This is a CS thread not a GD or PIT thread so keep the politics/hatred out please
Just watched a docu on BBC about Cuban boxing. They are the most successful country per capita in boxing at the Olympics. They have created some of the most amazing amateur boxers the world have ever seen. The greats get very little financial reward. A small house or car and the love and respect of a whole nation are the rewards offered to these men.
If these guys past and present had entered the world of pro fighting how much would they have changed the list of great pros that we are familiar with?
I’m clueless about boxing other that the BIG fights but I’d like to hear from people who know and follow the fight scene.
Never said they did. They have had fighters though that were very impressive(in the amateur scene anyway). Some of the greats, Ali, Tyson, Robertson etc also did well in the Olympics and they went on to pro greatness. I’m asking people who know more than me to give me their impressions on how the world of pro boxing would have been changed if people like Felix Savon and Teofilo Stevenson had of entered the world of Ali etc.
Probably about the same as if Cuban baseball players went pro: the best fighters would start making big money, the programs that have produced quality athletes will be under assault from agents, sportswear companies and the entertainment industry, and the vast majority of fighters won’t make a dime.
The top 1% would have better competition, and the rest would lose the advantages of the training programs they’ve been a part of.
There’s a lot of controversy over the Cuban amatuer team. Some say the reason they dominate so handily is because they don’t ever turn pro, so it’s a bunch of much more experienced 30 year old boxers fighting our 20 year old prodigies. Kind of like if their high school football teams stayed on for four more years after graduation and never went to college, so you’ve got their Heisman trophy winners playing against our State 5A champs. This article goes into the what ifs of Cuban amatuer boxing pretty well.
Boxing commentators have been going back and forth for years over what would have happened had Stevenson and Savon in particular had defected and turned pro. Some think they would have added their names to the lists of the greats from their age, and some think they wouldn’t have fared nearly so well as pros as they did in the amatuer world. It’s quite possible they wouldn’t have; pro boxing is a whole different animal from amatuer boxing. I heard a boxer who had recently turned pro remark how completely different and less “fun” the pro scene was, and how he really felt like it was a job for the first time. He had a great comment I wished I had written down, something like “you know, football is a game, baseball is a game…nobody ever calls boxing a game.”
Stevenson in particular would have been going up against one of the most dominating heavyweight fields in history (Ali, Frazier, Holmes, etc.). They might have joined the list of greats, or they might have run into real competition for the first time and folded. Stevenson was offered a lot of money to defect and never did; from his perspective, why should he? He already had as sweet a life as Cuba could provide, and the possibility of losing everything if he turned pro and couldn’t cut it, getting the bejeezus beat out of himself in the process.
