Did Bert Sugar respected historian (rip) get a lot of boxers wrong?

He said Pacquiao was top 15 at the minimum all time.

 

He said Whitaker is not a top 50 ATG. That doesn't mean he doesn't rate Whitaker. It means he doesn't rate him in the top 50. Which isn't really that far off or ridiculous. Whitaker's best official win is an old and very small Azumah Nelson. Whitaker's resume isn't that deep and most of the guys he fought were past prime, average guys or not really good. By the time he fought guys like DLH and Trinidad, Whitaker was already far gone too.

 

He might be. Don't get me wrong. Sugar wasn't always consistent with his own biases and he definitely knew the sport through decades of serious study. He just happened to always be crazy on top of everything else.

 

To be honest, though he was a boxing man through and through, I never once in all the years I heard him commenting on boxing heard him make an original comment. It seemed that everything he said, a lot of great quotes, was simply recycled from the original source. The man was a walking talking boxing quote machine - sadly they just weren't his own quotes.

I don't know what he said about Mayweather - but I imagine it followed the pattern of the rest of his career ie. He was likely parroting somebody else.

 

It's a great line - but like all of Sugar's best lines it was someone else's line.

 

You are spot on.

 

I also remember him saying "being a good liver is better than having one".

I lol'd.

 

I love Bert Sugar like I love Abe Simpson.

Sign on for the stories, but you really can't take it too seriously.

 

He wasnt a historian. He was just one of boxing's characters.

 

Everything judged on vision is purely speculation. Boxing is only definitive with a ko... any decision is up for interpretation

 

I don't think he was a knowledgeable on boxing.. He repeated what everyone thought about things. He was a character and had a great personality, but he was talk an if there was a big fight he picked the favorite and said simple explanations.

 

Someone (it might have been Hugh McIlvanney) once described Bert Sugar as being like "someone who stepped right out of a Damon Runyan novel."

 

I didn't know he was respected. At least on this forum every time I see him mentioned it is never anything positive. Like others have mentioned he was more a storyteller rather than a serious critic.

 

Like any human, Bert wasn't infallible, and in some cases he was a bit too married to his own preconceived narratives, but he did know quite a lot about the sport and for the most part had a good mind for analyzing it.

 

Yep he got many many boxers wrong. He was a totally biased US centric historian.