Name 5 great fighters who never had a fight where they struggled with someone a level or two below

In their primes?

Roy Jones, Sugar Ray Leonard, Wilfredo Gomez, Mike McCallum, Ricardo Lopez, Vitali Klitschko. Even an overrated fighter like Naseem Hamed blew away the Otto Wallin level challengers without missing a beat.

 

TS makes his point well. If you follow this sport long enough you know that subpar performances against lesser opponents are just a part of life. Fans and the media make mountains out of mole hills until the fighter in question has their next bout, and then the poor performance is quickly forgotten about.

Honestly, how many people remember how off Erik Morales looked against Guty Espadas in their first fight? Probably not many, but at the time he fielded a ton of criticism, and lots of 'experts' speculated that he was on the slide. Of course we know that some of his best wins were still years in the future.

A generation earlier, boxing writers used Evander Holyfield's struggles with Bert Cooper and Alex Stewart to explain why Holyfield would never be a great heavyweight champion.

What I'm saying is that using a single bad performance to make sweeping inferences about the state of a fighter's career is usually leads to failure. 36 minutes or less of combat gives you an insight into a fighter's abilities, but you also need context and a larger data set to really understand what's going on.

If Fury fights that poorly against Wilder, he's guaranteed to wind up with a devastating concussion. But there's plenty of reason to think he can do better than he just did. I mean...he did dominate Wilder by a wide margin only like 8 months ago.

 

Despite my earlier post I would throw out a few names of guys who pretty much always were at the top of their game:

Eder Jofre
Carl Froch (I didn't like him and he wasn't perfect, but he always showed up dialed in and ready to perform)
Jeff Fenech

But of course the list of greats who lost to or fought poorly against inferior fighters is far longer: Alexis Arguello, Julio Cesar Chavez, Barrera, JMM, Lennox Lewis (plenty of times), Larry Holmes, Muhammad Ali, Andre Ward, Mayweather, Pernell Whitaker, Azumah Nelson, Hector Camacho, Buddy McGirt, Roberto Duran etc.

 

Every fighter EVENTUALLY meets a style that isn't suited for them or doesn't let them do things as easy.

If they don't they are cherry picking.

Wallin is not a cherry pick at 6'6 athletic moving HW ,his style clashes with Furys to an extent and its why the smarter posters saw it going 12.

Most HW's don't even fight to win they fight not to lose and they struggle even more but play it safe for winning rounds. Fury had no choice to actually fight in this one because Wallin was bringing it here, fury wasn't use to that not including off balance wilder falling over his own punches not setting anything up with one punch at a time , that doesn't count. .lol


Wilder was saved by the bell in his 13th fight ,that's for the select special posters on here who should remember that bf posting to me here. lol


Many losses happen when you go past your 20th fight and sometimes its not to the guy most thought it would be to.


Wallin is a top win for Fury and Wilder if he had him ,hes got 48 year old Ortiz who didn't pass his pre med exam prior to that fight so make that as you will if you are complaining about who defeated who...………...

 

I don’t know why everyone is going on about the Wallin fight, fury won. If he lost it would be a big deal, but because he didn’t win easily everyone is having a go about it. Even worse, eggman feels the need to do a thread going all “b-b-buttt other people have looked bad as well” he is a very talented fighter but just because he pulls funny faces doesn’t make him the goat.