Transcript

EP23 Boxing with Ghosts

From Dan Carlin · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 7 min · 11,400 words · 67 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "EP23 Boxing with Ghosts", an episode of Dan Carlin published November 16, 2022 (1 h 7 min, about 11,400 words). It mentions 22 people, works and ideas, including Mike Silver, The Arc of boxing, Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, Joe Louis.

What this episode is about

The topic explores the nuanced world of boxing, using a personal narrative that intertwines a discussion with former NFL player Russ Francis to highlight the sport's emotional and historical complexities. By revisiting the mid-1990s, the narrative aims to engage both boxing enthusiasts and newcomers, presenting a unique perspective on the sport's significance and its impact on sports culture.

Key takeaways

  • Boxing: the only sport where a bout can end before you've finished your popcorn.
  • Intangibles like heart and grit often outweigh modern athletic metrics, especially in boxing's rich history.
  • Debates about past athletes' matchup against today’s stars highlight our nostalgia and bias toward modernity.
  • Jack Lambert’s legacy proves that passion and attitude can sometimes eclipse size and speed in sports.
  • The timeless nature of boxing appeals because it defies the laws of sports physics with its unpredictability.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Russ Francis, Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Mike Tyson
  2. – 20:00: Mike Silver, The Arc of boxing, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis
  3. – 30:00: Muhammad Ali, Emma Chamberlain, Harry Greb, Mike Silver
  4. – 40:00: Sugar Ray Robinson, Mike Silver, Muhammad Ali, Elvis Duran
  5. – 50:00: Mike Silver, Sugar Ray Robinson, Elvis Duran
  6. – 1:00:00: Teddy Atlas, Mike Tyson, Mike Silver, Muhammad Ali
  7. – 1:06:56: Mike Silver, The Arc of boxing, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis

Notable quotes from "EP23 Boxing with Ghosts"

  • 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…
    about Russ Francis · at
  • Magazine boxing monthly ESPN the guy is a known boxing expert and what he does in this book is try to make a case that boxing is the one athletic competition in the modern…
    about The Arc of boxing · at
  • 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.
    about Mike Silver · at
  • 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…
    about Sugar Ray Robinson · at
  • 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…
    about Muhammad Ali · at
  • 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…
    about Teddy Atlas · at
  • 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.
    about Mike Tyson · at
  • A new 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…
    about Joe Louis · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Mike Silver — Person · Referenced expert / interview subject · 10 mentions · first at
    Central authority for the episode’s thesis via his book and quoted analysis arguing past-era boxers were superior due to experience, technique, and incentives.
  • Muhammad Ali — Person · Referenced exemplar (historic boxer) · 9 mentions · first at
    Used as the archetypal transcendent boxing figure and as evidence in arguments about skill, psychology, and ring rust across eras.
  • Mike Tyson — Person · Referenced modern-era benchmark (boxer) · 6 mentions · first at
    Serves as a modern reference point for knockout power, style (peek-a-boo), and debates about whether modern champions would beat past greats.
  • Joe Louis — Person · Referenced exemplar (past heavyweight benchmark) · 2 mentions · first at
    Used to rebut 'modern giants' arguments (he beat very large opponents) and as a measuring stick against Tyson in quoted trainer commentary.
  • Russ Francis — Person · Referenced anecdotal foil (sports comparison debate) · 5 mentions · first at
    Introduces the cross-era athlete comparison debate (past vs present), which the episode then applies to boxing as a special case.
  • Sugar Ray Robinson — Person · Referenced exemplar (technical greatness) · 4 mentions · first at
    Cited as an apex of the 'sweet science' whose speed/skill is portrayed as difficult to replicate or surpass with modern training methods.
  • Teddy Atlas — Person · Referenced expert (trainer/analyst) · 4 mentions · first at
    Quoted to emphasize 'mental toughness' and experience as decisive factors; also referenced for early involvement with Tyson.
  • George Foreman — Person · Referenced exemplar (boxing comeback / late KO) · 3 mentions · first at
    Key illustration of boxing’s unique drama: losing rounds yet winning instantly via knockout; later also cited as a past great Tyson might not handle.
    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 a hundred to nothing would have been the equivalent so that's going to make the kind of.
  • Elvis Duran — Person · Referenced exemplar (craftiness/instincts; global boxing) · 3 mentions · first at
    Appears both as an example of 'craftiness' missing today and as a modern-era international icon (Panama) in the sport’s global context.
    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…
  • Jack Lambert — Person · Referenced example (football toughness vs measurables) · 1 mention · first at
    Used to illustrate how intangibles (toughness/attitude) can offset size/speed changes across eras in football, setting up the boxing comparison.
    That kind of stuff but I mean I remember specifically we mentioned Jack Lambert who even in the 1970s was an undersized linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers I think it was…
  • Emma Chamberlain — Person · Referenced cross-sport anecdote (size vs boxing skill) · 2 mentions · first at
    Used in a story about a proposed Ali vs Chamberlain bout to illustrate that size alone doesn’t translate into boxing effectiveness.
    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…
  • Jim Brown — Person · Referenced exemplar (cross-era athleticism in football) · 1 mention · first at
    Used as a shorthand example in the broader 'could past athletes play today' debate before narrowing to boxing as the exception.
    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…
  • Conor McGregor — Person · Referenced comparator (combat-sports showmanship) · 1 mention · first at
    Used as a modern parallel for Ali’s charisma and promotional style, illustrating how personality draws non-fans into fights.
    No interest in boxing at all but I had an interest in him and you know you combine some of the things people like about someone like Conor McGregor and all these you know…
  • Gorgeous George — Person · Referenced influence (pro-wrestling showmanship) · 1 mention · first at
    Cited as a model for fight-promotion theatrics, connecting wrestling-style persona-building to Ali/McGregor-type hype.
    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…
  • Manny Pacquiao — Person · Referenced exemplar (global boxing icon) · 1 mention · first at
    Used to illustrate boxing’s international reach and national-hero status across countries.
    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…
  • Harry Greb — Person · Likely duplicate / misspelling of Harry Greb · 2 mentions · first at
    Appears as a variant spelling in the transcript; context clearly refers to Harry Greb and his extraordinary fight count and style.
    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 hairy grab out of the time machine today put him…

Books & papers

  • The Arc of boxing — Book · Primary recommendation · 4 mentions · first at
    Central book discussed in the episode, making the case that boxers from the past were superior to modern boxers.
  • The Night the Referee Hit Back — Book · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at
    Another book by Mike Silver mentioned in the context of boxing history.
    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…
  • Stars in the Ring — Book · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at
    Another book by Mike Silver mentioned in the context of boxing history, focusing on Jewish champions.
    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…

Companies & orgs

  • ESPN — Company · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as one of the publications Mike Silver has written for.
    World he's been a promoter an inspector with the New York State athletic commission lots of articles on boxing of everything for the New York Times Ring Magazine boxing monthly…
  • Ring Magazine — Company · Referenced work · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as one of the publications Mike Silver has written for.
    World he's been a promoter an inspector with the New York State athletic commission lots of articles on boxing of everything for the New York Times Ring Magazine boxing monthly…

Places & events

  • Art Museum — Place · Setting · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as a place where the host saw a statue of a Greek Olympian boxer.
    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…

Full transcript with timestamps

it's hardcore history 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 uh feed to begin with right so instead of having to have a show that could you know 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 uh 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 unboxing for a long time and this is a show on boxing but I think the way we're gonna 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 1990s I was um 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 is as I said was the 1990s uh 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 it literally was questioning whether or not he was good enough 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 um 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 Russ 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 even in the 1970s was an undersized linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers I think it was like 215 or something and um 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 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's a perfect example of a sport where where the players of yesteryear on average were a lot smaller a lot slower maybe less athletic certainly uh 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 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 um Art Museum the met in New York and they had a statue of a Greek Olympian boxer from like the 400s bces and you 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 uh 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 know 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 Sonny Liston right boom over and you might say well that's a rip-off yet at the same time it forces you to be interested Anything could happen at any time right you can't 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 a hundred 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 a more modern trained the whole thing and uh George lost every round 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 a

hundred 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 um 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 pulled famously pulled in non-boxing fans uh 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 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 he's one of his idols um 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 um as you watch enough Muhammad Ali fights you start noticing the intricacies of the sport which is always sort of the the key right the pathway to becoming a fan of any sport understanding the little things the Chrome and and for me what AJ Lee bling

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 um to quote Mike silver who's a famous uh knowledgeable boxing historian and writer uh 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 uh getting hit all over the place right it's 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 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 counter-intuitive 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 um 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 of everything for the New York Times Ring Magazine boxing monthly ESPN um the guy is is a known boxing expert and what he does in this book 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 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 six foot six whereas 50 or 60 years ago was probably like six foot two there's no rule on that so it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger but 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 um 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 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 uh a fight the other

night on YouTube and an older one it's funny saying older one about a Tyson Fury uh Deontay Wilder fight and it's a six foot nine inch tall guy with an 85 inch reach against a six foot seven inch guy with an 83 inch reach How could somebody like a Joe Lewis from one of the great ages of boxing's in one of the great heavyweight champions at like six one and a half 76 inch reach could a guy like that compete with those two massive modern boxers okay well Joe Lewis did fight two opponents who were pretty much the same size um one was Primo carnera who is about six foot six inches weighed 270 pounds and Lewis annihilated him in six rounds the fights on YouTube you can check it out another was Buddy bear who I believe was six foot seven inches tall weighed about 250 pounds and uh Lewis stopped him first time in the sixth round the second time in the first round okay the the the problem is that many

people think that size is everything in in in boxing if somebody's well 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 more accomplished as a boxer knows how to get under the punches get inside um 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 than

he did with huge monsters like um uh carnera and and Buddy bear the same thing with Jack Dempsey whose nickname was the Giant Killer uh Jack Dempsey when he won the title beat he weighed about 185 pounds tremendous puncher very fast and he annihilated uh Jess Willard who was six foot six over six foot six 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 160 pound middleweight then you got a problem because that 125 pound featherweight just doesn't have enough Mass to uh and musculature to generate to hurt that 160 pound fighter you know it just would be uneven but 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 down through the years where a fighter a heavyweight was outweighed from anywhere from 25 to 100 pounds okay where the smaller opponent defeated the heavier opponent and in in in each case these you know 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 uh technique and very important heart the ability to take a punch

um 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 Will 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 um 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 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 an example of what I mean and 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 and it's not a little bit more experience it's in it's multiples of the amount of experience so for example um in the early days you had just like you do today you'd have amateur boxing and a lot of these people would find 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 grab uh 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 it just 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 um fascinating far beyond just the niche of boxing it's this idea about how much better competition makes you better right how steel sharpen 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 a better performance right steel

sharpened 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 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 you know in the 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 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 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 to a lack of sharpness because some of these Fighters back in the day who were more like lunch pail Go to Work Hard Hat type

Blue Collar guys are fighting every three weeks or something and these days uh 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 hairy grab 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 is not the perfect example to do that Harry greb like Muhammad Ali like Henry Armstrong he was singular had a a style of his own it couldn't be duplicated he was he was an outlier he just he had a style that nobody could solve nobody could even imitate him successfully so I I would say go back to uh the more traditional fighter Tony consideri Tony canzanari Barney Ross Mickey Walker

Tommy locker and even you know that those type of Fighters like 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 he was Rusty he was getting hit with punches that he never would have gotten hit with it it you know you have to start uh fighting more often to get your timing down your sense of judgment and distance this this with 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 the fighters who fought more often would have it that would be a distinct advantage just in the in their 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 um anybody uh 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 Arc 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 the I think he's 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 um Jack Dempsey the Ferocious Jack Dempsey the guy Mike Tyson likes so much and with the exception of the peek-a-boo 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 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 he was the introduction of a whole bunch of things that boxers never did like weight training that would turn you know somebody into the Stallone Hollywood caricature but here's what's weird silver says in his book that people saw the Rocky movies you know 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 um real sort of fatty let's call the some fatty nutrition and 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 strengthened so we'll develop a machine that just works that 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 these 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 way if they pull their hands away and you faked 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 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 medical manuals that existed from back then to try to piece together what it must have been like right something that the Kendo swordsman 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 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 were 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 um if you're just born like good at that you're just born good at Muhammad Ali had one of the fastest Jabs you ever saw you can't fix that with weights right push-ups 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 he goes over all these great old punchers people that were absolute murderers um 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 three of the sport Joe Lewis Jack Dempsey Rocky Marciano Sonny Liston Jimmy Wilde Bob Fitzsimmons Stanley ketchel 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 end quote

boxing the key is to develop speed and most Fighters when they go into it they they have enough strength through their regular training they don't need weight lifting the old-time train is the stained weightlifting it was damaging to the fire it slowed them up and just to give you an example like if I can quote from my book here um about you know athletes today being big or Stronger Faster why doesn't that apply to boxing aren't all athletes better today boxing is on a different level on a superficial level the newer is always better attitude towards athletic excellence and 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 weight lifter can it 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 blindly state that today's top professional boxes are better than their predecessors simply because measurable athletic performance has improved in other sports 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 Timber inflection vocal range and phrasing yet many people without even realizing it apply the same logic to boxing oblivious as they are to the complex nuances of the Box's Craft um see when when when you have people a lack of quality teachers people who don't really know what to do they 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 said hey football players are using weight training you know why why shouldn't boxers they need to get stronger they didn't understand that the the with weight training the boxes begin to throw their punches in a wider Arc they can't get them off fast enough the the old-time trainers who live this sport day in and day out day out their whole lives they understood that wasn't to be done nobody trained better than Rocky Marciano okay or Joe Lewis as as Joe Frazier I quote Joe Frazier in my book he said 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 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 and have enough information to do it that's not lost information it might be considered outdated by some but but it's known what 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 uh Silver's book and he has several different quotes I mean for example he quotes uh one of his experts in the book is Mike capriano Jr who 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 and he says about the little technique

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 Tippy 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 moods 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 faints the hook off of faint step to the right an 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 more more 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 boxed themselves at one time or another but one of these guys in the book Ted Linsky is a PhD 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 end quote 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 uh enjoyment kind of thing but you mention 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 crack-ups 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 or if you would in fact they watched Willie Pep in the fight they might they might not know what he's doing uh to them you know being used to slugfests and and the Arturo Gotti type

Fighter um not that not to diminish him he had great heart but you know the skill level was basically that of a tough guy that just tried to out punch his opponent I'm not sure they would recognize what Willie Pep 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 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'm not diminishing the danger of it at all in fact I'm

writing a current book and that that deals with the danger of boxing and how to mitigate those dangers under the current circumstances and and there's certain things that can be done I don't know if the sport will allow it or do it but um no your your premise is correct I 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 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 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 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 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 for twice a year anybody who applies his craft to any Trader 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 sound clip 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 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 were they ever going to find a way to deal with that science were 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 end quote he means the very big super heavyweights of today or the relatively small

heavyweight to the earlier era now we'd mentioned though that heavyweight's 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 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 a nail in the head with that um the fighters were not only that there's again this is an aspect that's different than other sports you could be a legendary great basketball player okay um and yet not have what we would call in boxing uh heart you know it it's it's a sport that requires Great skill but 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 a terrific punch for the for the solar plexus or to the liver um 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 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 if you you can go into the technique the greater technique the more experience but as you mentioned the phrase greatest generation 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 but not Champion just to become a contender the the depths 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 he had 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 uh a solid physical specimen that was just really impressive tremendous puncture could take a great punch but in the words of Custom Auto Teddy atlas's mentor he really lacked the character when the going got tough he bit an ear okay looking for a way out um 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're calling greatness today they're very few very few great boxes over the past 25 30 years a few however in the days when the competition was much more severe you can 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 what a

modern audience even recognize it I mean go to some of the boxing discussion Boards out there in the fighting um 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 a very sort of a different vibe and 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 futch who was one of the last of the great Golden Age trainers I have a bunch of books about boxing trainers and

um Eddie futch is like one of the last of the people you know in in some of the chapters of these books were sort of the last of an era and futch 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 uh long after Mike Tyson was on the scene he trained Riddick Beau for example and Mark cram who was one of the great boxing writers when he was writing for Esquire magazine cornered fudge 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 uh all the way into the modern era

a new 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 in this day and age because in 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 a 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 um 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 counter-intuitive argument 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 um 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 hasn't 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 block boxers who weren't really a part of the pro years during the Cold War two boxers in Germany I mean which country Italian boxers are are world famous Irish boxers I mean 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 African Americans were able to dominate I mean you know you had the very early ERA this 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 would 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 um some of the great boxers ducked black boxers two Sugar Ray Robinson when somebody suggested he fight I think it was Charlie Burley and not Homan Williams he said I thought you were my friend right 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

is worth a dollar Dan and Ben would love to have it go to dancarlin.com for information on how to donate to the show for Hardcore History t-shirts or other merchandise go to dancarlin.com

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "EP23 Boxing with Ghosts"?

Dan Carlin (Host), Mike Silver (Guest).

What is "EP23 Boxing with Ghosts" about?

The topic explores the nuanced world of boxing, using a personal narrative that intertwines a discussion with former NFL player Russ Francis to highlight the sport's emotional and historical complexities. By revisiting the mid-1990s, the narrative aims to engage both boxing enthusiasts and newcomers, presenting a unique perspective on the sport's significance and its impact on sports culture.

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

22 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Mike Silver, The Arc of boxing, Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, Joe Louis, Russ Francis. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "EP23 Boxing with Ghosts"?

The episode runs 1 h 7 min; the transcript is about 11,400 words in 67 timestamped sections.

More from Dan Carlin

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 25, 2026.