He was both a classless bully and a great fighter who lost the hunger. He beat good fighters and he beat some of them easily. He met Barrera and MAB knocked the ego and any love he had for the sport right out of him.
I would put him in the top 15 featherweights of all time, and excluding Sanchez, would give him an outside punchers chance against anyone else.
About half as good as he thought he was which meant he was very good indeed. Great puncher, unique style but it was always only a matter of time before he came undone with his attitude and style as he came up in class. Barrera was the only real prime A grader he fought and he humiliated him (revisionist history has some people saying that fight was close but if you watched it in real time it was a whipping). Still he was exciting and compelling for a time and briefly the best in his division.
To be fair, I was a little too flattering there. I can’t see him ever beating Barrera. He was though IMO the featherweight for the nineties, but would have found the opposition much stiffer in the decades before.
Underrated nowadays and quite over hated, never gets his fair show of going 36(32)-1 The Naseem against Barrera wasnt the peak form Hamed, imo.
Somewhere in the middle. He was a fast guy with huge power and an extremely unusual style. His unorthodox style could play in his favor since it’s hard to predict and prepare for, but it also went against him as he broke a lot of fundamental rules. There was talk that Hamed was enjoying the good life too much by the time he fought Barrera and had declined from his peak in the mid 90s with Brendan Ingle. While he may have been better back then, I don’t think it would have made much of a difference against Barrera. Hamed’s defensive flaws were still on display back then, such as the Medina fight. I think Barrera was just better and would have been able to exploit those openings.
Easily the most overrated fighter I have ever seen. His resume consists of has beens and fellows that were nothing special in the 1st place. He fought in a ridiculously weak featherweight era. He had great power and was unorthodox but his fans make him out to be this h2h monster which he clearly wasn't. He feasted on guys that fell into his trap as he psyched them out into getting into brawls with him. The 1st time he actually fought a great fighter that was close to his prime, he was exposed for being the limited moron with the tiny boxing IQ. He got out at at the right time because Pacquiao, Morales and Marquez would have made him look as stupid as MAB did
This is about right. Powerful, exciting to watch but not as great as he dreamt he was. Once he lost, that was it. Ego goes bang.
Tom Johnson was the stiffest opposition and he wasn’t all that at all, other than that it was old guys coming back (feather was a young man’s div) from losses or small guys coming up in weight, or both. He threw uppercuts from out of range almost and from some angles that were unexpected. He was good, he could hit.