How good would Gerald McClellan be

big power, great chin, nutjob.....nasty personality???...i aint opening that can of worms.....benn/mclelland is the greatest fight i watched as live...brutal, tragic, exciting...it had it all..if it had been a movie it would have been laughed out at the script stage.....chinny brit with big punch takes p4p punchers best, is knoced out of ring and comes back to ko and ultimately hospitalize his pantomime villain opponent.....

 

He had it all speed, power, chin, strength, great body puncher and was fearless! he just didnt cut weight right he would dry out week of the fight and take alot of weight off which is very! dangerous, against benn he had taken to much weight off he came in 3 pound under the supermiddleweight limit, one of the reasons manny steward left him was cause of his weight cutting habits. If not for that he would of been a all time great! He was the last person to beat roy jones as a amature, and always wanted to fight roy as a pro, there was also talk of matches against eubank, toney, hopkins, nunn, collins and mccallum around that time, we probaly didnt even get to see g man hit his prime. I think he could of went all the way to heavyweight with his strength, power and chin

 

Nah, he was outmanouverable. It's like saying 'what if Julian Jackson had an ATG chin'.

 

He had big power, a strong chin and good speed. Apart from that, he was alright. The most overrated fighter of the 90's if you ask me. Two wins over a shot-to-shite Jackson and a (tragic) TKO loss to Benn aren't enough to pave the way to Canastota. And he was never likely to be anything like Tommy Hearns. Generally on account of the fact that Hearns was a master boxer and McClellan wasn't. Still, he was good to watch I suppose.

The pro-McClellan crowd are going to tear into me now aren't they?

 

**** 'em, they have to wake up somedaygood

 

I think he was a psychopath honestly.

As a fighter, the guy could of been really great from my impression of his fights. There's a lot of whats ifs surrounding this brutal fighter.

 

To be fair to him, the attributes he DID have, he had to a considerable degree. They were just physical ones is all, the massive punch and concrete chin. It was always going to be downhill for him leaving the Steward camp and constantly cutting so much weight. And the Benn fight demonstrated that he was, for all that KO power, a mediocre finisher.

 

He was a bad *****.

 

He had explosive power, and took it to his opponents, but like someone said, maybe his boxing skills were a bit overated.
He tended like all punchers to fall back on his punching power a little too much. Regardless of how good he could have been, he was one of the more exciting fighters of the 90's.
Anyone who threw as many power punches straight like he did in the Benn fight would have certainly gassed themselves out as well and I think he was thinking the fight was going to be over. That fight could have very well been stopped and things might have been different. He seemed to be getting better around the Jackson fights so who knows how good he could have been. There was certainly a large list of very good fighters, including Roy Jones and James Toney, who he could have most likely banged out a nice legacy against.

 

That he was. A nasty ****er if the stories are anything to go by.

 

You're asking how good he would be if he were an entirely different fighter. This thread sucks.

 

Exactly.

 

No I think hes asking how good he would have been if he didnt rely on his power so much? The guy did have ability, and possibly like many raw punchers could have accomplished more had he tried to be calculated and strategic going about settin them up. Certainly the Benn fight could have been different, dont you think?

 

But we don't know that and have no way of knowing it, so the question is more or less rhetorical. Had he kept with Steward and kept his head, he may well have ended up in a better spot and been a much more formidable fighter in the long run, but there's no telling how good he may have been, we just didn't see enough of his boxing ability to really judge. What we did see in his supposed prime years was no methodical boxer-puncher, but rather a very flawed power puncher.