Your Hottest Takes:

Probably another one:thinking again,by single weight domination, longevity and consistency Vicente Saldivar might be better than Ruben Olivares or Salvador Sanchez.

 

1)Jack dempsey was the single greatest athlete in the heavyweight division. The guy had it all. Strong, fast, natural aggression, heart, Hit like a mule. All of this while weighing 190lbs. Crazy stuff.
2)Joe Louis's case for #1 heavyweight is better than Ali's and it isn't even close. Louis dominated his era and rarely had any close decisions fly his way, While Ali had better wins he often times got lucky with decisions like the 3rd Ken norton fight abd was excessively clinch Frazier in their second fight.
3)P4P Ezzard Charles is the greatest fighter of all time
4)If Wladimir Klitschko was in the 90s I'd give him a good shot at beating evander holyfield and riddick bowe. but would choose tyson and Lewis to knock him out. Klitschko also had underrated heart.
5)Rocky Marciano hit harder punch for punch than Sonny Liston.

 

I'm not saying Klitschko wrote a step aside cheque to Kirk Johnson for a sudden crack at an ageing, (likely) undertrained, undermotivated and underprepared Lewis...but it would have been a really smart move if he had.

 

Alright I agree with everything you’ve written here…. Expect I have no idea who Gerry Penalosa is… anyway, hot takes MY HOTTEST is that James Toney at 190lbs-230lbs would beat the devil out of 70s Foreman. Boxing has regressed just look at paid olympians like Bivol compared to Moore… different sport now… “amateur pedigree” medals etc is mostly a big nothing compared to equal time in the pros Manuel Medina had the right idea not Lomachenko.

 

Boxing being something I should feel bad about watching… tongue in cheek but with @NoNeck saying it should be illegal I’ll refer to the wife of Jerry Quarry who suffered a boxing afflicted husband “As long as there are men there will be boxing” it will always be this way there isn’t a proper rationale it just is.

 

Cross Trainer still on his mission to convince me that Charlie Z was an ATG not buying it, sorry. And he caught the "big marine guy" in the spinning section of the gym by surprise.

 

Great post @cross_trainer . Can I pick those I disagree with?

Why? I can't come up with a single good argument for this, other than boosting Mauricio Suleiman's and Gilberto Mendoza's egos a little bit.

Volenti non fit iniuria.

I disagree. Clear criteria can be established and then it can be straightforward enough. The issue is sometimes people don't make that first step and talk past one another.

 

I think the argument was, The Ring rates the fighters off of alphabet bodies rankings anyway. Only after the fighter gets a chance from the alphabet body and get a good fight, he can be rated by The Ring. That's why in my opinion body rankings are a joke, but they are needed in the sport. Just like alphabet belts. They are good in crowning contenders. But they are not automatically champions in my eyes.

 

Larry Johnson was ranked in the top 10 at both LHW and HW in the 1920s. He was in the 1933 NBA LHW tournament.

I mean the National Boxing Association of course I have no idea what else those 3 letters could stand for.

 

I dare you to say that to Ron Artest.

 

The Ring rankings are based mostly off of feelings while the sanctioning bodies have more concrete terms for the champions and contenders to fulfill. The Ring has never arranged an eliminator bout or forced a mandatory in its history.

 

I guess They do have more concrete terms and criteria - meaning the ones ranked higher are the one who either did provide (by fighting for regional belts, thus paying sanctioning fees), or can provide (By virtue of being more popular) more revenue for the organizations.

I get the part that governing bodies rankings have actual implications in terms of fights that We see, but the original post I refered to wrote that They should count for more than They currently do and the Ring ratings should count for less and I'm not sure in what context that would make sense.
Should We for example give Omar Andres Narvaez or Artur Grigorian more credit for beating all those ranked WBO contenders, because They had more clear criteria than The Ring Magazine?

 

I don't see a structured elimination system created by governing bodies. For the most part, They piggyback on promoters's job.

Promoter makes a fight, He wants to have his guy ranked, so He goes to WBA or WBO and asks them to approve the match-up it for some Oriental/European/Intercontinenal title. Fighters are often not even in the governing bodies rankings at this point, so They approve them by looking at their records on boxrec, or fightfax - most likely.

Winner will get in the top 15 and might eventually fight in a final eliminator - and then the champion might be mandated to fight him, so here We have some tangible impact from the governing bodies, but The Ring has couple big advantages:
- The fact that there is no large financial incentive (I guess up to the point of Golden Boy buying it, which created potential conflict of interests) allowed The Ring to be more neutral.

- They can rank all the avaible fighters. The governing bodies often exclude from their rankings guys who have a clear path of cooperation with other governing bodies. I don't think those ratings even aspire to give us top 15 of the contenders in the world at a given time, it's more like an invitation tournament.
For quite a while now, You can see Venezuelans and Panamanians ranked high in WBA, Mexicans ranked high in WBC, Frank Warren and Top Rank being the main partners of the WBO etc.

 

I guess mine would be that there is no greatest of all time.

That's all I can think of.