Sugar Ray Robinson

I HAVE seen Ray Robinson from his early days as a welterweight in the
early 1940s, and let ne assure you from the day SRR turned pro in 1940
he was already considered an alltime great by veteran boxing people....
Too darn bad we have no film of Robinson as a young welterweight...He had to be the greatest all around fighter of alltimes along with the
lightweight Benny Leonard....If the author you cite doesn't agree with SRR
as an immortal, put the book down and read what his contemporaries
said about him...Was he the greatest P4P boxer of alltime ? No in my opinion. A chap named Harry Greb holds that distinction....

 

I don't have him as p4p greatest either, though I don't definitively have that position set.
As for the perception, it seems as if it has always been that he is one of the greatest ever, and with that I do agree. However, it seems as time goes on he is held in higher regard. Nothing wrong with that, but it does kind of annoy me, when casual fans label him as GOAT, despite never seeing him fight and not being able to name his opponents.

 

Yes, I have seen Ray Robinson as a welterweight ringside many times and as a MW when he kod Randy Turpin in 1951 at the Polo Grounds....No
fighter since his prime comes close to SRR as a fighter P4P..,.

 

Hey Burt, let's put a granite chin on Tippy Larkin and put him into the ring with a 1941 140-pound Ray Robinson...

Who ya' got! :hat

 

Out of curiosity, who was the author?

 

There was a 1950 article arguing that SRR was already the greatest of all time in the Ring Magazine.

 

SRR on points, even though the question wasn't aimed at me. The guy was just too good at every aspect of boxing.

After all you DON'T get labelled as the best fighter in the world if you're a slouch. ( In Ray's case it was called pound for pound, best in the WORLD ) do you?

The man was just special.

 

Would you please give details as to what book you are reading?


Over the years I heard many commentators say he was the best P4P of all time and that this reputation was established well before the 1960s. My dad whose passion in life was pro boxing, and who hung out at the old St Nick and Eastern Pkway, told me of how he and others were awed by SRR's highly intense training and boxing. Among his fellow boxing fanatics no one enjoyed a greater reputation than Sugar Ray.

 

Nat Fleischer wrote in the Feb. 1951, Ring Magazine, that in the year 1950 “Robinson hit the spotlight as the greatest all around fighter, pound for pound, in any division.” They have been saying it about Robinson ever since. The term “pound for pound” has come to exemplify the stature of Ray Robinson as the greatest fighter in boxing history.


[url]http://coxscorner.tripod.com/robinson.html[/url]

 

WOW bg,Tippy Larkin a name from the distant past...Tippy was such a master boxer that in over 100 fights he was hardly ever outpointed.
So good a master boxer puncher he won about every round from Billy Graham and Willie Joyce. To beat him you had to knock him out as did
only heavy punchers like Lew Jenkins, Beau Jack, Al Bummy Davis and Henry Armstrong...But Tippy had a glass chin otherwise he would be in the HOF. As to SRR vs Tippy with a Billy Graham chin at 140 ? SRR hit too fast
and was a greater puncher....No fighter I ever saw impressed me like the WW SRR....

 

Good show, Burt. I've always been fascinated with Larkin. He dropped just a single points decision in the final 15 years of his career. That to the dogged Jack Kid Berg.

Larkin even befuddled the one and only Henry Armstrong... For 3 minutes, that is.

I'd kill for footage of the Garfield Gunner.

 

spinner, I lived about 3 blocks away from Eastern Pkwy Arena [the house of upsets], and I went weekly to the bouts there. Probably brushed shoulders with your dad. I also would go to the old St.Nick's Arena...In NYC
those days there was a boxing show every night of the week at least...