Cant speak for all time, but in my lifetime my favorite refs have included Tony Weeks Mills Lane Kenny Bayless Richard Steele I know Bayless and steele take some heat for some of their one off calls, but overall I think they are fantastic refs. What I love about Bayless is he's wide eyed and gets up in your face and tells his instructions. Theres no way a fighter can ever claim they didn't hear him or they didn't understand him. And I actually dont hold anything against Steele for the Taylor fight. I am of the opinion that refs main job is fighter safety, not keeping tracking of the time. You can question whether or not Steele could have let Taylor continue, but the time of the stoppage is completely irrelevant
When you ref hundreds of fights you're bound to mix in some questionable calls from time to time. Mills was great too, but he let Holyfield get away with far too much in the Tyson rematch. I'm sure I could find more questionable reffing by him if I sat and thought about it long enough
Richard Steele. I still think his decision with Taylor in the Chavez fight showed how great he was.. But that is the fight which made people turn on him.
Bayless took over as Floyd's 'protector' from Joe Cortez, Weekes performance in the Ward-Kovalev 2 was atrocious he let Ward bombard Kov's testes at will & then counted out Kov on what should have been a DQ for Ward , dirtiest fighter on the block.