Who would you rate higher : Tim Witherspoon or Jim Jeffries ?

Call me a hipster, but I reckon 'spoon.

 

on resume you have to go Jeffries...even if he didnt fight a great deal...he was still the "true" heavyweight champion..if we want to start talking head to head...well...who knows....

 

Tubbs, Smith, Page and Bruno are superior H2H heavyweights than any middleweight Jeffries beat. And the WBA World Heavyweight Title is superior to the White North American Title

 

Double hipster.


Spoon had great tools, and like Jeffries he was moved quickly. In fact, I rate Witherpsoon as a top 25 heavyweight in a head to head sense. However, he never put it all together for a sustained run.



Jeffries should rate much higher, because from 1899-1905, there was little doubt he was the best heavyweight around.

 

H2H: Witherspoon

Historical Ranking: Jeffries

Jeffries was a dominant force and fought and beat all of the best avaliable fighters in his respective era, some of them ATGs, however the quality of some of these wins is diminshed by the fact the best fighters he fought were usually either very old, inactive, weighing significantly less or Jeffries had to get his face smashed in before winning or a combination of all of them. Witherspoon certainly didn't clean out his era like Jeffries or be the dominant champ but he fought in a much stronger era and some of his wins were against H2H monster in comparison to Jeffries opposition. I'd pick 'Spoons top 3 wins to beat Jeffries top 3 and i'd favour 'Spoon to beat Jeffries himself. Still I stand by what I said above.

 

It is a totaly unsustainable position to be honest.

You are comparing a footnote to a legend.

 

If you watch the small amount of Jeffries on film you have to say he looks worse than the average 5 year old on his second boxing lesson. On that basis I'd go with Spoon

 

That's hyperbole.
We can make Witherspoon into a legend too. He's more than a footnote.

If we brought Jeffries' opposition into the 1980s and matched them with Tim Witherspoon, I suspect most of them would be flattened in quick time.

 

For his time he was the best, but like most sports boxing got better. Being the best in his day consisted of beating an old middleweight and an old inactive cruserweight. The talent pool and quality of opposition and how hard it was to become the best in the world increased exponentially to what it was in those semi pro days

Maybe Jeffries was part of upping the standards of the brawn physicality in heavyweight boxing, so in that sense he has his place in boxing history

 

Hipster.


It does not matter if Witherspoon would have bested Jeffries (he probably would have) or that he looked better on film. Fact is, ´Spoon was not anywhere the best in his time. Jeffries was by some distance. Jeff beat a few atgs and cleaned house. Nothing ´Spoon did compares. You might call Jeff´s opponents mws or cws but that doesn´t change that they were the best around. Jeff beat the best available, you can´t ask for more. The worst you can say is that he ducked Johnson for a few months. Big deal, there were plenty of worse ducks by greater fighters - see SRR-Burley or Pac-Mayweather/Mayweather-Pac or Jones-DM.

Sorry, if you think Witherspoon is greater you should have your brain examined. If you think, he´s better fair enough. For me that´s nearly impossible to determine due to the different rules. It was a different sport then.

 

An open ended question with no criteria on which to rate.

Surely, for greatness and historical importance, it is Jeffries. That requires no supposition or imagination.

Head to head is another question and one rife with complications such as which rule set, would Jeffries get to train under a modern trainer, which gloves, how many rounds... etc.

 

I'm going with Witherspoon, but it's not hard to say Jeffries, either, undefeated until com ing out of retirement for Johnson.

 

Lots of fighters were 'just a contender'. Some of them you would rank over champions. On the whim of the judges Witherspoon could have been champion too, not at all unreasonably. He was denied a rematch at Holmes and then went on to beat the fighter Holmes refused to fight.
If this happened to a fighter back in 1900 I'm sure you'd be the first to glorify it.