Bat Battalino ,anyone think the old Featherweight Champ is underated? He defeated the likes of Kid Chocolate Freddie Miller Bud Taylor Panama Al Brown Al Singer Andre Routis Fidel Labarba Cocoa Kid That ought to gaurantee him a lof ty spot,yet he is rarely spoken of why?
With a resume of wins like that it's quite obvious that on his day Bat could trouble the best of them. His trouble was consistency though. Did all his good work within a couple of years, but even in that time frame was dropping a lot of decisions to lesser likes. Hard to know where to rate him in light of that but it would be a brave man that would bet against him against top opposition.
I would go out on a limb & say he's not only underrated, but may be the most underrated fighter ever. as to "why" he's so underrated, idk ... but he did struggle to gain respect even in his own era & was even the underdog in some of his (ultimately successful) title defenses, so perhaps the ongoing lack of respect/appreciation is a lingering effect of the negative press coverage in his own day. i would argue that a few fw champs from in & around Bat's era are underrated as well - Kid Kaplan & Freddie Miller being 2 other notable examples. In Peter Heller's interview w/ Battalino in the book "In this Corner...," Bat said this: "... they couldn't figure me out. That's a funny thing about me. I used to go out and fight nontitle fights with a bunch of bums and lose them. Then, when there were titles at stake, they all bet against me and I fooled them. I come back and defended my title." Not sure if this is supposed to be a thinly veiled admission to taking dives (which he does admit to attempting in his title rematch w/ Miller). Elsewhere in the interview, he attributes some of his underperformances to chronic/lingering hand injuries (he broke both of his hands winning the title from Routis) & a relentlessly hectic fight schedule. Once Battalino made up his mind that he would vacate the fw title, he tried to deliberately lose it in a pre-arranged fight w/ Miller, whose contract Bat partly owned, but the ref saw thru the facade & declared a NC. Miller then ended up winning the vacated title in his own. After Bat formally moved up to Lw, he bombed out ex-champ Al Singer in 2 & looked poised to continue his success @ that weight, but 2 punishing losses to Billy Petrolle brought his momentum to a screeching halt & started him on a career decline. Currently, it appears that there's only 2 incomplete films of Battalino on YT, a non-title loss to Kaplan & his title defense vs. Chocolate. (The kaplan fight was a bit like the Hopkins-Pavlik of its day, in which a highly touted young star gets a surprise licking from a supposedly faded ex-champ in a non-title fight.) There used to be more footage of Bat vs. Singer & some training/sparring footage, but it appears whatever channel(s) hosted them have been deleted. This content is protected This content is protected This content is protected
