Most Natural Talent ?

This doesn't make sense...First, you don't know what a single one of these people were like, or what skills and abilities they had before they became famous, much less what they were about before somebody taught them how to box. Second, everything can be learned, if not taught. I think that if you were able to sit down and talk to Sam Langford, he would tell you that he learned as he went on.

 

Wilfred Benitez...A pure and natural talent.

 

James Toney.

 

robinson, dempsey, duran come to mind first

 

From what I've read, Ezzard Charles.

Everyone who knew him as a child said he was born to fight.

He was whipping teenagers when he was 8 or 9 years old.

 

Roy jones robinson leonard ali in that order

 

Toney whitiker just behind them

 

I always thought Roy Jones had the talent to be the best ever. It never really panned out like that but man, his talent was something

 

Roy Jones physical gifts allowed him to pull of things nobody else could do, i dont think hes the H2H monster some people think he is but in therms of pure raw talent is up there with best of them if not the best.

 

Bang on the money.

If ever a guy was born to fight its Roberto. As a kid he was fighting sailors in the docks for money to feed his siblings. This guy could fight, box, brawl, counter punch, you name it he could do it in a boxing ring.

I'd go so far as to say that the ONLY thing he could do was become a pugilist, either that or an illiterate street urchin lurching from one problem to another.

 

Its hard to pick one
Roberto Duran
Roy Jones
Ray Robinson
Ray Leonard
Benny Lynch
Willie Pep
Lots more
If i had to chose it would be Duran.

 

^Truth.

Most of this talk of "natural talent" is a crock of ****.

 

Muhammad Ali. I remember Roger Mayweather saying something about it.

 

Benitez is the one who springs to mind, taking into account the age at which he became an elite fighter, and his notoriously lax training habits.

Hamed is another. According to Ingle's apocryphal anecdotes, he first saw a tiny Asian kid in a playground fighting off an undefined number of larger kids (it's probably upto 20 when he tells it these days). Regardless of the truth behind this, by all accounts he was a freakish natural talent, which again is backed up by world class performances with a poor training ethic.

In reality though, there will be some incredible natural talents who never amount to anything due to lacking the drive required to compete at the highest level. The greatest natural talent in boxing history is probably someone none of us have heard of.

 

Rjj