Zale would have trouble catching Duran. Duran would land a lot of counter shots. The accumulation of punches would weaken Zale, who would start showing the decline around the 10th. If it's 15 rounds, the referee stops the fight somewhere around the 12th or 13th rounds. If it's 10, Duran wins a clear decision.
You really don`t think too highly of Zale do you? Anyway, Zale by decision or late TKO for me. Tony`s size, strenght and punching power will dictate the outcome of this bout imo.
i think Duran can do it look what he did to Hagler and Zale wasnt as good as Hagler but maybe would have been more aggresive but i see a Duran victory
It really more a case of how highly I think of Duran. Duran gave Hagler a hell of a fight. Hagler is way, way better than Zale. As for what I think about Zale, you ought to study Zale's record sometime. He lost tons of fights before winning the championship, including three losses by knock out. He won the title right before the war, beat some good middleweights, lost a few, and then didn't fight for several years while the war was on. The title, like other titles, was put in mothballs while most men his age, including himself, were overseas fighting the axis powers. He returned to a war drained division, as were most divisions from middleweight upward (a lot of middleweights moved to light heavy and even heavyweight, as light heavies moved to heavy), blew away a bunch of dead-enders, barely survived Graziano, who was a small middleweight, was stopped by Graziano, regained the title and then was pummled by Cerdan. It's not that impressive of a career. Zale isn't a top 10 middleweight for sure. We can talk about whether there's room for him in the top 20. But Hagler, Monzon, Robinson, Fullmer, LaMotta, Hearns, Jones, Toney, Hopkins, and so on would have blown right through him. He wasn't in that class. Duran would have outboxed and exhausted him. Graziano made Zale look good in their third fight. Graziano made Robinson look even better.
I like both these guys. Even @ 160 I still give Duran the edge. I just think he had too many tools for Zale to overcome.
