Fighters who are often lauded as all time greats.....

I like to be fair, so if a fighters greatness can be argued either way, I call them great.

 

Juan Manuel Marquez is on the cuff of greatness in my estimation, and I don't feel right in writing him off because of his last time out. Floyd is a special fighter, and he held significant physical advantages going into that match-up, way above Marquez's most effective weight class. If he can win a 4th divisional title, and in doing so, getting a win over the likes of a Bradley, that may just cement a top 100 place for me. He holds respectable wins already, and he gets credit for moving through the divisions and his technical ability. Missing that one defining win, however.

I've never been sold on Oscar De La Hoya. He lost to many of his most important fighters in my estimation. Trinidad, Mosley, Mayweather, Hopkins. The argument can be made that he should have won at least two of them but likewise, the argument can be made he lost to Ike and Pernell. Too inconsistent for my liking, but I'm not sure whether I consider him an ATG or not. Anyone care to weigh-in?

 

2 fighters who i think were really over rated in terms of greatness are willie pep and dick tiger both were great, but not as great as people make out! i have heard many people call pep the best, when for me pep is a top 20fighter, i rank him about number 15th, but he is not a langford, greb, armstrong, ali or robinson. Also tiger was good but monzon, hopkins, billy conn, burley, la motta and thomas hearns were better, reason i named the fighters above is cos i see tiger ahead of them on alot of all time great lists. I rank tiger about 48th in my all time great list

 

I think the 'ATG' label is cheapened by being widely applied to anyone who has held a world title for a couple of years and beat one or two decent names. In the General, you often see guys like Tszyu, Calzaghe and Trinidad being referred to as ATGs, and even more ludicrously, people actually putting forward arguments that guys like Hamed and Wlad deserve to be called ATGs.

My own feeling is thus: let the top 50 fighters in the history of the sport be called ATG. The rest are great, so they are greats. The title of "All-Time Great" should be reserved for a select group, and I'd say from history we could comfortably have that group as 50. I would accept anyone saying the group should be smaller, but not anyone saying the group should be larger. To have a top 100 ATGs demeans the term IMO. The 90-100 bracket of anyone's top 100 are not greats for eternity.

In p4p greatness terms, the only current fighters I view as being ATGs are Pacquiao, Jones and Hopkins, as those are the only three who make my p4p top 50.

 

lads why should the All Time Great label be regimentaly limited to a top 50 on your list why dont we all get together and choose who we think should be called ATG

 

An even better idea! :good

 

I would agree, but knowing the majority leave Marco Antonio Barrera out of their respective top 50's, I have a huge problem with that. He's an all-time great, no question. The opposition he beat, the weight divisions he spanned, the titles he won, the longevity he displayed, the different variety to his skill set. It's just not as simple as saying top 50, because even then we have a difference of opinion on who makes the cut. There's the obvious ATG's like Robinson, Pep, Armstrong, Ali, etc. then you have ones that are debatable...I don't consider Marco all that debatable.

 

You see, I don't even consider MAB in the running for ATG status. I think he was a great fighter who had a great career, therefore he is a great. I do not for a second think he should be called a great for all-time. And yet, you know the high regard I hold Barrera in, I have said repeatedly I think he has one of the very best resumes of the past 20 years. Our divergence simply underlines the futility of this sort of argument, because although our opinions of a fighter are very similar, our notions of what a certain term means are very different, and so it would be between any two fans on this or any other forum I would expect.

 

I agree it should be in this type of order, in terms of greatness, i have just named fighters of the top of my head and put them in the group i think they belong in

All Time great fighters armstrong, robinson, langford, greb, louis, monzon, duran ali, johnson, learnard, dempsey, tunney, hagler, arguello, pep, walker, chavez

Great fighters dick tiger, bob foster, thomas Hearns, benitez, pedroza, hopkins, sanchez, gomez, holmes

Fantasic fighters Trinidad, calzaghe, oscar de la hoya, fenech, kosta, morales, tapia, barrera

 

You're thinking more or less along the same lines as me. I would have everyone except Pedroza from your Great category ranked higher than Jack Dempsey mind you, but we are more or less on the same street. There are ATGs, and there are Greats.

 

What is your criteria then? Marco Antonio Barrera beat a stupid amount of world champions, including Erik Morales x2, Naseem Hamed, Kennedy Mckinney, Johnny Tapia, Paulie Ayala, Jesus Salud, and Enrique Salud. He was a 3 divisional champion, no other Mexican in the history of the sport has bettered that, and Marco is rumored to be in the running for a title shot at Lightweight in the next year or so. His technical ability speaks for itself, and his ability to bounce back from defeat is infinitely more impressive the remaining undefeated when you look at the records of Floyd Mayweather Jr and Joe Calzaghe. He was fighting for over 2 decades, and all of his greatest triumphs came when he was the heavy underdog, and his opposition were primed...undefeated...P4P entrants.

 

Yeah, there are definite discrepancies between his list and what mine would be, but essentially the right system is in place to break down a p4p top 100 IMO, and to differentiate between the ATG and the plain old G.