To be fair, I said borderline top 5. But to be more exact: PBO rating was #6 Ring rating was #3 TBRB rating was #4 Now I realise many of us have our own personal rankings, but that's why I said borderline top 5.
Then why have rankings and champion. Who you beat does matter on a boxers resume. This isn't about give credit for a win. The win belongs to the boxer's record and nothing takes away from that but are you going to seriously argue on here that that is all that should matter? Well it does matter. Beating up mediocre opponents to pad a record will come out when people look at your record. If you think it is so easy to nit pick then why not counter some of those arguments?
Give the man credit for what? And why? If it doesn't matter who you beat or what form they were in at the time why have a concept of credit at all?
I'll give the man Wilder some ****ing credit for beating Jason Gavern and Ding a Ling Wilson. He stopped both guys in under four, and Wilson's only ever been stopped nine times in twenty one losses. Yeah, he was old and washed up and never any good in the first place, but he was still a damn good fighter at the time. As for those disparaging Wilder's wins against Matthew Greer and Nicolai (the real SNV) Firtha, it's easy to pick holes in someone's resume. What matters is what I arbitrarily think of them to suit my argument. And they were both damn good fighters as well.
Malik Scott is one of the most technically sound heavyweights I've seen in recent years. Didn't stop him being an epic dive bomber when he stepped up to the big stage. Are you one of those fighters who feted Adrian Broner as the next P4P king when he was coming up the rankings?
OK, since you've just massively wet the bed and taken it back to resumes, let's pick apart Ortiz's. Jennings (Old Man Rivas KOed him with eye issues, slow as molasses Joyce took him to syrup school, Mike T-Rex Perez drew with him but got a dodgy decision go against him on a points deduction) Thompson (got outhustled by Chisora KO victim Takam, outboxed by the stiff mummy Pulev, lost to dive bomber Scott, a hundred and four years old) Scott (total dive merchant, got KOed (properly) by Chisora, wet the bed and ran a mile) Hammer (just KOed by hands of soap Hughie Fury, nuff said) Errr... really struggling to find a fifth guy to make fun of.
I didn't take it back to resumes. I was calling him out for changing his criteria when he compared Ortiz to Solis. Read properly before you start chatting ****. How do you criticize Ortiz's resume and then call him poor man's Solis in your next post? And then you act like I moved the goal posts. Try re-reading your posts before you post them. If you're calling Ortiz poor man's Solis based on skills then you have no clue wtf you're talking about. You clearly don't know what technically sound means. Do you want me to name all the fighters that I thought would make it far based on boxing skills? I can name at least 5 for every 1 AB. Skills matter and just because you can't see **** it doesn't mean its not there. Just because in some cases skills are not enough to take a fighter to the top, it doesn't mean it's irrelevant. Educate yourself.
The saying you can only beat who is front of you does deserve some consideration in the HW division. It's not like they can move down in weight in most cases to fight better skilled opposition. But the notion of you can only fight who is front of you should only apply IF you actually make an effort to fight the very best the division has to offer which Wilder never did make that effort. So the division was both weak AND, Wilder made it a point to avoid the best there was anyways. And as HW goes usually the division is relatively weak. We could get into the weeds about NFL, NBA stealing talent and old school training methods being lost. And yadda yadda yadda. Not saying they dont have merit, but intrinsically speaking HW is typically weaker because the talent pool is shallow. In modern times a natural HW is typically 6'5" or taller barefoot. Less than 1 percent of adult males on the planet are that big. So there isnt the same pool of talent. Why is 147 and 160 usually strong historically? Because everybody is 5'9" or 5'10".
Yeah, this has been said so many times it doesn't really need to be said again, but Wilder's resume isn't very good. He beat two ranked fighters, Stiverne, who wasn't really very good, and Luis Ortiz, who was probably quite a good fighter but certainly an ageing one. Other than that, his defences of his strap were pretty embarrassing, very poor, and the proportion of good defences to bad ones is awful keeping in mind that the first Stiverne fight was for the vacant belt - not a defence. When he defended against Stiverne years later, he was busted and unranked. Really, what happened was Wilder came to the title before he was really ready to do the necessary thing with it and so he didn't. He was learning on the job while holding the title and that's always a pity. Most of all, there is a HUGE gap between the best fighter he beat - Old Ortiz - and Fury. So we don't really know how he would cope with the fighters in between - guy like Joshua, Povetkin, even Whyte, Wilder came nowhere near any of these guys. Ortiz might be his roof.
People can try to slight Wilder all they want I've had fun doing it myself but ultimately that man has a historic rocket right hand, that is undeniable. A man is still a man even if he's a bum off the streets, they all take some knocking out. Wilder's career has been mismanaged really. Why was he flying to Russia to fight Povo? stupidity. Ortiz fights were the best move he made. Ducking Wlad was probably the right move. Should have got Whyte under his belt at all costs.
I think you don't recall povetkin failed a drug test a week out from the fight. Wilder had already flown out to ruski.
No mate he tested positive for meldonium a recently banned over the counter medication in eastern europe which wasnt proven to have any performance enhancing properties. WADA had set an allowed limit for athletes for this drug as it takes a long time to get out of your system. Povetkin was something like 30 times under the allowed Olympic limit. Wilder never got to Russia, he was in the UK and went home thus forcing the wbc hand to cancel the fight. No rules were broken, wilder chickened out, povetkin then would have killed him.