Most exciting Puerto Rican fighter: Wilfredo Gomez, Edwin Rosario, Felix Trinidad, or Miguel Cotto

Gomez is both the best and most exciting of that lot, and my fave is Rosario.

 

Agreed.

What a devastating guy he was early. Another one of those guys never the same after his first loss.

Man---I just watched that Alfedo Layne bout a few days ago. Yikes. They should have used another name in there and not called him Wilfredo Gomez.

 

Rosario had some of the best footwork I've ever seen

 

Rosario

 

His control of distance for countering was elite Rob, among other things.

 

Gomez was like a smaller Duran in many ways pre defeat Zad. With a touch more power.

 

I absolutely loved they way he could almost dip to the canvas and touch his butt to the floor. And come out of that position firing. Just like Sweet Pea. But Gomez was not given a lot of credit for his technical expertise in there---like lots of the high ko guys.

But those high ko guys have to have elite rare skills to get those ko results. They have to. And for awhile Wilfredo Gomez did. And he was a real scary guy during that timeframe. It was a real pleasure watching him back then--one of my favorites, back in the day.

 

Gomez.

 

Gomez was a brilliant boxer-puncher with a plethora of skills before he fell in love with his power a bit too much. He had virtually everything.

 

One beautiful thing about Bazooka Gomez was how he always looked like he was lollypopping his punches … then they would just explode on the target like a smart bomb hitting a bunker.

He might increase pace and output, but he never seemed to over-leverage his shots or dig or shift weight to try to throw harder. They seemed effortless — I once was at a game where Justin Verlander was throwing 99 mph in the ninth inning in 100-degree, super-humid Atlanta summer weather … and watching his motion, it was like he was a dad throwing catch in his backyard with a kid — but it came out of his hand like it was shot out of a cannon. Wilfredo was like that.

He was also a combination puncher. A lot of big punchers fall into looking for big shots — Wilfredo never fell into that trap. A lot of punching pressure, even in fights where he looked exhausted from being weight-drained.

In his KO of Derrik Holmes, it looked like Holmes was a quitter. He went down eight times in five rounds, sometimes with seeming to barely get hit. The Ring reported on why — one of Gomez’s punches had broken his jaw basically in half, not a fracture line but actual bone-from-bone separation. Along with that, Wilfredo splits one of his molars in half (top to bottom split down the middle, not like chipping off the top) along the lines of the fracture. The Ring published the X-ray photos to illustrate it.

I’ve never heard of even a heavyweight doing that — splitting an opponent’s tough along with the jaw. Most jawline fractures are simply cracks in the bone … not breaking it two. Bone is bone and a jaw is a jaw … to think that a 122-pound man could do that kind of damage is, to me, incomprehensible.

 

Trinidad was the most exciting while Gomez was most likely the best. Tito would go down in the early rounds on a few occasions but got up better than most.

 

I also enjoyed watching Alfredo Escalera as well