Your Hottest Takes:

- Floyd Mayweather has a case for being p4p higher than Roberto Duran,mainly because most of his opponents were younger than him(although I still had Duran maybe one number higher)
- Vito Antuofermo had good defense at times.
- Duran would have possibly win that Hagler fight (atleast in my cards) if he didn't blew it up by the 4th low blow.
- Hagler was more of a calculative jawbreaker and not a destroyer.
- There was no boxing era that had every boxers being better than the last generation,every era has their own crops of fighters that could go go toe to toe with anybody,regardless of their era.(The bare knuckles excluded)
- Despite his early achievements, Salvador Sanchez was never truly tested.

 

Prime GGG defeats Hagler on points

 

I have so many lol
- Floyd and Pacquiao should both be ranked higher then any heavyweight P4P including Joe Louis and Ali
- Usyk would beat most great heavyweight champs including Ali and Holmes
- Wlad is a top 5 heavyweight and his competition is underrated
- GGG resume isn't substantially worse then Hagler's
- Heavyweights in general are a level below every other division in terms of skill and talent
- Vitali gets underrated H2H but would give any heavyweight in history problems and would beat most
- Loses shouldn't take away from how great a fighter is only their wins should be considered when considering how great they are
I'm sure I can think of more

 

- Jack Johnson is a top 5 HW, greatness wise.
- Baby Arizmendi has a better resume than Chavez. Screw the blemishes, he has multiple wins over half a dozen ATGs, Chavez has none.
- Whitaker, Foster, Zarate and potentially to a lesser extent Jofre (at 118) and Duran (at 135) are ranked highly mostly due to name value/prestige than they do achievements/resume.
-Beterbiev and Bivol are not top 20 ATG LHW's.
- Usyk's resume is overrated P4P, but underrated at HW.
-Maxie Rosenbloom has a deeper resume than your favourite fighter.
- Jose Napoles is arguably a top 5 fighter in terms of sheer ability, ever
- The modern approach to world class professional Boxing stunts the fighter's potential and ruins them as a result.
-Harry Wills > Sonny Liston, in terms of greatness
- Sugar Ray Robinson has greater feats of power than GGG.
- Rocky Marciano was great.

 

I'm gonna list the Floyd thing a bit later, there's so much.

For Sal,I believe that Gomez was kind of small and undertrained(he'll never beat Sanchez with full training anyways),and Azumah was kinda green and fought with short notice, Sal also died too early before he could fight guys like Arguello or Pedroza.

 

I saw this a few weeks ago in another boxing discussion (definitely not here but can't remember were I saw it) which had a all time ranking of Sam Langford/Harry Wills and Joe Jeanette in the top 5 heavyweights of all time which I found pretty interesting.

 

The top of the heavyweight division would be full of seven footers if not for basketball.

 

- The modern heavies would generally beat the 60s-70s guys. People over-estimate the "golden age" guys' head to head abilities due to nostalgia.

- Unfortunately, my view of the 60s/70s guys will become more common as there are fewer and fewer boxing fans who grew up with Ali/Frazier/Foreman/Norton as their heroes on TV. This is also what happened to Marciano (and Dempsey, if you take out the TV part), so there's precedent.

- Ali was an amazing generational talent, even head to head. The rest of the 70s ATGs, although better than the 60s ones, were not.

- @GlaukosTheHammer is probably right that sanctioning body rankings should count for more -- and Ring rankings for less -- than they currently do.

- I think many fans build their view of boxing history by initially deciding which boxers they like, and then constructing a web of beliefs around the idea that the favored fighter(s) or era(s) are really good. The opposite, where someone builds a parallel history of boxing out of the assumption that a particular fighter they hate sucks, also happens, but is rarer. This may change as the fan gets older, but also may not. @BCS8.

- It's possible, although unlikely, that some of the lighter guys from the 40s and 50s would beat top modern people by large margins. Kind of like how the best MT guys with millions of fights beat up better physically trained and larger Western kickboxers. I don't think this is likely, but it wouldn't really surprise me.

- We should bring back the London Prize Ring Rules as they were originally practiced.

- MMA guys are finally athletes at roughly the same level as elite boxers. There's still a bit of a gap, but not much.

- I suspect PEDs are rife in boxing, and have been for 30-40 years, to the point where I don't even bother asking whether so-and-so is on steroids anymore. Others may take a different view, but them's my suspicions.

- Professional boxing is probably unethical to watch. It provides a service to society by pressure-testing a useful martial art, but we are entertaining ourselves by watching people suffer trauma to their brains. This probably won't stop me watching it, since the temptation is great and casuistry will keep me afloat for a while longer, but we ought to feel guilty about it.

- Andy Ruiz was overweight. @NoNeck.

- "Greatness" is subjective, like asking what flavor of ice cream you prefer. The heated and endless arguments spawned by debating who was "greater" are occasionally fun, but a profound waste of time. People brandishing their greatness lists, which are almost all alike, reminds me a bit of that scene in American Psycho where the investment bankers are all deeply emotionally invested in showing off their indistinguishable business cards to each other.

- Written newspaper reports are almost useless for reconstructing a fighter's style or abilities beyond the barest essentials.

- Adding to the above, an overreliance on texts over film has been a serious problem in boxing fandom, and we are only starting to get over it with the easy access to film YouTube provides. @Pat M.

- Most assertions of "strong" or "weak" eras are backed by little to no evidence

- We are correct to pay more attention to heavyweights, for the same reason that we care more about athletes in other sports who are the actual best in the world.

- The Heavyweight Blog Guy made a few good points, here and there. I emphasize "a few."

- Liston didn't have an 84" reach, and it gets repeated far too often anyway.

- Johnson wouldn't be very good today at all. He's just as primitive as the rest of his contemporaries.

- I like Tommy Burns.

- Joe Louis is one of the hardest people to get a handle on how good he might have been, in an absolute sense rather than relative to his era. @Journeyman92.

- Holyfield was one of the most skilled heavyweights ever.

- We should pay more attention to the history of public health and the size of talent pools than we do.

- @Ioakeim Tzortzakis may be right about his Liston/Wills comment. I would add on a different note that Liston reminds me more of a Wills-era "big heavyweight" than the large, athletic Silent/Boomer generation heavyweights who came after Liston.

- We should listen more to the opinions of boxers instead of other fans. Fan consensus means less than we think it does.

- Conversely, boxing professionals seem to lie a lot, historically speaking. Not quite like professional wrestling, but still pretty bad. We take too much ballyhoo at face value, don't look at motives or context, and don't go for multiple attestation or original sources as much as we should. Too many discussions devolve into trying to defend a professional boxer's honor rather than trying to figure out if he was lying or even honestly mistaken.

- Boxing history, as practiced by fans, is more like a folk tradition than professional history. Stories we tell mostly to build community. Even the versus debates are more like ritual contests than attempts to accurately determine who would've actually won. And there's nothing really wrong with this.

...Have I offended everyone yet, as the thread demands? Or am I missing someone?

 

Unsure of how controversial this is, atleast amongst more hardcore fans, but Tommy Hearns is MAJORLY overrated in terms of his welterweight greatness. He's one of my all time favourite fighters and in a H2H sense he's definitely up there, but he didn't build up his resume enough at the weight.The Cuevas win was impressive but that and a few decent title defenses is not even enough to put him above a guy like Donald Curry or Errol Spence, let alone into the top 10 imo.

 

The ideal body type for boxing seems to be "bigger than the opponent."

 

Yeah, sometimes a fat guy can even win a major fight by countering a flush shot because he's too bug to lose his footing easily.

 

* Miguel Cotto was beating Sergio Martinez 10 times out of 10, bum knee or no. Just a horrible matchup for Sergio.
* Ending your career undefeated doesn't automatically mean your resume is suspect.
* Tommy Burns's reign as heavyweight champion is very underrated
* Not only do I think Floyd Mayweather won his fight with JLC, I think upon a recent rewatch that the wider scorecards are actually defensible.
* Along the same lines, many of the fights that are considered robberies are often debatable at worse.

 

Outside of 130lbs, Floyd Mayweather is arguably not top 5 - 10 at every single weight he competed at.

Mike Tyson's chin for a single shot is better than Ali's.

Evan Fields may be the most versatile and skilled HW of the ATGs.

Rigo was a better boxer than Loma despite getting dominated in their fight.

RJJ alike PBF isn't likely top 1 - 3 at the weights he competed but could be argued top of the tree H2H from 160 - 175 lbs in a one fight, no rematches scenario.

SRR would KO Duran.

Saddler just might be greater than Pep - probably one of the hardest fighters to face p4p.

Floyd Mayweather isn't significantly greater than the other defensive greats in any facet of defence in particular, but his consistency and use of all four key components of defence are the greatest captured on film.

B-Hop is a great fighter, an ATG fighter but I don't know if I necessarily look at him as a great MW fighter in the same way that I do with Monz and Hags.