Biggest underachievers at light-heavyweight

John Conteh always comes to mind. He was one of Britain's very best fighters but if he'd remained injury free and also free of "out of the ring distractions" he could have been right up there as an all time great 175lb man. In the company of Moore,Charles etc. He had that sort of talent.

 

Ismail Silakh.

 

Agree and I remember having high hopes for them. I saw them both drop their first losses going Cycz and Booker word

 

I’m wondering if Jeff Harding could have been better. Montell Griffin was highly touted coming out of the amateurs and started off undefeated 25-0 with two wins over James Toney and a lucky DQ win over Roy Jones.

 

YESS, dap me up

 

You forgot he got stopped by Saad before being buzzsawed by Braxton.

I don't think he underachieved based on his talent. He had the perfect style to beat Scott. He was not talented enough to beat the three guys he got title shots against.

 

The obvious choice for me is Michael Moorer. This is mainly because he jumped up to HW before he took on any of the top fighters in the LHW division. He won the spurious WBO title and made several defenses, but his best opposition was Frankie Swindell and a faded Leslie Stewart. Fights with Virgil Hill and Charles Williams would have been fun and shown if he was indeed the best at 175 lbs. Instead he jumped up and became a "What if" at 175 lbs.

 

Jeff Harding is one of the biggest overachievers at 175.

 

Jim Slattery.

 

They both came to my mind too.
I thought there was no doubt Smilin' Drew was going to world beater for a long time

 

I disagree. He should have beaten Andries two in a row and not gone inactive after that trilogy. Then lost to an ancient McCallum moving up in weight. The man had the power, chin, conditioning to do a bit more

 

He was never a "175 pound" fighter. A guy that I sparred a lot of rounds with fought him for a world title and told me later that Moorer was huge, well over 200 pounds.

 

I'm going with two really talented Romanian fighters from tye early 2000's. Zsolt Ederi was a super talented guy that was the lineal champ but he failed to ever fight the best in his era like Dawson, Tarver, Jones etc. The dude had crazy hand speed and looked legit.

Adrian Diacnou was a guy that could really Crack. I remember watching him splatter Rico Hoye on ESPN and thinking this guy was going to make some serious noise but back to back decision losses to Pascal filled by another loss to Dawson and he simply faded away.