Purely in pugilistic terms, which boxer would you consider to have had the worst luck throughout his professional career? My first nomination goes to Herol Graham. The guy fought in an era of awesome contemporaries yet still was avoided repeatedly until McCallum manned up. When he finally gets his best chance for the elusive title belt he is seconds away from stopping Jackson and is humiliatingly KO'd with one flash punch. A great boxer and one of the best never to be world champ IMO. But there are far worse stories out there of hard luck pro careers, we would be interested in hearing some share their knowledge/stories.:bbb
Luis Manual Rodriguez by all accounts (and by my own from what Ive seen of it) won the series against Emile Griffith..but the judges thought otherwise. He already has a sparkling record..that would up put him up a few tiers if he had gotten those wins..Maybe on par with Emile himself. Had his Jackson-Graham moment with Benvenuti..Seemed to be getting the better of it, had Nino badly cut but then ran into a massive bomb with only a few rounds to go. At some points throughout his career he was avoided aswell, from what I can gather.
Wouldn't say he was the unluckiest to have ever lived but Glen Johnson has been on the wrong end of plenty of decisions and was only ever decisivley beaten by B-hop. He was also desperately unlucky to have had 2 very winnable fights with Calzaghe fall through due to the welshman withdrawing through injury.
Pissed me off though when he fought Dawson. I was hearing it was a robbery, logged on to ESB, saw this thing he'd broadcasted saying 'the public have spoken out' and how much of a travesty the decision was. I felt for him, so i watched the bout on youtube and Dawson won. I know Johnson had a lot of bad luck earlier in his career, but he also needs to admit when he simply got outpointed.
In the same vein as Graham, Alan Rudkin came about at a ridiculously great time for the bantamweight division, his title shots were against Masahiko Harada, Lionel Rose, and Ruben Olivares.
Fair point - I gave the fight to Johnson but I am slightly biased. It could be that after being on the wrong end of so many bad decisions he's naturally developed a bit of a chip on his shoulder about the whole thing, hence his bad reaction to the Dawson verdict.
Johnson has had some shockers go against him..But he has also lost a few fights clearly and a few of his L's are fights that could have gone either way. There was a thread about it a few weeks ago..and between us we had seen just about all his major fights. Im pretty sure there were only 2 or 3 really bad ones. From memory they were the Judah, Gonzales and possibly one of the Woods fights. Judah and Gonzales especially stunk..very bad decisions.
Normally I don't like to name a cotemporary boxer when talking about the history of the sport. However, on this occassion I can't think of anyone, throughout the history of boxing, who has been as unlucky as Glencoffe Johnson. He has been on the end of awful decisions more times than anyone I can remember, has seen a series of big-payday fights cancelled due to injuries and is still barely known apart from hardcore fans. This is despite the fact that he has consistently been one of the best boxers in the World in the last 10 years.
The unluckiest fighter would be Eddie Brown. Well,if you don't like Eddie Brown , how about Terry Malloy?
If Benny Leonard had died pre lightweight title win, Tendler would have been one hell of a champ imo. Unlucky that a great fighter like Tendler in ALL the eras in boxing had to share it with that guy.