Better resume/greater fighter: Floyd Mayweather or Barney Ross

I was about to say that's me for Wlad then he was brought up when talking about PED's

 

At the end of the day, it all comes down to what you value. Personally, I don't place much weight on newspaper reports or secondhand accounts. If I can't independently verify a fighter’s ability through footage or fully sanctioned, judged fights, I don't rate them as highly as fighters from later eras where everything is documented. That's my framework others might disagree, and that's fine, everyone has their own criteria. I simply laid out why someone might value modern fighters over the old 'greats' based on a consistent criteria, if you see it differently that’s your right.

(That said, I do think it's important to note that @Ioakeim Tzortzakis admitted his view of the past is shaped by a belief that U.S. boxing is inherently superior, and that he glorifies the era when American boxing was at its peak. To me, that's a major concession, and it highlights the underlying bias in how he evaluates fighters from that period and boxing in general)

 

Tougher era? YDKSAB.

 

Floyd was actually caught doing PEDs and used his A-side manipulation to avoid any blowback.

The fact that there are comparisons between Floyd and Greb goes to show the insanity of this discussion. Greb is top 3. Floyd struggles to make top 50.

 

I don't think Greb's career can be dismissed nor can the accounts of his fights which have been commented by other fighters in his era that wouldn't be fair but footage of fights does have a certain type of context which gets talked about a lot in discussions multiple times that would have been extremely handy to see and the information of the fights is limited to what we have today it may have made a difference in shaping the discussion around fights significantly.

I tend to find P4P comparisons tricky especially with 2 boxers who fought 100 years apart
who fought under totally different era's and circumstances to be a slippery slope which is why I tend to avoid P4P comparisons/rankings especially like this.

 

I can see the care that went into your roster of names, but a long fighter roll-call tells only part of the story, because it weighs the output of each country without asking why those boxers emerged where and when they did. In the 1930s and ’40s, the United States enjoyed a massive first-mover advantage: hundreds of clubs, cross-country circuits, national media coverage, and a Depression-era public that treated prizefighting the way Americans treat the NFL today. Unsurprisingly, most titles stayed on U.S. soil. Yet even then, foreign champions, Panama Al Brown, Kid Chocolate, Benny Lynch, Marcel Thil, Sixto Escobar, Max Schmeling, proved elite talent was scattered worldwide. What those fighters usually lacked was the purse money and promotional muscle that allowed them to rise up the ranks and get the support they needed to improve. The gap was a result of infrastructure, not innate superiority.

Once other nations built comparable scaffolding in the 1960s through the ’80s, the competitive map changed fast. That era’s “golden globalization” you highlight wasn’t an exception to American dominance so much as proof that, given opportunity, the rest of the world could keep pace. In the glamour divisions from welter to heavyweight the U.S. still boasted Ali, Leonard, Hagler and company, but below bantamweight the landscape flipped: between 1965 and 1989 only two Americans (Jeff Chandler and Richie Sandoval at Bantamweight) held a lineal championship. The lower the weight class, the less U.S. control you find because lighter weights were where Japan, Mexico and Thailand poured their resources.

After 1995 the raw head-count of foreign champions looks thinner mostly because the sport itself fragmented. Four sanctioning bodies, splintered TV deals, and rising pay-per-view barriers meant that fighters outside the HBO/Showtime pipeline could reign for years invisible to the American audience. Veeraphol Sahaprom defended the bantamweight crown fourteen times in Bangkok for purses that wouldn’t cover a Vegas undercard; Anselmo Moreno ran twelve defenses in Panama and Argentina with almost no U.S. airtime; Srisaket Sor Rungvisai had already upset two world champions before Americans learned his name by paying extra for “Superfly” cards. The talent never disappeared its broadcast stage did.

The post-Soviet explosion drives that point home. Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and their neighbors had virtually no professional scene until the 1990s. In one generation they produced over twenty five major-belt holders and ATG like; Usyk undisputed at cruiser and heavyweight; Lomachenko setting the modern speed record for three-division titles; Golovkin tying Bernard Hopkins’ middleweight defense streak; Bivol and Beterbiev becoming the kingpins of the light heavyweight division. Those careers, packed into fewer than twenty-five fights apiece on average, dwarf the “fifteen noteworthy pros” ceiling your list suggests.

Look closely and the pattern is consistent across every decade: infrastructure → opportunity → champions. The United States simply built its machinery first, so it harvested early headlines; when other countries invested the same care and cash, their fighters rose just as high, sometimes higher. The record of the ring, read in that light, isn’t a tribute to an inherently superior “American school” but to whoever happens to have the best gyms, coaches, sparring, and television slots at a given moment. Your own meticulously compiled lists, stripped of their U.S-centric spotlight, end up illustrating exactly that.

 

I think Ross has better top end names for sure, but there are some nitpicks to be made if so inclined. Canzoneri and McLarnin rank higher than Pac and Canelo on my all-time ratings, so Ross gets the edge there.

Pacho has never really impressed me as a top name given the lack of elite victories on his resume. Petrolle was literally at the end of his career following the second fight with Ross. Battalino was coming up in weight and wasn't nearly as successful at lightweight in general as he had been at featherweight. It could be argued that Klick was starting to slide by the time Ross beat him. And so on.

I'm still taking Ross based on top end names, but I think the margin's a bit closer than it's made out to be.

 

I'd shade toward Ross. He'd be a 12-20 type guy. Boxing didn't start in the 2000's.

 

I have Ross and Mayweather in the same neighborhood, but yeah, I think Ross generally rates a couple of slots higher on my all time lists.

 

**** man

 

Those are three Colombians, man.