Did Ramirez dump the Mancini fight ?

He did have those positive qualities you mentioned. He had a couple of bad qualities you left out. Mediocre defense and a tendency to cut. Quality of opposition can vary greatly between champions. It is illogical to think all champions are protected to the same degree or face the same quality of opposition as other champions. I don't deny he was a good fighter. But he won the title and defended against obscure, medicore opposition. And he had a hard time against some of them. Orlando Romero was never a factor before or after fighting Mancini. Yet he fought tooth and nail in a close encounter with Ray for 9 rounds. Same with Kim, except he lasted 14 rounds. The experts at the time even thought Bramble was fairly undeserving of a title shot.
Go back and scour the boxing magazines of the time to get a feel for the lightweight landscape at the time and what the writers thought about the division. The WBC title was seen as higher grade and Rosario was rated above Mancini. Rosario defended against Howard Davis, then gave Ramirez a rematch. Both guys were much tougher and highly thought of than Frias, Romero, Kim, a badly faded Espana and Bramble. Dave Wolf even tried to make a championship fight between Mancini and Kenny Bogner. The same Bogner who had already been stopped by Bramble. The WBA top 10 was kind of a running joke when Mancini was champion.

Ray Mancini beat ONE legitimate lightweight top 10 contender. Jose Luis Ramirez. I am not counting Chacon because he was not really a lightweight when they fought.

 

If we don't count Mancini beating Chacon then shouldn't we also not count Ramirez beating CBE? :think

 

All fighters that are successful are protected and carefully matched , their opponents are selected to showcase the fighters skills, some are development fights that are meant to push the fighter, sometimes they are fed journeymen known for being stopped. At the end of the day a fighter is a product of his management and in Mancini's case Wolf may have made some bad style matchups for Ray making him look worse than he was. Ray looked pretty **** hot vs a prime Arguello until the late rounds he took great shots and gave Alexis all he could handle. Here is the thing about the economics of boxing when Mancini was champion he was the guy who could make everyone money. There were not alot of managers knocking down Wolfs door to fight Ray prior to the title but as soon as he was the money guy and Wolf being a smart manager knew Mancini's style usually made for a short career a small window to make as much money for him as possible. For fighters like him to have longevity he couldn't go to war in every fight see Joe Frazier. It is clear by the matchups he had that Wolf had a not so good eye for styles that showcased Ray case in point were the styles of his opponents and the bad style matchup with Bramble. Bramble was a tall narrow fighter with a tight clam defense and punched up the middle bad for a hooking swarmer with a thick wide torso and short arms.

Many fighters were matched with tough opposition too often and had a short career. Bad management and poor opponent selection. I will agree that Rosario fought the better opposition being Puerto Rican he had some big money grudge matches with Ramirez and Chavez the classic Mexican-PR rivalry, Camacho and of course HD Jr the most avoided lightweight around. But knowing style matchups the swarming style of Mancini is a bad matchup for a boxer like Davis fairly common knowledge in boxing, Davis would never have the power to keep Mancini off. But punchers like Rosario had issues being able to land effectively on boxers like Camacho and a Davis. For the Davis team it was a better matchup.

 

They really screwed up eventually with Mancini though. They obviously avoided Davis because he seemed like a bad matchup for Mancini...on paper at least. But Davis seemed like a terrible matchup for Jim Watt and look how that turned out. Instead they matched Mancini up with Bramble. Presumably because everyone thought Bramble was such an awkward weirdo that he couldn't have any chance against Mancini. Of course that underestimation turned out to be a huge blunder. I think Mancini might have beaten Davis if he forced Davis to fight Mancini's fight.

 

Mancini-Davis is a 50/50 proposition, but I don't think Howard would make mistakes with Ray that he did with Jim Watt, though admittedly his heart wasn't into boxing after his fifth professional fight.

 

he grant believes every Italian descended fighter is a fraud and every thing he does on these forums is to convince us of this.

Everything else he posts about is cover up, a guise to be "a normal poster" to hide his true agenda. If you think I'm crazy, you haven't been here long enough.

 

Well I've been here three years longer than yourself. :yep

...but admittedly, I've not ever noticed this bias from HG and have always thought he came across relatively normal and fairly knowledgeable on a wide array of subjects.

Hazarding a guess - does this perceived bias pretty much all stem from the Marciano bickering threads? Because I generally avoid those, as they're not generally representative of the quality that elevates the Classic. (with fault on both sides of the fence, the pro-Rocky crowd and the anti-)

This is my first encounter with HG randomly bashing a very good fighter, which is eyebrow-raising to me having never encountered anything of the sort before or enough of it to say there's a pattern of targeting & discrediting Italians specifically. :conf If that stuff has abounded I've just missed it.

 

I routinely see Mancini referred to here as "a glorified clubfighter." Not necessarily by the OP, but you do see it all the time.

I guess what makes me roll my eyes about it so much is that the very phrase "glorified clubfighter" just smacks of something they read once upon a time that they think sounds cool and kitschey. Problem is, it's just rote memorization of something they've read. Like the "Oh, what could have been" chestnut we see rolled out every time Salvador Sanchez is discussed. It's just fvcking lazy. It's the standard pet responses we see for a handful of fighters here that always let you suss out who actually knows their head from their azz when it comes to boxing, and who just toes the popular "scratching the surface" line.

 

A glorified clubfighter? :-( So people regard Mancini as basically of the same ilk as, say, Tex Cobb?

I wonder if those same people are just dismissive of guys with pressure styles like Ray's in general. "If they ain't cute, they aren't good boxers!" is another of those litmus tests for people who talk a lot but don't actually say (or know) anything worthwhile.

 

It seems Mancini suffered from an extended backlash by a fair few that were into boxing at the time he was active and remember(and disliked\disagreed) how hyped and relatively protected he was for a time, and struggle to seperate that from assessing his inherent value as a fighter.

He was a good solid fighter, but not ahead of the pack for that era.There were a lot of fighters hovering around that level in the 80s at lightweight that could all beat\lose to each other...Ramirez being in there as well.Only really Arguello at the start and then Chavez and then Pea at the end of the decade elevated themselves beyond that.

 

This is fair. :good

 

good post but I'd put Camacho and Rosario at the top of that heap.

 

Yes but they aren't exempt from the "could lose to any of the rest in that group on a given night" bit.

 

The Bramble fights were great competitive fights, not thrashings the second was very close imo.It's not like Bramble at that point wasn't good too, or couldn't have fought well against Ramirez.

Ramirez just wasn't THAT good compared to him.He fought one of his best fights against Arguello over ten, fighting evenly, but the explosive thin man was never at his best over that distance, he never seemed to be able to change his well honed 15 round pace to suit.

You only need to see how close Mancini ran him over ten in their fifteen rounder to see it was well within Ray's capabilities to produce a similar performance to that one.

And Rosario while more talented than Ray or Jose Luis, was not a smart fighter and was hot and cold..a fighter that abandoned much of his skills very early on in favour of crude stalking and right hand punching.He's the type that could dominate or blow out Mancini, or turn in a front running effort like he did in the first Ramirez fight and have a tough fight with him...or get caught and stopped while in front due to his dodgy chin and **** recovery abilities.You don't know what you will get with him.

Fighting evenly over ten rounds with Arguello and being able to match Edwin Rosario does not exlude someone from a potential loss against another good fighter(who has also fought evenly over ten with Alexis) if the styles and form go against you.If you think that you are a fool.

As i said earlier, few of the 80s lightweights were good and consistent enough to go on long runs of victory or dominance over the other top ten guys.You would think you were talking about prime Vicente Saldivar and not Jose Luis Ramirez here.