Who In Your Opinion Is The Most Overrated ATG?

Well, Roberto Duran did beat him, so you can throw him in there.

Hypothetical fantasy match-ups are very subjective, and I haven't seen enough of every champion to make many solid guesses. But there are several welterweight champions with great wins and great reigns, and many with a lot more depth and a lot more fights than Leonard had.

Leonard beat Benitez and Hearns and went 1-1 with Duran, and beat a few contenders on the way up. That's quite impressive, but I'm not convinced that's a top 2 welterweight of all-time.
I dont think Benitez was a truly great welterweight champion. Hearns was a great destroyer, but still a little unseasoned, a great fighter nontheless, and Leonard's greatest win.
It took Leonard two attempts to beat Duran. There's no shame in that, but seeing as Leonard's welterweight reign lacks successful defenses over any other good fighters other than Duran and Hearns, I think he falls short of the ranking being given to him.

 

Roy Jones Jr

Conventional wisdom seems to be that he is the most gifted fighter that ever lived, and nobody below Heavyweight would have been able to defeat him. I say he looked infallible for so long not only as a result of his obvious talent, but also because the Light Heavyweight division was a barren wasteland. The best one he fought, one that couldn't hold the jockstraps of Charles or Spinks, also defeated him two times out of three. I say there are plenty of Light Heavyweights and a few Middleweights throughout history who could and probably would have defeated Roy Jones Jr at his brilliant best.

Aaron Pryor

All too often I see this man being listed among some all to familiar names like Alexis Arguello or Julio Cesar Chavez. The credibility of these said individuals is up for debate, but the majority still seem to have him easily among the top 50 greatest fighters of all time? I say Pryor scored one great victory over a past prime former Super Featherweight, and then slowly faded into obscurity. He would struggle to make my top 80.

 

Good stuff. It seems that you heavily consider experience/caliber of opponent.

 

Actually i had heard that back then and i always believed it. I guess it was a joke cause i just looked at Boxing records and he did fight after. ?????? All these years i thought he traumatized Payakaroon. LOL LOL

 

I don't know but Dempsey is fast becoming one of the most underrated.

 

The most effective and accurate way of ranking fighters is to access the level of competition they defeated.

 

Jones seems to be very overrated.
Remember that one dude that had jones #1 All Time P4P? ABOVE RAY ROBINSON?

 

It's very hard to give a definite answer here, since it often differs wildly how fighters are rated by different persons.

But Bert Sugar has named Dempsey as one of his top 5 p4p, and that is as overrated as I've ever seen a fighter get by someone that is after all knowledagable of the sport.

I've also seen posters here who have Dempsey as thier nr. 1 or nr. 2 HW of all time, which I think is way too high.

But then there has been a reaction against this, so it's hard to say.

Then we have Roy Jones. Some posters have him way higher than his record merits, but on the other hand I don't think any fighter has looked quite as untouchable in his prime. Of course, that may well be because he didn't face enough opponents with the quality to really ask questions of him, but having wins over Toney and Hopkins and still looking as superior as he did is really something. From that perspective I can see why some rate him very highly h2h, even though his record doesn't support it.

 

Disagree. We still have people out there who claim he is number 1 of all time.

 

Indeed. His unorthodoxy combined with that athleticism also gives him some serious pull in H2H matches. It begs the question, how does any fighter prepare themselves for an RJJ fight stylistically? As Kellerman once said,

"It's like you in your prime roy....what caaaaaan you doooooo???"

 

Do you not think Bernard Hopkins was only a segment of what he'd later become at the time of the Jones fight?

 

I think Jones will divide opinion for a long time to come. There are quite a few with a better record than him, but skillwise I feel he often gets underrated. I think he was quite a lot more than just extraordinary fast twitch muscle fibers.

 

That is one discussion I don't want to be dragged into. Suffice it to say, Hopkins was still quite a way from being the master that schooled Trinidad and Pavlik (two of my absolute favourite perfomances incidentally), but Jones would also improve and he beat Hopkins easily. I would really have liked a rematch some time in the late 90's or early 00's, but as it is it's still a damn impressive perfomance by Jones.

 

Roy was unorthodox, but a lot of people equate that with being technically unsound in his case. To the contrary, i find that jones is technically very sound in certain areas, in some more so than a great deal of modern fighters. People forget what an adept body puncher he was, and his feinting and drawing was the best of any post-black and white fighter i have ever seen(yes, that's right)... the way he combined it with his counterpunching was his greatest asset imo, more so than his stellar combinations or fast feet.

to me b-hop is the perfect example of a fighter who bloomed late.. if he had been consistently boxing in his youth his technical and physical prime would have overlapped and i think he might have been a different level of fighter, despite being as good as he already was.

 

Jones wasn't far away from the finished article in 1993, whereas Hopkins required a lot more experience and seasoning. One was arguably the greatest physical talent of the last 30 years, and the other was an ex-convict. I'm not saying Hopkins would have ever defeated Jones Junior, but the Hopkins that fought Trinidad was a completely different assignment. Another animal, altogether.