Top 5 (top 10) boxers with the best resume

Bivins has a top 15 resume of all time, people here just like to pretend he doesn't because no one has the balls to have him that high over darlings like Hagler and Burley

As for Pep, I think his case has gotta be dominance over a large field of world class Featherweights. They're not iconic names but I did the count once and he's got over 50 wins over top 10 world rated guys. He's on the very higher side of history when it comes to that. Those are more wins vs world class opponents than Ali and Louis. More than Charles too. Very close to Robinson, Armstrong and Moore, but more dominant against them than all 3 of them aside from maybe Robinson.

He beat Humberto Sierra by winning every round against him. Sierra would be the #1 contender a few months later beating Saddler right after Pep schooled him, literally his very next fight. He dropped Saddler on his ass. Pep then beat him again via 10th round TKO and Sierra was never the same and would lose most of his fights afterwards. That was after the crash, by the way. Literally his 6th fight after the comeback, and not even a full 2 months into it.

Sierra may not be the best fighter ever, but **** like that matters. It sums up the entirety of Pep's career. Just total, consistent domination of the field the way you've never seen it before.

 

Yeah, Napoles is like Rigo and Loma in that the skills exceed the résumé, but of course, Napoles is their superior.

With Pep, he's arguably cleared out a division of top LWs who weren't able to cement their greatness as Pep was the man that basically ruled over a stacked FW division.

The Terranova and Wilson wins are probably underrated and he beat Wright more than once - Wright was a big puncher and very experienced.

To come back from the airplane crash and still be elite despite his aging and a style that relies tremendously on athleticism and youthful vigor - I feel that Pep's genius gets sold short cos he didn't have the equaliser punch that Benny Leonard had.

The major gripe that I have over the Buchanan fight is the low blow that Duran won the title with. Kenny did hit after the bell and he was getting overwhelmed but still ... I would've liked Kenny to get time to recover from the low blow.

 

Yes I understand that his case is based around dominance but that's exactly the problem, dominance isn't (in my understanding) apart of resume yet in supposedly resume only lists, Pep is coming in top 10-15. I don't think resume should be the only criteria so my problem isn't people considering other things than resume, my problem is when they say they only consider resume but you look at where they place Pep, Whitaker, Foster, etc, and you see that for select guys they're giving up on their own criteria to rank them higher. Pep's dominance over the featherweight division is cool and all but when you're considered a lock for top 15 or even top 10 p4p all time, I need to see more than that.

 

I think I might be realizing I'm a secret Pep hater. I don't know how I feel about that.

Canzoneri has better names on his resume and to the horror of boxing analysis channels on youtube around the world, I think he looks more impressive on film too. I don't understand why Pep is the one who gets worshipped even by those who don't rate old timers that highly and Canzoneri isn't.

 

I'm in full agreement here.

I made a thread the other day titled "Let's play a game" where I challenged the forum to pretend that no outside Boxing opinion was ever published or spoken. It's just you, records, newspapers, reports, all available Boxing film and Gilligan's island. Try to judge and rank fighters from scratch to ensure your survival. But it was deleted.

I think it's historical inertia. Certain takes are instinctively thought of as "correct" and people accept them because they make sense on a surface level. Therefore what happens is that they try to reverse engineer the reasoning behind said opinions, instead of actually arriving on those conclusions on their own. You know, from scratch. They feel like the same thing but they're not.

Somehow Duran's resume of Leonard, Barkley, Buchanan, De Jesus, Marcel, Palomino, Castro, Moore and Cuevas is good enough to have him 20-30 tiers above Bivins, who beat Charles, Moore, Burley, Marshall, Yarosz, Soose, Lesnevich, Christoforidis, Bettina and Oakland, as well as Heavyweight contenders like Pastor, Murray, Sheppard, Savold, Mauriello and Valentino (with a peak record of 52-5-1 when he had already beaten all of them, mind you). Simply because you were told Duran is top 10 and because you were never told that about Bivins.

Someone might come back with the losses excuse, saying how Moore and Charles came back to beat him 1-4 each, but it's not as if Duran also doesn't have horrid losses and isn't 1-5 vs his 5 best opponents and 3-5 in title fights above 135 (when at the same time praised for his weight climbing achievements). Certainly those past prime losses didn't matter for Mt Rushmore lock Langford as they did Bivins, who spent half his career losing in dominant fashion to Wills and dropped decisions to guys he should've beaten. But Langford's simply got mystique, unlike Bivins. His weight climbing, his power and KOs, being avoided, being part of the early 20th century. You were never told to rank Bivins that high because nobody felt that mystique in him. He just did his job and won.

At the end of the day people rank fighters primarily where they want to rank them or around the area where they've been told to rank them, with the illusion of independent thinking. Gans enters the top 10. Walker exits it. Ali moves up 3 spots. The Mt Rushmore order changes but it's the same 4 guys. Revolutionary stuff

 

This is a great post and touches on something that I've pondered for a long time.

If you were to pick your best fighters purely off of fight film, H2H assessment and then where these were not possible (Greb for example, extensivse high quality Gans, Langford etc.) and you lastly relied on ring record, fighters like Ray Leonard, RJJ, Loma, Pete, Floyd that beat Corrales, 140 Napoles, Duran of Montreal, Valentine's Robbi might make the bulk of your top 10.

 

I mean I think the top 5 is pretty much set in stone. Greb, Langford, Robinson, Armstrong and Charles all seem to me to be better than the rest. My thought process could absolutely be clouded by historical dogma but I feel like the common opinion has got this one right. I always struggle with making lists because I always struggle with criteria. I never know by what criteria my own criteria should be judged by if that makes sense. It seems to me that a really good looking top 5 is more impressive than a long title reign over pretty good fighters but why? How do I justify that criteria? What process would I have to go through to know if I'm making the right decision there? But even with my failure to ever come up with a consistent criteria it really does seem to me that those 5 are almost untouchable. I mean if I wanted to break tradition and sneak someone into that top 5 what would be my options? Maybe a case for Moore by valuing longevity really strongly? Maybe a case for Fitzsimmons by valuing weight jumping highly? Those 5 just have such great overall career where they excel at basically anything you would want them to excel at that it seems like you would need to overvalue something to take one of them off the list.

I saw that 'let's play a game' thread. I didn't realize it was deleted, that's a shame. I didn't end up posting there because at the end of the day I don't think I'm smart enough to really pull something like that off. I've been pretty up front about the fact that I'm relatively a casual fan, at least compared to most posters here. I wanted to make a top 15 for each weight division for the last 100 years but quickly found I was out of my depth. When I saw my flyweight list was basically everyone else's flyweight list just with Kingpetch going down 4-5 places I decided to call it quits for now. Do you have a top 15? I would be interested in seeing what it looks like.

 

yes, i agree. And I stand in solidarity with Ioakeim Tzortzakis

 

This may help:

 

That's recently been my problem too actually. Criteria.

I'm still a firm believer that resume is king. But resume is weird. At what point does huge depth+ok quality become too great for elite quality+shallow depth to overcome ? I mean, SRL is ranked top 20 by almost everyone here and the reasoning is "well, his top 4 is greater than almost anyones", but then they rank Duran above him because of his greater depth, longevity and weight climbing despite his top 4 of Leonard, Barkley, Buchanan and and De Jesus being clearly weaker.

You then have to wonder why they don't have Pacquiao > SRL when he beats Duran in those categories, but then they just tell you "well, he doesn't have that outstanding win over Leonard that Duran has" and suddenly quality matters again more than depth. You ask them their thinking process and all they say is "well, depends on your criteria". All of this is ****ing weird.

Clearly longevity, activity, dominance and title reigns matter too. Nobody seems to agree to what extent though.

Honestly, I think the best course is to go by feel while being honest with yourself. Obviously Hearns destroying Cuevas is a great win, especially if you add the eye test and how easily he dominated him. Is it better than Pep twice making a child's play out of a less historicaly notable divisional #1 who had just beat Saddler, right after he started his post plane crash comeback ? My gut tells me no, I'm more impressed by what Pep did. Maybe you think Hearns destroying Cuevas is more impressive and that's fine, as long as that's what you actually think and not what you want to think.

My most recent top 15 was something like this:

1. Harry Greb.
2. Sam Langford
3. Sugar Ray Robinson
4. Henry Armstrong
5. Ezzard Charles
6. Benny Leonard
7. Archie Moore
8. Willie Pep
9. Barney Ross
10. Joe Gans
11. Muhammad Ali
12. Joe Louis
13. Mickey Walker
14. Packey McFarland
15. Tony Canzoneri

But I'm not confident in it at all anymore. I could see Bivins in. I could see Luis Manuel Rodriguez in the top 30 or potentially higher. Maybe Langford outside the top 5. All I'm sure of is that Greb is still indeed the GOAT.

 

Great list .. I'd add Moore and Holyfield ..

 

No order
Ali
Ezzard Charles
SRR
Joe Louis

 

Here's a question .. we all know Greb fought a ton of fighters .. we know he fought Blackburn, Flowers and Norfolk .. in accessing his overall record , were there other great black fighters he could have but didn't fight during his career ?

 

I have two weirdly niche hot takes in regards to what you just said. I think it applies to:

1. Discussions about heavyweight punching power. If you ask people to give you a list of the hardest punchers p4p, I.E, the people for whom there is the largest gap between their own punching power and their peers and you exclude the heavyweight division people will say Jimmy Wilde, Julian Jackson, Bob Foster, Sam Langford etc. If you include heavyweight, people will say Rocky Marciano, George Foreman, Sonny Liston, Earnie Shavers, Ron Lyle, Mike Tyson and Deontay Wilder...

How the **** can a single division have 6-7 of the hardest P4P punchers of all time? How can 3 of all 3 of the hardest punchers in a single decade be in the conversation for P4P punchers if they can't separate themselves from the pack eachother? This makes no sense and people only think it because for the better part of a centre Heavyweights were demigods that sports writers fawned over and not actual human beings. It's why I think Earnie Shavers is ridiculously overrated and can't be in the discussion. I had the exact same thought as you previously and thought

"If holy boxing testimony and sports writers didn't exist, and you could only get your conclusions from watching film, is there a single hardcore boxing fan that would come to the conclusion that a man with a 70% KO rate and a stark lack of single punch knockouts over rated opponents, has the most single punch power? To the conclusion that a man who threw the hardest punch of his entire career that couldn't even keep Larry Holmes down for more than 5 seconds is in the conversation for hardest puncher ever?" Obviously not. People only have that conclusion because sports writers and fellow fighters have to fluff eachother up in order to sell them as larger than life. Ditto with nonsense about Rocky Marciano, an attrition puncher, completely shattering an opponents gums in a single punch leaving teeth flying everywhere. Made up nonsense that there's no evidence for, yet people will cite it as legitimate evidence as opposed to the obviously hyperbolic tall tale it is.

That and the definition of power is literally the amount of energy (work) you've produced over a given time period. By definition, someone with first round KO power hits harder than someone with "break you down" over 12-15 rounds type "power". People will literally ignore the laws of physics to pretend like their favourite fighter that doesn't have 1 hit KO power is in the conversation with the people that do.

Reminds me of some people that actually believe Deion Sanders ran a 4.6 40 yard dash going backwards, or that Michael Jordan can run a 3.9 40 yard dash. Some sports fans have the common sense and media literacy of a brick.

2. EXTREMELY Old fighters. There is a very clear difference in the quality of the sport from about 1940's and onwards, which makes sense considering the 1920's was the first time fights were 15 rounds and was the beginning of when boxing participation began to peak. Despite this, people will look at you with a straight face and say that a 30 round fighting boxer-wrestler hybrid that had fingered 4oz gloves and who didn't want to fight other black people in Jack Johnson, has a better resume than Lennox Lewis or Larry Holmes. Or that someone like Bob Fitzsimmons, who fought in such a primordial era that the jab wasn't invented and where heavyweights weighed 180lbs has a better resume than someone like Archie Moore or Roy Jones Jr. If a prime Marvin Hagler, Carloz Monzon, or Middleweight SRR weighed in at the Middleweight limit and then stepped into the ring against Beterbiev they'd get splattered, let alone a Floyd Patterson or Rocky Marciano. But we have to pretend like Fitzsimmons beating Corbett isn't because Corbett obviously sucks ass compared to the 180lbs fighters that came after him, but it's because Fitzsimmons is transcendentally good, all because old sports writers said so.

They'll justify this by saying "It's not fair to punish older fighters and reward younger fighters", which makes no sense. Wtf d'you mean reward and punish? There's no moral element to this. Some boxers were unlucky to be born when the sport sucked, some were lucky to be born when it was good. Luck has ALWAYS been part of resumes. Why do we have to mark people on a curve and pretend that it was just as difficult to dominate boxing in the year 1880 as it was in 1940 or 1970? Well because Bert Sugar said so.

Ditto with forum darlings like Harry Greb and Sam Langford (who for what it's worth I have high opinions of). They look basic or poor on camera and a quarter to a third of their resumes are rematches of them fighting the same 4-5 people, sometimes literally over 20x each. Yet these people are almost universally rated alongside people like Robinson and above people like Muhammad Ali and Roberto Duran.

 

Why not ? "Hardest P4P punchers of all time" doesn't mean that each division gets a few representitive like it's the Eurovision final. Sometimes freaks cluster. Plus, Heavyweight has the actual hardest punchers in absolute terms. The power is simply easier to see, so several of them will end up in the P4P conversation with bigger ease. Bigger men, cruder skills, heavier shots, more knockdowns, more stoppages.

Contrast that to Flyweight and Bantamweight, where fighters swing at each other like angry chihuahuas because they're literally too small to usually produce one shot KOs. It's hard to actually assess their power. It's what makes guys like Wilde, Zarate, Zamora, Inoue and Gomez freakier. It's natural that those guys distance themselves from their peers more than the Heavyweights when they drop people like flies. Almost anyone can punch when they're 200+ lbs, so the absolute hardest HW hitters are more difficult to seperate.

And yeah, HWs just get more coverage in general. I'd bet Peter Kane hit harder P4P than somebody like Lyle, but he's simply not known because why few people care about late 1930s Flyweights.

This is why I think bothering to rank punching power among the greats is pointless. Too many variables. How many opponents had iron chins ? How many spent 12 rounds clinching for dear life ? How many ran just to survive ? How many walked onto the shot ? How many got caught on the point of the chin, behind the ear or on the cheekbones instead of the forehead ?

You can absolutely separate a puncher from a non-puncher. That's easy. Separating elite punchers from other elite punchers? Good luck. You don't actually know how half those knockouts were produced. That's why I care far more about who the best puncher was instead of the who hardest puncher was.

Who's the guy who could KO the punchers, the spoilers and the runners ? Who could finish you when you were hurt ? Who was the guy that was simply better at KOing people than everyone else ? All that at the world level, consistently. The answer to that at HW is Joe Louis.

I agree with about half of this. Boxing absolutely got better after the 1880s. It became legal in most states, the talent pool exploded in America, it turned international (not in the "we have the US, the UK, and sometimes Canada or France" kinda way) and the Walker Law changed the sport for the better. Saying that it became harder to dominate boxing after the sport exploded isn't all that controversial.

I think you've swung a bit too hard against the extremely old timers though. Like, the jab line nearly killed me. Bro spent an entire post declaring independence from Boxing mythology, then immediately saluted the "Joe Gans invented the jab" flag.

Millions of years of human evolution. At least thousands of years where people have been punching each other. 2 centuries of organised prize fighting. Daniel Mendoza writing Boxing manuals before Sullivan was in the ballsack. But nobody, not one bloke, looked at his lead hand and thought "****, I think I can punch him with a straight arm and keep him away from me"

Yeah that's extreme. Jim Driscoll wrote a book in the 1910s saying the stiff jab was being neglected by the new generation of English fighters, but 2 decades ago it hadn't even been invented ? No way. Maybe it wasn't button mashed like a hadoken akin to today's game, but it was certainly emphasized. We don't go from "no jab" to Robinson, Louis and Pep in 40 years.

Curious that you mention Duran at the end. If he's not a Boxing darling, I don't know who is. Both on this forum and irl. He's great but he's one of the most romanticised fighters ever. Exactly the sort of type that people rank higher than almost any fighter because everyone's told them that he belongs at the peak, despite a lot of shortcomings or resume limitations that don't get acknowledged.