Regis Prograis vs. Julius Indongo & Ivan Baranchyk vs. Petr Petrov RBR

Damn you, putting me on the spot...

I absolutely love the Reptile (fuck the stupid Machine alias, that's how much of an OG fan I am, I still rock with the old nickname!) but Kessler is my ride or die. The only guys I might arguably like more than Kessler are Izzy V, Johnny Tapia, Cristian Mijares, Hagler and Joe Louis.

 

...and this, ladies and gentlemen, is what happens when a mere dabbler in boxing history is shown up by a legitimate scholar and qualitative analyst for the sciolist he is.

 

I've been waiting for so long for a perfect opportunity to seamlessly & organically work "sciolist" into everyday banter. Thank you, random alt.

 

1. He probably did know more about his milieu, which is to say 20th century boxing, than any of us, and was immersed within that world in a 1st-person capacity with a perspective that none of us can match. That said, that's a double-edged sword and he was also very much a prisoner of his perspective and product of his times. He was sort of a spiritual successor to Nat Fleischer, in that he was around for a very long time, contributed to both the boxing lore (that is, objective history) and mythology (the exaggerated folklore canon) in many important ways (including being chief editor of the Ring Mag for a number of years, in both their cases), and were both complex human beings capable of being at once profoundly insightful on a good many subjects but also very myopically wrong on some others.
   
2. While serious fans' and peer historians' opinions about the man run the gamut from deep respect to disdain, Sugar's rankings themselves were a laughingstock for most of the last quarter-century of his life, and beyond - and have continued to be widely criticized as overly weighted towards his personal sense nostalgia, for basically the entire 30 years since it was published. Which is another point, they necessarily exclude the whole of the sport's history since 1988. Which means you've shot yourself in the foot by hailing a list that includes none of your precious EE greats to come along since the Iron Curtain fell. Whoopsie.
3. Who let you back in?

 

Exactly. Bert has a place in the flow diagram of fight writing, and his body of work is worthy of respect but that doesn't mean he's infallible, nor that his rankings can be trotted out as some kind of trump card.