What boxers did Larry Holmes consciously and deliberately avoid, if any?

LOL at this being “proof” that he ducked Pinklon Thomas.

Pink’s not even mentioned.

He’s basically saying “I’m ready to retire but for the right opponent at the right price I’ll fight again.”

Doesn’t meet the standard of a duck.

Again, did anyone make an offer for him to fight Thomas? Hard to turn down a non-offer.

 

He didn't duck the stream of hypejobs that Don King was directing to him : Spinks, Ledoux, Cooney, Cobb

 

Spinks was undefeated light heavyweight champion. Lots of heavyweight champs have fought their light heavyweight counterparts.

Larry chose to fight Scott LeDoux out of compassion. Scott’s wife was battling cancer and facing massive medical bills. He was ranked. Holmes brought a title fight to his hometown to hand him a payday that allowed surgery that added years to her life. Nobody hyped Scott and Larry didn’t have to fight him but chose to for the best reasons.

Cooney was ranked No. 1 and it was a super fight moneywise.

Cobb was a legit contender. He had wins over Shavers and Bernard Mercado, a split loss to Ken Norton and a majority decision lost to Michael Dokes, all in recent memory.

 

I was actually referring to Michael's little brother. And Cobb was a massive hypejob, a close loss to an old washed-up Norton is proof to that. Cooney was barely better. Plain, sad money maximization - risk minimization.

 

It’s possible. Given that most people thought Holmes was going to murder spinks a Williams upset isn’t out of the question. I personally think the decision could have gone williams’ way in their actual meeting. It was close.

 

I'm not sure who you're answering here, since I haven't said anything about that.

But this meets the criteria of avoiding fighters, he even mentions Witherspoon and Weaver. He was ready to go on a bit further, but only against what he considered easy paydays.

So, yes, he did avoid fighters, and, no, he wouldn't take on all comers, at least not at the end of his first career. But if this means much when he was 35 and had been champion for a long time is another thing.

 

Thomas won the WBC belt by beating Witherspoon. The WBC belt was dumped by Holmes. Whom did Holmes avoid when he dumped the belt?

 

Don King, lol.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arch... World,Jose Sulaiman accepted the resignation.

Quoting Holmes, who was in a legal dispute with King: “I will fight Greg Page but I will not fight for Don King. I will offer Greg Page the same amount as Don King offered him.”

But Greg was contractually bound to King and Don wasn’t going to let his guy fight Larry without him promoting (and getting options on Larry).

This, pure and simple, is about Larry not wanting to again enslave himself to a man who took millions from him.

 

Well he certainly didn’t duck Weaver or Witherspoon, two guys he beat.

To say I’m willing to fight again under the right circumstances (pay and opponent) when he didn’t have a mandatory in front of him isn’t ducking. I don’t think there’s been any champions (at least who held their belts for any notable period fo time) who took on the top guy every single defense.

I know some people like the idea that if Fighter A exists and Fighter B exists and they don’t fight that means Fighter A ducked him (remarkably that’s never Fighter B’s responsibility somehow) but if there’s no offer of a fight turned down I don’t see how you can say a fighter ducked another. They just didn’t fight.

 

Cobb and Cooney were contenders, no matter what you think of them. Leon won an eliminator by beating Mercado so he deserved a shot.

And I don’t see why it’s sad that boxers want to get paid to work just like you and me.

 

I see pattern behavior whereas you see a perfectly valid excuse for Holmes not fighting the best of his era in each possible instance. It’s not easy to take Holmes at face value when Witherspoon and Thomas were in line. The only one that I really give him a pass for is Coetzee bc he tried to make the fight.

Edit: Thomas would’ve been a valid fight for Holmes from 82 onward. I don’t see the pass here.

 

He said plain and simple that he refused the difficult opponents and would only take on fights that were easy pay days, that's avoiding fighters and sure as hell isn't taken on all comers whether you want call it "ducking" or not.

I son't have anything more to say about this, since it only get repetitive. It's there in the quote.

 

Alright Holmes was a savvy businessman. He didn't want to lose the milking cow, which he knew he would if he kept facing strong opponents. If all he wanted was to get well paid for the fights, why did he decline fights where he would have made actually more than some others he did ?

Like many well marketed boxers of the late 70s, those guys Spinks, Cobb, Cooney, Ledoux... made names for themselves beating the corpses of legendary boxers of that great era that just finished.
There were probably tens of boxers in these years who would gotten the same flashy wins, had they have the proper investors paying to have those corpses pulled onto the ring with them to artificially build a résumé.

 

For starters, he did fight and beat Witherspoon.

That’s like Thor in the Avengers: Endgame saying Thanos has never fought him, and Rocket (Sweet Rabbit) Raccoon saying yeah he has and Thor saying ‘Well he’s never fought me twice.’

If you fought a guy, you didn’t duck him … you fought him.

The revolving door of other guys, to me it’s pretty obvious that you are taking a period of time (usually a very small window) and saying ‘Well wait, this guy was good for this very narrow period of time and Holmes should have dropped everything else and fought him right then.’ That’s with hindsight because you know when those windows were … yet in real time, at that time, the Holmes fight might have been made if those guys could have won a few fights and actually established themselves as big-fight material … but instead they got beat.

Greg Page is a good example: you can say Holmes ducked him, but Holmes said he’d fight him if Don King didn’t promote and instead Greg fought Witherspoon and lost. And then he lost to David Bey and Holmes fought Bey … so he fought the guy who beat the guy people say Holmes should have fought. If he had fought Page, he’d be ducking Bey, the guy who beat Page.

As for Thomas, you say he’s ‘valid’ from 1982 onward. In 1982, Holmes is preoccupied with making $10M to fight Gerry Cooney, his No. 1-ranked contender. Should he have ducked the top contender and biggest payday of his career to fight Pinklon, whose biggest win at that time is over Quick Tillis? LOL.

Pinklon didn’t do anything of note — anything to plant a flag as being more than just another contender like all the rest of the contenders who Larry did fight — until he beat Tim Witherspoon in the middle of 1984. There was no one clamoring for a unification because every champion of that era was a one-and-done guy who won the belt and immediately lost it. Tim did a neat trick by defending it successfully exactly one time.

So we’re into 1985 before he’s actually defended a title and said ‘hey I’m still here,’ and of course he loses it next time out.

So there’s a narrow window where he’s the other guy, for about a minute, and then he’s gone again.

I don’t see that as a duck because, again, did anyone make Holmes an offer to fight Thomas? Did he turn him down? Because Larry was the bankable guy and it’s their burden to make themselves viable enough for a big enough purse for a unification to happen.

 

What fights did he decline where he would have made more money?

He parted ways with Don King and wouldn’t sign a long-term contract with the guy. He wanted no part of being tied to a guy who stole millions from him. Do you blame him?