29 years ago today: James Nathaniel "Lights Out" Toney vs. David Stephen "TNT" Tiberi

Looks like someone was trying to give Toney every benefit of the doubt, which of course is what a garbage judge would do. When judges have to go back and alter their tally they are trying to give the victory to someone.

I hate blaming this on weight drain. Toney had a history at every weight of being extremely lazy and not throwing enough. He got outworked. In my opinion it wasnt the first time and wouldnt be the last. Toney looked great when he was motivated but he looked ordinary when he wasnt and he wasnt exactly easy to motivate.

 

All of those (except one) had Toney winning fairly wide, too, but fair enough. I should state that I’ve still never even seen the fight, so I wasn’t gonna chime in if not for your post piquing my curiosity.

 

Im sorry, Toney loss this fight.

 

Exactly, it was his fault!

 

Tiberi was the boss throughout the majority of the fight. It wasn't razor thin. It was close but clear.

 

Maybe it's just the way I think and view the fight game, but I don't see why this is some collosal black mark on Toney's record. Everybody knows he's inconsistent. Nobody's denying it, this fight is clearly one of those instances where he didn't give a **** and paid the price. Thing is though, is that Toney wanted a rematch, he didn't get it. When he let his hands go, Toney was clearly the more impressive fighter. His head-to-head stature shouldn't fall because he didn't beat Tiberi clearly, because by that logic, he should never had a prayer of beating Barkley, let alone Jirov, McCallum, etc.

Look, I'm not saying that this is a good thing. Or that it should be ignored, I'm saying that in debates revolving Toney at his best, it's pretty hard to argue that this fight plays more significance to his ranking than his fights with Holyfield, Nunn or McCallum.

 

The whole “at their best” thing can be flat nonsense, though. Mainly because of fighters like Toney. If they were consistently inconsistent at every juncture of their career, it needs to be taken into account in their ranking. Same with their head to head prowess, as that kind of flaw can be taken advantage of the same as any technical or physical deficiency.

If a guy is the best fighter of all time for 5 rounds and then turns into Reggie Strickland after that, we can’t just not hold it against him that his stamina was horse ****. Otherwise he wins every hypothetical because we’re imagining the fighters “at their best”.

Stamina and mentality are just as big a part of boxing as technical skill. You can’t fault one but not the other.

 

Tiberi beat Toney, and it was clear to me.

Hell, even Toney admits it.

 

I wasn't arguing it shouldn't negatively affect his ranking, it should. It shouldn't any more than the Griffin/Thazdi losses should, but it shouldn't do anything but take away from Toney.

But even still, I don't see how fighters like Toney make that nonsense. If anything, they're the guys who make it easy. Toney clearly wasn't at his best here, whereas he clearly was vs Mike McCallum. Hence the reason he could beat Mike McCallum, yet shouldn't have beaten Dave Tiberi. That doesn't seem complicated or nonsense. It seems quite easy to differentiate between the performances IMO. Being inconsistent is absolutely not as easy to take advantage of as a technical or physical disadvantage/flaw. I don't see how you can take advantage of an inconsistency on a night where Toney is at his absolutely apex. That weakness isn't there. It'd be like arguing that somebody could beat the Louis of the Schmeling fight, but no others. It's like alright cool, basically, they can't beat Joe Louis.

Toney's stamina here was ****, no argument there. But it wasn't vs Barkley, Jirov, McCallum, Nunn, Johnson or others. If you're taking the version who was clearly at his best, compared to this one, then stamina or being out-worked shouldn't be an issue. And I'd say he was as tough mentally as he was physically. He was one stubborn ****. Short of believing that taking a fighter at their best is a myth, I don't see how you can hold this fight against him in a mythical match up vs an all-time great middleweight. It's not like this version of Toney would turn up for Marvin Hagler.

I don't see anybody downgrading other notoriously inconsistent performers. Giardello, Emile Griffith and Jake LaMotta are doing fine, so are Kid Gavilan and Mickey Walker. Although there's somebody else is who gets a (deserved) hard time. Bennie Briscoe

 

Im not really sure what the point of these two posts are. IB came on here trying to convince that Toney didnt win a gift against Tiberi. He did. If Toney gets pushback on his legacy its exactly because of the fact that despite his obvious flaws and his inconsistence his deluded fans think he was this H2H monster. This post was a perfect example of the revisionism around his career, hence the comment by another poster about IB having on his "Toney Goggles". Its not like this fight was an outlier in Toney's career or even at this time which saw Toney come from behind to win his title and win some of his most impressive victories on paper by margins so narrow they could have easily gone the other way.

 

The point of my post was to give my own thoughts on the decision and the fight. They were challenged, so I defended them.

And you don't think a fight which he should've lost vs somebody so unheralded and unknown that you couldn't even bet on him, and somebody who couldn't beat Tony Thornton and never scored a KO victory was an anomaly? There's a world of difference between having a close, either-way type fight with Mike McCallum, or coming from behind to KO the P4P #3 in the world and being the benefactor of a robbery vs a featherfisted nobody, albeit a damn determined one.

I'm sure if this fight wasn't an outlier at that time in his career, you'll be able to offer up other examples of robberies vs nobodies he had at middleweight.