Is roman gonzales that good or

You can just look at how he fights and you know you're looking at something special, nothing to do with any talent pool shortage at lower weights.

 

Prefight excuse duly noted.:deal

 

Or, y'know...they could be pretty good. Tete and Mthalane are very good.

 

It seems a lot of people don't actually WATCH fighters to decide how good they are these days.

 

It's a combo of talent and lack of depth in the extreme low weight divisions.
To be the no 1 strawweight or light flyweight in Europe for instance, all you have to do is make the weight and make it into the ring in that condition.
But if you look at Gonzo, you can't deny the talent he has. Maybe looks can be deceiving due to the quality of the opposition, but he really seems to be the real deal.

 

No shortage of talent...

Takayama is among the most highly relevant strawweights of the era

Niida was the solid #1 strawweight at the time

Estrada lost to Roman immediately before booming to the big time

Rodriguez lost to Roman immediately before becoming a unified titlist himself

Yaegashi is a known good fighter, been in a FOTY, who was legit lineal Fly king

Edgar Sosa was faded and is one of those dudes who you can forget about but had a truly great career and Brian Viloria, should he defeat him, will be a big notable name with a similar description I've vaguely used here for Sosa
--------

Plus if you follow 115 and below you would see that a lot of his cupcake and stay-busy wins are at least against highly known journeymen.

 

I was just making a parody out of what 'certain' people say about Caucasian fighters in the lower weight classes :yep

Those fighters are good though :deal

 

I know, I was just kidding :yep

 

Good fighter but mosquito fighting is a tad lame.

 

It doesn't matter that there aren't as many flyweights as middleweights overall when the talent at the top is as great as it is and has been the last several years at flyweight. Despite the prevalence of mismatches in boxing elite fighters rarely fight guys that would be worse than the best 30 or so in the division.

 

You could say the same thing about the best Asian middleweight or larger, who wouldn't be able to test and develop himself till he gets beyond his domestic level.

 

he is amazing and fluid so natural just a beauty to watch

 

Technically this. Much more diversity among this group. Of course, that is pfp, taking size off the table as "talent".

 

Good thing boxing has weight classes not height classes then.

 

There are no "height classes", because weight is more important, but height is implicitly regulated by them. It becomes virtually impossible for someone to be average heighted and fight at Chocolito's weight. It takes a real genetic freak like Hearns to be a tall man and be able to not be too drained to fight at the lower weight classes.

Anyway, his point would have been better served by saying less than 1% of grown men are 112 pounds or lighter.

Edit: Actually, the 1% mark seemed real low to me, so I tried to look it up online. Graphs I saw suggested about 2-3% of American males are 5'3 or below.