Fury's resume isn't any better than Chris Byrd's

I would swap out the McCline of Purity for Byrd. I would swap out the Chisora win for Hide and K Johnson for Vitali but overall I agree with your picks.

Now Fury's top five names in your opinion are?

 

Neither I am. That a reason why he's isn't named in the quote. Let's move on from that point. Who are you top 5 wins for Fury and to be fair to him list each name only once so he has five different names.
I've got it.

Wlad who was 39 but still champion
Wider who Fury beat 3 times but was down in the fights 4 times.
Whyte
Chrisora
Wallin - Who left Fury face a mess.

Not a bad top 5 but clearly not as good as Chris Byrd. If Fury looses his stock takes a tumble. If he fights and beat Usyk it will rise up but he has to win it.

 

I know.

It was me making the point that you are the one confusing the two.

Wlad always did. If he couldn't keep his opponent at bay with his jab or smother him, in the event that his jab failed, he was useless.

Fury took both of those options away from Wlad.

I didn't say that you had. The point was that you hadn't really factored in Fury's contribution to the fight at all. Even now, you can only acknowledge that he was a part of the reason. But I am not sure if you know what part he played, how he played it and the extent of the impact Fury had on the outcome.

Likewise, while we can reasonably speculate that Wlad's age influenced his performance against Fury, you can't really measure with any confidence, to the point of 'knowing', the extent to which this had an impact on the outcome.

OK - So, now you're saying Wlad was always gun-shy; not just in the Fury bout?

In which case, how do you balance the gun-shy version of Wlad during his expansive reign against the gun-shy version of Wlad that Fury faced?

I mean what are these presumably prior "gunshy tendencies" when set against the Fury/Wlad gun-shyness?

Could Fury not have "exploited a flaw that was already there" at any time, during Wlad's reign?

How do you measure and express the value of the respective gun-shyness, in a way that I can take your point seriously?

This is the stage at which I have to ask you: What the heck are you talking about?

Show me where I have conveyed any such "narrative that Wladmir had no trouble opening up for 99% of his career and then suddenly turned into crap for just one fight."

Show me where I equated "Wladmir's safety first style to being gunshy and insisting there were numerous fights where he hesitated and was gunshy."

What numerous fights? I provided one example (Wlad /Chambers) and mentioned another fight (Wlad/Ibragimov), in which Wlad could be viewed as hesitant and explicitly stated:

"

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"

At no time in this thread have I referred to Wlad as having been gun-shy. Rather, I provided alternative "

This content is protected

" ("

This content is protected

" and "

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", which had been associated with Wlad for years and could be related to his hesitancy.

Yes. Yours.

Below is what you wrote in response to my point that "

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":

You are literally expressing "The reason" for Wlad's hesitancy, as being a psychological condition associated with PTSD, as though you know this to be the case.

So - yeah - you probably do need to have some level of expertise in a field related to psychiatry or psychology and have conducted an examination, some way beyond simply watching a boxing match, in order to have formed this hypothesis...

...But it isn't a hypothesis, is it? Because, as it stands, it is an unfalsifiable flight of fancy you just pulled out of nowhere.

You have an opinion and that’s fine. But it is just an opinion.
I disagree with your opinion.
That doesn't make you wrong.
It doesn’t make me wrong.
It doesn’t make me a troll.
I haven’t been contradictory.
If you find any of this confusing then I suggest you attempt to unravel the knot you’ve tied yourself in and simply accept these obvious truths.

 

You should probably clarify this statement you made earlier then:

"

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"

 

Unless the opponent was a complete No Hoper WK usually stunk the joint out, he effectively had to fight in Europe only because his US Tv/PPV/HBO outings were a disaster.

 

Also so far Fury has not quit against a C level Journey man(Purrity), was not walked down by a Punchbag(Brewster) and was not blitzed by a Flash in the Pan Golfer (Sanders).Fact.

 

This is mostly true.

 

Oquendo's not better than Whyte, plus Fury beat his opposition way more convincingly, Chisora is better than Oquendo

 

Bull****.

At no point ever in the second half of Wlad's whole career was he as gung-ho as he was in that fight.

There is no way he could be described as gunshy in that one; regardless of whether or not he himself felt he held back too much. If he thought he held back too much in that one, then imagine what he was thinking after Haye, Jennings, Fury, etc.

 

Wlad in his later years was a very gunshy fighter. But not in his later years, like last two or three. From the end of 2000s to his retirement, there was probably only a few good examples of him letting his hands go. He was naturally a very safety first fight.

 

If you don't think it opinion after everything that's been said in this thread i really don't know what to say.

You are making up narratives that haven't remotely been discussed and then telling us if we think these fairytales are true then we don't know **** about boxing. Well the only guy bringing them up is you. I've already said Wlad was not at his peak but was certainly better than you are trying to sell. If you think he'd throw the same amount of punches a round vs Peter, a fighter not even remotely comparable in style to Fury you are kidding yourself. Others have clearly explained to you at length a couple of possible reasons for Wlad's reduced workrate (as well as age) but you don't seem to grasp it.

The Holmes of the Tyson fight isn't remotely comparable to the Wlad of the Fury fight and the most basic of posters would get this. Again no-one but you is talking about the Tyson version of Holmes or that Holmes would look the same against Shavers and co. You are trying to discredit us by making up your own little stories (of which you must somehow, heavens knows how, think are akin to the positions we are taking) and then attacking said story. It's not cutting the mustard.

We must be because we disagree with your "opinion" right. I mean what else could it possibly be? How could you possibly be wrong? In a sport where the greatest sages and fighters only get it right sometimes.

There you go again. It's factual that the sky is blue so of course you put your good self in that bracket. The flipside 9 people saying the sky is blue and you say it's green.

But it's not even that. We know the sky is blue where as what is being debated is shades of grey. You could be right, we could be right and anything in between could be right. It's ludicrous that you steadfastly refuse to concede this and the crux of your problems in this thread.

The real responses or the ones you are pretending people have said? Something not aligning with your opinion doesn't automatically make things absurd.

Well good thing Wlad beat Povetkin, whom many rate as his greatest win just two years earlier.

Another point is that sports science has moved forward quite a bit since 3 1/2 decades ago when Holmes was aging. Fighters and various other athletes are commonly performing notably better at ages when they were failing in the past.

Context tells us Wlad beat Povetkin, a guy many consider his best win, just two years and 4 fights before he took on Fury. He also looked damn good doing it.

Again,I haven't said Wlad was at his best, only that was was going notably better than you want to admit.

 

Just to make sure i am not seeing things - you truly believe that Wlad at the career stage of fighting Fury and Holyfield at the career stage of fighting Byrd were equal in head to head ability??

 

Of course I do. . A gunshy guy won't take any risks.

I provided you a quote from Wlad in 2002 where he admitted to not taking risks so you are no longer arguing with me on the matter.

And that fight in question was against walking Mummy Jameel McCline.

For Wlad to ever have a chance at beating Fury he would need to open up and take risks. He was never that guy.

 

And, this takes us right back to the beginning of the thread and the basis for why @Glass City Cobra is likely to have been so utterly resolute on Wlad being far more diminished than seems reasonable.

While I don't think any of the direct comparisons made in the original post were particularly useful, the attempt at an equivalence between "Old Holyfield" and "Old Wladmir" stood out a mile, to me, as being off-kilter.

I can only view this as a matter of an ill-conceived OP, having led to an entrenchment (with some tactical adjustments, along the way).

The potential irony in this case is that most posters in Classic are likely to align themselves with GCC's broader view here, about Fury's status as an ATG Heavyweight.