Technological advancements and drastic changes in media consumption help boxing appear novel, but boxing today faces many of the same challenges, criticisms and even praises as it did 100 years ago.

In this century flashback, we take a look at the issue of The Ring on newsstands in the dead of summer, July of 1926, as the U.S. suffered through a heatwave and enjoyed its waning time with a titan like Jack Dempsey as heavyweight champion.

One would be hard pressed to consider boxing a well-developed sport in the 1920s given the benefit of hindsight. Many states in the U.S. still lacked infrastructure to actually provide officials and oversee fights, local police were still involving themselves in stopping bouts from time to time and the alphabet organizations of the day, the New York State Athletic Commission (NYSAC) and National Boxing Association (NBA), were only a few years old. Yet veterans of boxing circles still pined for the days of yore, as they do now.

Like many other covers of The Ring in the magazine’s early years, a fighter known only by the weirdest history freaks donned the July issue’s cover. Phil McGraw, a lightweight originally from Greece who fought out of Detroit, received the honors after he defeated reigning junior lightweight champion Tod Morgan in a non-title bout early in 1926.

A time capsule in the table of contents reveals one of the biggest and most lamentable changes in boxing over the last century: bygone hubs of activity and local fistic communities. New York City and Chicago were openly considered the country’s (if not the sport’s) foremost boxing centers, though now-forgotten fighting cities like Scranton, Buffalo, Erie and others were a regular focus of updates. These days, apart from a handful of fighters, it’s New York, Las Vegas or bust.

Billy Gibson, a manager known then for handling the likes of Benny Leonard and future heavyweight champ Gene Tunney, wrote a guest column listing the greatest fighters he’d ever seen, division by division:

Interestingly, five of the listed greats from the “original” eight divisions would still be considered all-time greats today. Wilde, Attell, Leonard, Ketchel and Dempsey are all still frequently listed among the greatest of their respective divisions after all this time. While the years have a way of lending perspective to such arguments, all can be seen fighting in footage online and all five greats, some retired for many years, fought with styles that would hold up perfectly fine in the 21st century.

The development of boxing from a sport where milling and blindly brawling were favored over stylish flourishes to a far more nuanced endeavor was still fresh in the 1920s. A fan needn’t be elderly to recall the days of 45-round championship fights with gloves that looked like small patches of fabric, or even just a few years earlier, when prize fights could be chased off to a makeshift ring on a riverbank or waterway that law enforcement couldn’t touch. In that context, the rapid evolution of the sport may have felt dizzying.

As always, writers fended off the fear of an unknown future with humor. Jack Dempsey, heavyweight champion, celebrity and icon, hadn’t fought since his wild two-round battle against Luis Ángel Firpo in 1923. Even so, Dempsey commanded headlines with everything he did. Unfortunately he also got attention for what he didn’t do, and his inactivity aggravated the masses as he starred in a number of motion pictures.

Dan Daniel, one of the The Ring’s original writers who stayed with the magazine for decades, wrote in prose about “That Dempsey Affair”:

“Dempsey will fight Wills; Dempsey will fight Tunney; Dempsey will fight anybody; Dempsey will fight nobody.”

Nearly half of Daniel’s funny entries were about either Dempsey or the rest of the heavyweight division, which, he said, “provide[s] most of the comedy relief in boxing.” And indeed nothing has changed in that regard as Oleksandr Usyk’s gift of heavyweight clarity turned into farce upon facing a kickboxer and promptly vacating the belts, leaving the division in disarray once more.

On the opposite end of the divisional spectrum, the flyweights suffered as boxing did in the wake of its champion Pancho Villa dying following an operation in 1925, just as Harry Greb and Tiger Flowers would later in 1926. Fidel LaBarba, a 20-year-old flyweight sensation, captured a portion of the title not long after Villa’s death. In July of 1926, The Ring published an article penned by LaBarba recounting his triumph, and the fighter would go on to retire in order to attend Stanford University the following year. The former champion later became a sportswriter and screenwriter.

The Ring’s founder and editor Nat Fleischer often happily offered his own perspective on boxing’s current events, and they were generally a guide to figuring out the most important issues plaguing the sport or propelling it forward.

This time, Fleischer spoke about Benny Leonard and the lightweight legend’s recent retirement and openly warned against making a comeback. “The Ghetto Wizard” predictably staged a comeback years later that ended in heartbreak. The Ring’s boss also decried the politics he said were ruining boxing in California, as the state’s commissioners reportedly sabotaged the reputation of the sport in certain jurisdictions, dismissing their fights as fixes.

Lastly, Fleischer praised the leadership of New York in the world of boxing and lent some ink to an up-and-comer named Ruby Goldstein, who would make waves first as a fighter and later as a famous referee.

Writer Francis Albertanti fielded dozens of reader questions on the back half of the issue, which made for unintentional comedy. Fans from all over the U.S. and a few in Canada asked trivia questions that could be easily answered with BoxRec or an internet search today, but would have required specific knowledge at the time. They also asked about mythical matchups, fighter measurements and even boxing advice. Most questions were answered bluntly and without much refinement.

One reader gave their own dimensions and asked for help getting into boxing. Albertanti replied: “Join a gym where there is a competent instructor.” Many other questions received a simple “Yes.” or “No.” despite many requiring elaboration, though the inclusion of such a section clearly indicated fan intrigue and The Ring’s interest in being a source of information and, as it called itself then, the “World’s Foremost Boxing Magazine.”

If one sentence from the month could truly reveal the unchanging mindset of most boxing fans, perhaps it would be from the last column of the July 1926 issue, Arthur Lumley’s “Training — Then and Now”:

“There is a great deal of difference between training boxers for matches today from the old days of genuine prizefighting.”

In truth, the difference wasn’t that vast. Fighters in the 1800s ran and jogged for endurance, worked with weight to increase strength, sparred and watched their diets. They did the same in the 1920s, and fighters are still doing all of those things. Naturally elements of the training changed as awareness of nutrition and different training programs expanded, but the mechanics are now what they were then.

Boxing is not a monolith. It shifts as the world does, and a series of words, sentences or even all the magazines in the world cannot hope to fully define it. But the century, and more, of The Ring simply reminds us, though boxing, how far and how long the journey has been.