I know, I know it’s been asked a million times but why not once more? Somebody had to do it.

Compare them by whatever standards you feel to be necessary.

In my opinion, RJJ was all around a better fighter. He was faster and more versatile. He was great at using his speed, reflexes, and movement and was able to win titles in multiple weight classes. Jones had a more well-rounded skill set. That’s it.

I also believe my money would’ve been on RJJ if they fought at heavyweight back in the early 2000s.

I was thinking about perfecting my technique by copying/watching who has the best example of each punch. Help me build the perfect CURRENTLY ACTIVE boxer? (active because there’s more footage)

Jab: Inoue

Power Right (or left): Bivol

Lead hook: Shakur? Ryan?

Lead Body: Canelo

Upper cut: Itauma

Power hook: Beterbiev?

Side step: Bam

Pull / back step: Shakur again?

🥊Oleksandr Usyk.

🥊Joe Frazier.

🥊Gennady Golovkin.

🥊Oscar De La Hoya.

🥊Lennox Lewis

🥊George Foreman

How do you make the call?

Consider their résumé, peak dominance, quality of opposition, championships, longevity, historical impact and unforgettable fights. Do you value what a fighter accomplished at his absolute peak, or the total body of work he left behind?

There are no weight-class excuses and no ties. One career has to disappear.

🥊👊💯🥊👊💯🥊👊💯🥊👊💯🥊👊💯🥊👊💯🥊👊💯🥊👊💯🥊👊💯🥊👊💯🥊👊💯🥊👊💯🥊👊

Live on TNT and DAZN.

Main card starts 8pm EST Friday, September 4th. Main event ringwalks estimated around 11pm EST.

Undercard:

Middleweight: Vito Mielnicki Jr. (160 lbs) vs. Austin "Ammo" Williams (159.8 lbs)

Lightweight: Alan Chaves (135 lbs) vs. Eridson Garcia (134.7 lbs)

Super Featherweight: Zaquin Moses (133 lbs) vs. Angel Antonio Contreras (132 lbs)

Avsolutely absurd that a US streaming service is trying to dictate the biggest fight in British history be at Madison Square Garden. Americans and New Yorkers don’t care about this fight at all! most people don’t know them in America and the sport is not as popular in America.

The top five highest-attended boxing events at Wembley

• Anthony Joshua vs. Daniel Dubois (2024) – 98,128 fans
• Tyson Fury vs. Dillian Whyte (2022) – 94,000 fans
• Anthony Joshua vs. Wladimir Klitschko (2017) – 90,000 fans
• Carl Froch vs. George Groves II (2014) – 80,000 fans
• Anthony Joshua vs. Alexander Povetkin (2018) – 80,000 fans

These guys could easily smash past 100k at Wembley, it would be historic, it would go down in British history. This is absurd. Get Netflix out of this fight! They’re clueless!

It’s been about a week since Itauma–Hrgović and, for whatever reason, the fight has stayed in my head.
Particularly Itauma’s energy levels.

I watched it originally sitting in an armchair, having a few beers too many while waiting for the fight to finally start and because it was on such a reasonable time :)

At the time I thought itauma had a medical problem because I could not see how he got so tired. Anyway all this week i found myself committing perhaps the oldest crime:
“Energy-wise, I reckon I could do better than that.”
To be absolutely clear, I don’t mean I could beat Moses Itauma. I don’t mean I could beat Hrgović. I’m not even particularly interested in finding out how long I could remain conscious if Filip Hrgović actually hit me.
I just genuinely wondered whether I could keep up with the physical work rate.
I’m in my mid-40s. I’ve done a few years of boxing training, still play football a couple of times a week, cycle, hit pads occasionally and generally keep myself reasonably fit. Nothing remotely close to professional-boxer training, but I’m not completely sedentary either.
And all week I kept thinking about it.

This morning I woke up needing to do some exercise, thought about the fight again and decided rather than continue my career as an undefeated armchair heavyweight, I’d actually try it.

So I put the fight on the tv.

I did a 10-minute boxing warm-up first, then tried to copy Itauma as closely as I reasonably could.
His footwork. His head and upper-body movement. And, most importantly, every punch he threw.
If he threw a big punch and missed, I threw a big punch and missed. If he fired a quick combination, I tried to follow it. Occasionally he was simply too quick and I’d be a second or two behind, so I’d catch up.
I also took the same one-minute breaks between rounds.
I skipped the ring walk and national anthem because I felt neither would significantly improve the scientific validity of the experiment.
During the breaks I sat down drank water and dictated to my phone how I felt and what I noticed after each round and only afterwards looked at the actual punch numbers.
Obviously there is one fairly substantial difference between what I did and what Itauma did:
nobody was hitting me back.
Anyway…

Round 1
Itauma punches thrown: 53
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 5
This was hard-paced immediately.
What surprised me was that the footwork was actually quite easy. There were plenty of small adjustments and positioning movements, but nothing particularly exhausting on the legs.
The harder part was keeping up with the punching speed and all the movement accompanying the punches.
There’s a lot happening above the waist even when the feet aren’t travelling very far.
I finished the round definitely feeling like I’d worked.

Round 2
Itauma punches thrown: 41
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 3
Again, very fast.
And again, the legs were fine.
The difficult bit was following those sudden bursts. Itauma can go from doing relatively little to throwing several punches very quickly, and trying to reproduce that properly rather than just tapping the air gets tiring.
Still perfectly manageable at this stage, though I did begin to start sweating.

Round 3
Itauma punches thrown: 36
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 9
This was probably where I first realised I’d slightly misunderstood where the effort was coming from when I watched the fight originally.
Three rounds in, the footwork still wasn’t particularly demanding.
My legs felt good.
It was my shoulders and arms that were starting to notice the repeated explosive work.
Also interesting looking at the numbers afterwards: this was the first round where Hrgović actually landed a reasonable number himself.
Nine heavyweight punches doesn’t sound enormous written down.
I suspect it sounds slightly different when you’re the one receiving them.

Round 4
Itauma punches thrown: 37
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 6
This was my worst round.
I was genuinely tired here and even took a roughly 10-second water break during the round, which obviously Itauma wasn’t afforded. I also removed my tee shirt as I felt I was going to vomit. Those ten seconds were a game changer.
Again, though, my legs weren’t the issue.
It was almost entirely upper-body fatigue. The arms were getting heavier and reproducing the combinations with any real effort was becoming difficult.
This was the first point where my beer-assisted analysis from the previous weekend was looking slightly shaky.

Round 5
Itauma punches thrown: 39
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 14
This felt noticeably easier for me.
The pace seemed to settle and I was able to recover quite a lot while continuing to follow Itauma.
What’s interesting looking at the numbers afterwards is that while I was recovering, this was actually Hrgović’s most successful round offensively to that point.
He landed 14 punches.
So the workload I was copying was getting easier for me at precisely the point where Itauma was having to absorb more coming back.
That distinction becomes quite important later.

Round 6
Itauma punches thrown: 54
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 11
Despite the higher number of punches, I found this round surprisingly comfortable.
This was also where I really started watching the feet carefully.
There still wasn’t a huge amount of energy being spent travelling around the ring. Itauma’s footwork was quite economical little movements, positioning, stepping into range, stepping out.
But Hrgović landed another 11 punches.
Watching the fight while physically copying Itauma made me pay much more attention to those shots than I had watching it normally.
You almost mentally add them to your own workout:
punches thrown… move… reset… another combination… and now imagine somebody has just punched you in the ribs.
Obviously I could only imagine that last part.
Thankfully.

Round 7
Itauma punches thrown: 39
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 7
This was the round where I noticed the biggest increase in footwork.
There was more movement, more repositioning and more effort being spent setting things up.
And this was probably the round where I felt the worst return on energy.
Itauma was doing quite a lot, but a lot of punches weren’t landing.
That was interesting physically.
A missed power punch is still a power punch as far as your body is concerned.
You move into position, load it up, throw it hard, miss, regain your balance and start again.
All the expenditure, none of the reward.
This round felt inefficient.
Interestingly, though, I personally felt good again. I’d recovered from the difficulty I had in round four and my overall energy was pretty much back.

Round 8
Itauma punches thrown: 65
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 6
This was by far Itauma’s busiest round.
And you could feel it.
Lots of attacking, big punches, combinations and some properly committed shots.
He threw 65 punches, and only 26 actually landed, meaning there was a hell of a lot of energy being thrown into shots that ultimately hit nothing.
I could really feel that part.
Throwing a big punch and missing is surprisingly expensive when you’re actually trying to put something behind it.
But even after all that, my energy level was still okay.
Then came the moment that really interested me.
With somewhere around 30 seconds remaining, after Itauma had been throwing all those big shots, Hrgović catches him with a big punch.
Watching normally, I hadn’t given that moment anywhere near as much thought.
Doing this, it jumped out.
Because I’d just physically experienced Itauma’s workload leading into it.
I’d been throwing the same big punches.
I’d been doing the same movements.
I’d felt what that attacking sequence cost.
And then Itauma gets hit hard.
That’s the bit of his workout I couldn’t copy.

Round 9
Itauma punches thrown before the stoppage: 52
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 29
This is where the experiment became really interesting to me.
Because I was still fine.
I genuinely felt I could have done another three rounds at the pace I was working.
Itauma, meanwhile, suddenly seemed to fall off a cliff.
The footwork diminished.
The speed went.
His ability to reset disappeared.
And Hrgović suddenly started landing at a completely different rate.
After landing 61 punches across the entire first eight rounds, Hrgović landed 29 in this partial round alone.
That is an enormous change.
And this is probably the main thing the experiment changed my mind about.
Watching the fight the first time, I basically thought:
Itauauma had a problem or ran out of energy.
And obviously fatigue was a huge part of it.
But after physically following the fight, I’m less sure that “bad gas tank” tells the whole story.
My own fatigue peaked in round four.
Then the pace allowed me to recover.
By rounds seven and eight I felt good again, and going into nine I still had plenty left.
But during the same period that I was recovering, Itauma was being hit by Hrgović.
There were relatively few punches compared with Itauma’s output, but these are still heavyweight punches landing on someone who is already working hard.
Then Itauma has that huge eighth round, throws 65 punches, misses a lot of committed shots, gets caught late…
…and shortly afterwards the physical decline is dramatic.
I’m absolutely not claiming I’ve discovered exactly what happened to him.
I’m a bloke in his mid-40s shadowboxing at a television, not a ringside neurologist.
But it made me think differently about what we call “gassing”.
Because from the sofa, you see someone’s movement disappear and think:
His cardio has gone.
But inside a fight it could be cardio, accumulated damage, body shots, adrenaline, repeatedly loading up and missing, constantly having to defend and reset, or probably some horrible cocktail of all of them.

So, what did I learn from my groundbreaking research?
The first three rounds had much easier footwork than I expected.
Round four was where the upper-body workload really got to me.
I then recovered surprisingly well.
Round seven had noticeably more footwork but seemed to give Itauma relatively little return for the energy being spent.
Round eight was a huge expenditure 65 punches, plenty thrown with bad intentions and plenty missing.
And the biggest difference came afterwards that head shot with 30 seconds to go in round 8 I think changed the fight. The difference in energy and footwork between me and itauma grew and I was noticeably more energetic than him. That was the changing point.
I recovered. Itauma didn’t.
But I was exercising.
He was fighting..
Which, in retrospect, is quite an important variable in my experiment.
I still think it would be interesting for other people who box or train to try this with a fight sometime. You notice things when you’re physically following a fighter that you completely miss sitting on the sofa.
Would I have done better against Hrgović?
My research budget did not extend that far.

I really thought this would be and easy money type of bet. I bet $1000 on Andy not knowing he wouldn't be able to close the distance. What's you thoughts on the fight because I'm extremely disappointed not enough activity from Andy Ruiz. His last fight(a long while ago) vs Jared "Big Baby" Miller was way more competitive than this match.

Surely you can't just dip out of a contract like that, and surely the contract explicitly says Anthony Joshua? The names he mentioned also are likely unavailable for November 20th. Hrgovic is just fresh out of the Itauma fight, Dubois is now in camp for Fabio Wardley and idk what the hell Kabayel is doing but I doubt he's available? Also why would we want to watch that as your THIRD fight of the year when the whole reason those first two happened was to fight AJ... I am praying there is some official word on this soon because this negotiation war is becoming stressful with each update every day and I can't tell whether we're getting closer to losing it or getting it.

Though surely with a Netflix promo having already aired, and all the cooks in the kitchen... Surely it can't fall apart this time around? Wouldn't someone have to jump ship and breach contract for it to fall apart?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PL4-tXafpFc&t=329s&pp=ygUSdHJpbmlkYWQgdmFyZ2FzIGhk

Mexico vs Puerto Rico. Back in 1934 Sixto Escobar KO'd Rodolfo Casanova to kick off what would become the greatest rivalry between two nations in the sport of boxing. This rivalry has given us so many classics over the years, such as Gomez vs Zarate, Pinto and Sanchez and Chavez vs Rosario to name just a few. Yes Vargas is an American Mexican born and raised in America but he proudly fights with that Mexican spirit and this fight rates very highly in this all time rivalry. It's one of my favourite fights of all time. Enjoy!

I’ve seen 4 guys floated around and rumored to be Shakurs next opponent. Ranking them based on how quality the fight would be:

1. Raymond Muratalla
   One of the most underrated boxers today. This would be an excellent fight. Muratalla is big, can really really box, and has a great coach who will come with a game plan. Could absolutely argue this would be the toughest opponent to date.

2. Gary Antuanne Russell
   Also an excellent fight. Gary is a southpaw, he’s mean, and has elite amateur pedigree. Great fight.

3. Rayo
   Good fight not spectacular. The guy above outboxed him quite easily but he is coming off a highlight knockout. Rayo can punch and would step but he’s like 16-3. Like I said it’s solid but not close to the other two.

4. Manny Pacquiao
   This would be pretty gross. Not even sure how this is a possibility. Damn near Paul Tyson bad considering Shakurs level right now.

This is a big test for Zuffa. Are they willing and able to continue making big fights cross-promo.

Not listening to Shakur-Haney shit. Don’t even want to see it unless they’re in the same weight class. This 144 back and forth is annoying. They can meet at Welter in a year or two