[Rocco Del Sesto]

Hello! It's been quite some time since I've been around these neck of the woods, sometime around 2022 I think. Glad to see this Forum is still here with contributors still kicking around things to keep Title Bout 2.5 active. Still love this game! Good to see there are others still here from years back and maybe newer members I don't know.

I tried here and there over the years to keep active here, but life (work / family) just kept getting most of my time. The last three years had been total crazy with work! Well I'm done with that! Retired this past January 23rd!! Had turned 65 last year, got 30 years in complete with my company back in January and decided it was enough! Crazing start to the retirement though. About a week later I went in for open heart surgery to get a new Aortic Valve put it! Great start to retirement, NOT. But doing very well. Between the new valve and taking up swimming as part of my recovery process I feel physically better I think then I've had in some time!

Well enough of that. One of the things I wanted very much to do now with the whole lot of extra free time is get back to this wonderful hobby and game and sport of boxing! Anyone here who knows me, will know I really love the history of old time heavyweight boxing. Did a lot of researching and contributing heavyweights to TB. Well I want to do more. Over the past years I've put together quite a collection of Ring magazines and Boxing Newspapers. The Rings I have complete back to 1939 and am working on 1938. Been skimming through them really enjoying reading about the old fighters especially. Starting with 1938, I want to go through a study of sorts of the heavyweights from Joe Louis championship times up through the Ali years. In the past I took some stabs at looking at heavyweights from back in the 30's - 40s using the Ring as sort of a guide looking up fighters. Well found I would quickly get bogged down trying to look up articles in Ring about so many Tom, Dick and Harry fighters and then going through on line newspaper articles to try and found information about them. Was taking a long time to hunt through a small number of boxers!!

So going to take a different approach. With the help of the Ring ratings that are in the magazines along with the NBA Quarterly rankings on BoxRec, I'm going to focus on those fighters that appear in those rankings. Many of course would have already been rated in TB by the many contributors over the years, but, what I'm seeing is BoxRec has greatly expanding much information on many of these fighters from when they were first looked at for TB. At least that's what I'm seeing with the copies of rated fighters I have in my data base for TB2.5. I like to look through old on line newspapers to see what else can be found about these heavyweights. There is a LOT of great information to find.

Using the Ring monthly top 10 ratings I have along with the NBA ratings I'll focus on those fighters as my base line to look at the chronological progression of heavyweight boxing from the early time of Louis' reign on through the years. Along the way I hope I can share with you all some worthwhile new information on some of these fighters along with maybe some updated ratings for them that maybe you'd appreciate. The Online newspapers and Ring's I'm seeing as great sources of new photos of fighters. I also like to look at the boxing venues. Hope I can find some new insite into old boxing venues where these fighters battled to help expand this I still feel great game of TB2.5.

By the title I put in, I thought and thought about what to call this thread and just never came up with anything I felt worth while or attention catching, so.... I didn't want to just re-bucket this into my old HW Forum from years past. Well hope you'll all see something worth your while to check in time to time......
Rocco