I have Hearns pipping Hagler because i like the way he traversed the weights. His incredible win over a Duran who had just given Hagler a very interesting nights work is huge as is his win over Benitez. The Cuevas win is also a very very notable win particularly in the way it was achieved. Hill was also a very good win and the Leonard rematch is underrated at times. I am probably a touch biased on this one too.
It is pretty simple because they fought and Hagler beat the hell out of him in a fight that was only competitive for the first minute.
By that token you'd obviously rate Benitez above Duran P4P? Benitez won about 13-2 in rounds and it was a very dominant win.
The problem with making p4p (if p4p is even something you care about) purely about weight jumping is that it means any fighter who established themselves as a great fighter in a single weight division is automatically penalised for not fighting at any different i.e. higher weight classes. But a fighter can be called a multi-weight champion world champion without ever becoming either a lineal or undisputed champion so not all weight jumping is equal. I don’t think there’s any reason to penalise Hagler for not going up in weight in a p4p sense, any more than there is penalising Joe Louis for not going down in weight. Hagler was a career middleweight at a time before there was a super middleweight division. To go up he’d have had to jump 15 pounds and this was in an era of same day weigh ins, before fighters would dehydrate themselves to get down to an unnatural fighting weight. As @Ghetto_Wizard said, there are some fighters who are well-suited to weight jumping because they have the frame to do it. Hearns was certainly one of them. Where Hearns falls down in an overall p4p sense is that he lost his two biggest career fights and didn’t establish himself as undisputed no. 1 in the divisions he fought in (154 is debatable and I’d argue he probably was no. 1 there as he beat Duran - who was stripped of the WBA title for taking the Hearns fight rather than a mandatory). He was an awesome force at welter but lost to SRL and he would go on to be a middleweight titlist but lost the big one against Hagler. Hagler has one championship-level defeat only and its probably the most debated decision in history. He was absolutely dominant in his career division (11 KOs in 12 successful defenses) and was undisputed no. 1 throughout his reign of nearly 7 years. He just wasn’t a natural weight jumper. He always made the middleweight limit in the same-day-weigh in era and sometimes with a couple of pounds to spare. He was about 5 ‘8 (official height was a little more generous) which is short by middleweight standards - not James ‘Hard Rock’ Green short, but still pretty short - you can see that there’s not much of a difference in height between him and Duran (who was 5’7) when they fought. So, I don’t think any of this is reason to say he needed to go up in weight to prove mythical p4p credentials - it’s just a symptom of the current, weight-draining day-before-weigh in era that people think that way.
GREAT post! Except I would only call it a couple pounds to "despair" in a case such as Hearns trying to make weight against Leanard. He shot Manny a look when the scale read "145": given his height & frame those extra unnecessary lbs. of weight drainage could well have made the difference in the fight!
The ‘couple of pounds to despair’ was a predictive text thing - I’ve corrected it now! Yes, losing 2 extra pounds before the Leonard fight was a mistake, but I believe he did some extra running before the weigh in which Manny didn’t sanction and feels that it contributed to his low weight.
I knew it was a mistake, just having fun! I read about it year ago, did not know he ran extra, then his own fault!
Excellent post. I completely agree. Moving up in weight to beat naturally bigger world class fights scores highly when I rank fighters p4p, but its not a prerequisite for a fighter to rank highly p4p. Hagler/Hearns p4p is close and can reasonably be argued either way. If "proof" of the above prerequisite statement is needed, then consider that Ali only ever fought at HW and Pep didn't little of note outside of FW, yet both are generally ranked higher than Hearns p4p.
Hagler, This is no disrespect to Hearns as both are two of my top 10 favorites ever and I actually think I rank Hearns higher than most people
Are there any reliable reports on his in-ring weights back when he was fighting at 147 or 154? I wonder how much he was dehydrating.
I don’t really get the criticism of Hagler for staying in the middleweight division. The gap between middleweight and light heavyweight has always been a hard one to bridge for even the best middleweights and Hagler wasn’t the biggest of middleweights. I mean how many middleweight champions won the light heavyweight title the last 100 years or so? Plus the super middle division didn’t really mean anything until the 90’s when Hagler was long gone. It was much easier for someone like Hearns to rise from Welterweight up the smaller weight differences to pick up alphabet belts. Having said that I find it hard to separate them Hearns was spectacular, Hagler was solid. I think I’d just err towards Hagler I think dominating a division for so long should mean something.
