Your twelve favourite fighters of all time - but read the OP

Fair enough, i'll give it a spin.

01 - Charley Burley. Burley was the first "mysterious" fighter I ever got into and he is the guy who got me into deep dives, trying to learn about fighters as historical figures and share that information. He's still probably the definitive fighter for me in terms of his "thinking" style, of being smart. He was also enormously committed to a style and I love and respect that. He did it right rather than changed up for cash.

02 - Midget Wolgast. Just genius, different, a fighter that found another path. There's something fascinating about dead-end technical fighters, guys who due to physical and mental make-up mined a dead end in boxing technique that was never revived. Roy Jones, Jimmy Wilde, Midget, these guys fought in a style that was unrepeatable and where guys who tried got Ko'd. Also absolutely fearless and would fight anyone, all the way up through the weights.

03 - Juan Manuel Marquez. This is a guy who, like Burley, found the "right" way to do things, ducked by Morales and Barrera when all that was going on, toiled in obscurity, then landed the dance partner everyone wanted for making money and got routinely mauled on the scorecards in matching him. I thought he won II and III. But Marquez was too furious to quit and too furious to keep to the style he'd nurtured so he changed up to become more popular and eventually to get that win over Manny, which was as astonishing a KO as I've ever seen. Survived mis-management, survived Pacquiao, it's one of the great arcs of our sport and his first victory of Juan Diaz remains one of my very favourite fights.

04 - Roman Gonzalez. He's kind of ended up on the wrong side of history a bit and it's ending with a whimper rather than a bang but for a while there he was a monster. Eight punch combos that were pure liquid, a puncher below 115, rather terrifying. Impossible to run from and almost impossible to out-fight. As complete a fighter as has practised in my lifetime.

05 - Holman Williams. Another one who would fight anybody, another kind of mysterious guy, another one who put his style through some changes, in this case due to bad hands. Crazy resume, brilliant general.

06 - Joe Louis. Nobody did it better probably from a technical punching perspective. It's the power, but the way he generates it never fails to impress me. Doesn't matter how many times you see it.

07 - Dick Tiger. He was unbrawlable, don't you know.

08 - Chucho Castillo. "He would fight a bull with a fork."

09 - Naoya Inoue. Been obsessed with this guy since his second fight when he was an emaciated light-fly. Recent spate of believers in Doinaire is weird, Inoue will clatter him. Then on to better and possibly bigger things.

10 - Tyson Fury. Marmite where this guy is concerned, but I love him, love the background story, love the lunatic moments in the ring, love that his preposterous stylings are finding their way to the top of the division. Been a bit of a bumfight recently, but the cut will heal up, he'll fight Wilder again and then we'll find out once and for all presumably.

11 - Oleksander Usyk. I followed Usyk from the ams and it's been an absolute delight to watch his special kind of boxing florurish all the way up to heavyweight. I predicted he'd be the guy to beat AJ, that's obviously been done already, but I still think there's an opportunity for the guy to make an enormous splash. It helps that he's really funny.

12 - Ivan Calderon. I know how it sounds, but his is one of the few career sets I own. He was just a Rolls Royce of a fighter, brilliant little operator, so hard to hit, so hard to hurt. Then he just went wildly off a cliff and that's when I knew I loved him because it just broke my heart.

 

Well this was kind of actually the point of this thread, to find some other ideas where i'll do a delete on any wayward posts. Maybe we'll do twelve favourite fights next.