Marcel Cerdan is not a great middleweight. In fact, James Toney, Nino Benvenuti and Bert Lytell are all greater middles than he. Freddie Miller is a great fighter, greater than Jim Jeffries, Jake LaMotta or Carlos Zarate. Greater, or as great a feather than Sal Sanchez. Harry Wills is a greater fighter than Jack Dempsey. Unfortunately I'm so good at all of this that these hot takes are no longer hot takes on this forum!
The Ring rankings are based mostly off of feelings while the sanctioning bodies have more concrete terms for the champions and contenders to fulfill. The Ring has never arranged an eliminator bout or forced a mandatory in its history.
And if somebody's gotten to the ABC belt rankings, he's at least in theory beaten a line of other fighters in regional bouts, who'd in turn beaten lower-level regional guys. All of whom were motivated to get the baubles at issue in their respective fights. If somebody is in the Ring rankings, it means a journalist or group of journalists have found something about him impressive.
I guess They do have more concrete terms and criteria - meaning the ones ranked higher are the one who either did provide (by fighting for regional belts, thus paying sanctioning fees), or can provide (By virtue of being more popular) more revenue for the organizations. I get the part that governing bodies rankings have actual implications in terms of fights that We see, but the original post I refered to wrote that They should count for more than They currently do and the Ring ratings should count for less and I'm not sure in what context that would make sense. Should We for example give Omar Andres Narvaez or Artur Grigorian more credit for beating all those ranked WBO contenders, because They had more clear criteria than The Ring Magazine?
Put it another way: You have a pool of fighters. You need to figure out who the best guy is. Do you: (a) eyeball their records / film and try to figure out who is better; (b) organize eliminator fights for a series of baubles that they all want to win, and crown the guy who wins the last fight as the best guy? You might reply that you can be just as accurate by eyeballing their records after each eliminator fight. Sure. But if you do that, you're just piggybacking on the eliminator fight system anyway.
I don't see a structured elimination system created by governing bodies. For the most part, They piggyback on promoters's job. Promoter makes a fight, He wants to have his guy ranked, so He goes to WBA or WBO and asks them to approve the match-up it for some Oriental/European/Intercontinenal title. Fighters are often not even in the governing bodies rankings at this point, so They approve them by looking at their records on boxrec, or fightfax - most likely. Winner will get in the top 15 and might eventually fight in a final eliminator - and then the champion might be mandated to fight him, so here We have some tangible impact from the governing bodies, but The Ring has couple big advantages: - The fact that there is no large financial incentive (I guess up to the point of Golden Boy buying it, which created potential conflict of interests) allowed The Ring to be more neutral. - They can rank all the avaible fighters. The governing bodies often exclude from their rankings guys who have a clear path of cooperation with other governing bodies. I don't think those ratings even aspire to give us top 15 of the contenders in the world at a given time, it's more like an invitation tournament. For quite a while now, You can see Venezuelans and Panamanians ranked high in WBA, Mexicans ranked high in WBC, Frank Warren and Top Rank being the main partners of the WBO etc.
Precisely! And based on agreeing with that one thing I’ll assume you too also believe “Big” James > 70s GF and invite you to feel superior at the expense of every biped’s patience.
Based on my last admission, the conclusion has become undeniable. A pox on you and the science of necessary inference!
- 15 rounds fights should be back - boxing gloves for hw should be 6 oz - No antidoping (better recovery)
Carlos Monzon is the greatest middleweight head to head of all time. Julio Cesar Chavez was the greatest fighter of his generation. Sam McVea would have creamed Tommy Burns.
Chavez might have been the greatest fighter of his generation, but his loss to Whitaker is too hard to look past. Not to mention, Arizmendi is greater.
I find it extremely tough to compare fighters across different era's. It hard enough predicting fights in the same era let alone comparisons of fighters several decades. You should say there are standouts but for me there was never one guy who was way above the rest at least in my opinion which I imagine is in the minority.