Boxrec

Introduction

BoxRec is an online record keeper compiling data about past and present professional boxers and their bouts. It was inaugurated in May 2000 with 20,000 bouts. With nearly 100 editors representing 38 countries, it now has data on over 2.1 million bouts, making it the premier boxing record resource.

Why Use Boxrec?

Simply put, Wikipedia but for boxing. To be more specific, BoxRec helps the boxing community, including promoters, managers, coaches, boxers, fans, and journalists accomplish myriad objectives. From a fighting perspective, it helps people identify potential match-ups and current, past performances by peers and potential opponents, and timing of events. Importantly, since the records are public, it helps increase transparency and accuracy when accomplishing these tasks. As a corollary, it keeps accountable the business people who are too often charged with corruption.

Fans benefit by staying on top of their favorite fighters’ records, discovering new fighters through the ranking system or upcoming matches and current champions lists, and accessing information that goes beyond community favorites and popular reputation when making bets. Further, if fans are interested, the site provides historical information on events, scorecards, refs, bios, and more. Journalists benefit for many of these same reasons.

Features and Amenities

Inaugurated in May 2000 with a database of 20,000 bouts, BoxRec.com (Boxing Records Archive) has grown by leaps and bounds, with a million bouts having been entered by 2005, and currently over 2.1 million bouts to date. Its world-wide volunteer editors scour magazines, record books, scrapbooks, and newspaper microfilm, attend boxing shows, and maintain contact with various boxing commissions throughout the world, to continually add old and new bouts. Presently they insert an average of 2,000 “new” entries each week into the BoxRec database. (The editors believe that well under 50% of those bouts that can be documented have been entered so far into the BoxRec database; not to mention those undocumented bouts of the past that are forever lost.)

Unlike boxing record sources of the past, BoxRec.com actually cites the exact venues, referees, judges, official weights, knockout times, promoters, and descriptions of many bouts. However, the BoxRec database does not include amateur, bare-knuckle (pre-Marquess of Queensberry Rules) or exhibition bouts, although such matches might be mentioned in the boxer’s BoxRec Wikipedia biography.

BoxRec also has a pound-for-pound list that many people consider to be the most objectively accurate list. Although the list uses a sophisticated data-driven approach to rank all-time and current fighters, it may not sufficiently consider innate ideas like social, economic, and political state of the sport. You ca read our analysis about BoxRec’s list here.