duran beating barkley would be equal to floyd going up and beating ggg?

Duran-Barkley is my favorite fight ever

 

GGG is a much better fighter than Barkley. Floyd wouldn't stand a chance, in fact, I'd say it would be unfair. That said, Duran vs GGG I'd love to see. Duran had a harder chin than anybody GGG has faced, with real power and skills. Somebody mentioned the Moore fight, which I rewatched last night. Duran was a real hardass, he took Moore's best shots and laughed at him.

 

Compared to GGG, Barkley was skilless. He was bigger, that is all.

 

I will say that while I do respect Barkley, he really does live off of beating Tommy Hearns twice. His next best performances are leagues behind and a shallow list at that. He finished 43-19-1. He fought a lot of great fighters, but he only ever beat one of them.

His win over Hearns is obviously better than anything Golovkin has done, but if you look at everything I'm not sure the answer is clear one way or the other. If Golovkin had beaten or does beat someone better or three times more than the whopping 2 "B-level" victories that he has (Geale, Macklin), I think the argument for his scalp being more significant than Duran's victory over Barkley would be a highly attractive one for me... And when you factor in styles, value of top win, value of poor performances, etc, it all gets highly up to the beholder, as is everything with boxing.

I will say that Duran and Hearns were both acclimated to some proven or experienced degree at Middleweight before facing Barkley while Mayweather has never fought at Middleweight, in addition to winning his first ever title at a lower weight class than Duran did.