite athletes, and the money allows them to commit a good 4 to 6 months of training between fights, without actually needing to fight in between just to make ends meet..

You have to have a lot of respect for those guys back then who really carved out good pro careers.. And fought that often..

I'd would not be surprised if the guy with 95 ko losses didn't know his name..

To be fair though, there were some pretty horrible jobs back in those days.. I remember seeing a video of a guy in the back of a truck, shovelling huge mounts of straight asbestos into a seperate pile, without any protective clothing or breathing aparatus... The guys lungs and body would have litereally been falling to peices in old age, and probably would have had a brain of mush that would rival any boxer....

"Grandpa, what did you used to do for a job?"
"duhi do dlu da daii doww"

Tough lives back then, we have things easy these days.... I respect the fighters of today who don't neccessarily take a tonne of fights every year, but they sure as hell don't waste the 2 or 3 fights that they DO take!

It's a throwback to the heart & toughness of the old days..

[donnydarkoIRL]

Undeniably boxers in the past would have had better records with tailor made training camps, improved nutrition and less frequent fights.

I wouldn't expect to see any losses on SRR's card in modern boxing.

[HattonTheHammer]

Modern fighters are much less susceptible to wear tear and permanent damage than their past counterparts.
Past fighters fought TOO regularly and in the interests of safety, no elite fighter should fight more than three times a year.

Agree to a certain extent

But for me a fighter should fight as much as he feels is physically possible for him.

If say Wlad klitchsko fights twice in a year and on both occasions blows his opponents away he is merely wasting his time in the gym when he could be fighting.

When you fight amateur you have to on some occasions fight 3-4 times in a night.

Some boxers out there at the moment could easily manage 5-6 fights a year still but choose not to because they know the real money is there to be earned from fights that need 2-3 months of promoting.

[donnydarkoIRL]

Agree to a certain extent

But for me a fighter should fight as much as he feels is physically possible for him.

If say Wlad klitchsko fights twice in a year and on both occasions blows his opponents away he is merely wasting his time in the gym when he could be fighting.

When you fight amateur you have to on some occasions fight 3-4 times in a night.

Some boxers out there at the moment could easily manage 5-6 fights a year still but choose not to because they know the real money is there to be earned from fights that need 2-3 months of promoting.

A fighter can feel ready to fight every day of the year.
However if he does he simply counteracts his own fitness and preparation, decreases his chance of winning and causes totally treatable injuries to become permanent.
Wear and tear comes as much from training as the fight.

I've fought amateur for the past ten years and boxers are no longer allowed to compete more than once a day because of fatigue and injury.

Even if a boxer did fight four times in one day in the past he wouldn't meet near the demands of a professional boxing contest.

[Mikkel_K]

95 KO losses sounds really, really bad, but it might also be because he knows when to stay down. It could be much worse with guys like Gatti who just keep coming back and gets more and more thrown in his face.

It's the accumulation of punches that do the real damage, and if you go down easily you just might be able to escape that.

Btw I'd say the most prolific active fighters of a certain standard should be either Jorge Castro (130-11-3 = 144) or perhaps Yori Boy Campas (91-12-0 = 103).

[CutMeMick]

I think James Toney is going for bout #81 vs. Rahman...

Castros career started in 87, Toneys career started in 88, Campas in 87 also.