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

Lets say that Withgerspoon had got the nod over Holmes. He would just have lost the title very quickly, and been remembered as the Marvin Hart of that era.

 

You have Witherspoon at 14???????????????????????

I just don't get it!

 

It's only a fairy tale if you remove the concept of greatness from that of the championship, which seems like mental gymnastics to me. And even if you figure in the color line in some deconstruction, I would like to know who the contemporaries thought might offer Jeffries a legitimate challenge during his "real" career.

 

Jeffries was portrayed as great, practically unbeatable. He erased the division in his own era. Greatness is not an abstract concept when it is attached to a championship regime. We can see he beat all the top contenders, mostly in emphatic fashion. We can point to these results as concrete experiential reality.

What is abstract is imagining the outcome of two elite level fighters who have never fought. It requires a great amount of supposition which is the fertile soil for bias.

 

I was not impressed with Witherspoon, he was an underachiever and most of his big wins were close decisions, many felt he beat Holmes and that was his 16th fight but he never did really step out and impress. Jeffries was dominant in his era but not sure how far off the 2 decades were.

I do rate Jeffries much higher I am not sure if Tim makes my top 50

 

There was about a year or so time span where Jeffries could've fought Johnson... but besides that, he pretty much fought the best around.

 

Did I see someone had Spoon at 14.. Please tell me this was a joke.. If not, can we get him banned from this section and relegated to the General forum? Please?

 

I think the major points have been made.

"Jeffries dominated an era, while Witherspoon was just a contender"

Janitor puts his finger on the bottom line here.

In terms of historical greatness, this is no contest.
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What about head to head?

For me it is a meaningless criteria, and becoming more meaningless year by year as the sizes of modern athletes explode.

Probably any ordinary, even losing, modern NFL team could beat the 1960's Packers who won five championships (and whose largest player was 260 lbs) and any ordinary, even losing, NBA team could handle the Celtics of the 1950's & 1960's who won 11 titles in 13 years (and whose tallest regular was Bill Russell, at about 6' 9.5").

A criteria which places mediocrity in one's own time over greatness in the distant past is useless to me.