Fighter's That Wern't Rated As Amateurs...

Hi Guys.
I followed the amateurs quite a lot around the early to mid 70s, two of my favs being Dave Williams / Robbie Davies, but cannot from memory seeing Dave Green in many title winning fights, didn't win a ABA as far as I can recall, but his style was better suited to the pros, as was proven, good old days back then, going to the divs, and seeing the likes of Hope, Magri, Flint, Gardener, Batten, and lesser knowns , Johnny Whitehorn, Freddie Knowles, Dave Banks, and the big punching Tom Imrie, saw some classics in my time, all old men now, like yours truly.
stay safe guys, chat soon.
Mike.

 

Larry Holmes. People who saw him get dominated by Duane Bobick must be perplexed that he could go on to dominate the heavyweight division.

 

Victor Galindez was 1-2 for his amateur career (atleast listed on boxrec),guess what happened.

And if @George Crowcroft could mention a man like Armstrong that never actually had amateur fights,I'll tell you a story of some underrated minimumweight tough bloke.

Muhammad Rachman,he lit up one of perhaps the most unhinged title winning upsets I've ever seen (or read,no full footage of the fight),dude was almost hitting 40 in the lowest weightclasses,which means men ages faster there.

He was a former world champ in the weightclasses,but his reign was quite short and he started gaining more losses.

He came to his 3rd world title shot,now 39 facing an undefeated skilled boxer in Kwanthai Sithmorseng,yet he,surprisingly struck gold as he was down on the cards,he knocked out Kwanthai in 9 and became the division's oldest champ.

Now cutting off the storytelling,when Rachman first started training,days goes by and he wondered how did he only train and not fight a single bit,he went to Surabaya and entered the Pirih boxing gym,where he impressed the trainer from his good spirit despite the fact he's 20 at the time,quite late to start,he would be accepted as a member and history starts.

 

Future Fly, Bantam and Super-Bantam World champion (as well as British champion in 2 division (fly and Feather) and EBU fly champ) lost
38 times (with only 29 wins) as an amateur!

 

I believe he alternated between amateurs & pros in his early years. He used the name Melody Jackson for some fights.

boxrec's amateur records are often woefully incomplete.

 

I just rechecked Armstrong's interview in Peter Heller's book "In this Corner" - he initially turned pro under the name Melody Jackson w/ no amateur experience b/c he was desperate for cash (he got paid $30 for his debut), then entered the amateur ranks under the name Henry Armstrong in hopes of qualifying for the Olympics (which he didn't), before proceeding w/ a pro career in earnest.

 

I wouldn’t use boxrec to gauge what kind of amateur career someone had unless they had a pretty big amateur career.

Those aren’t comprehensive by any means and mostly are from researching/scraping national tournaments and international competitions as those results are usually pretty findable (especially in countries like USA and in the UK).

If a guy was competing internationally, that means he was doing well on the national circuit to get picked to represent his country. And if he was in major national tournaments like the National Golden Gloves, you have to qualify at the local and regional level to get to those, so again it means a fighter is at a certain fairly high level just to get to that tournament. Like you might have to win the Tennessee GG and then the Southeast GG just to make National GG. So you’re at least the best in your region.

 

Fair point, but that was in the Olympic Trials and you have to qualify for that by winning some national event to get there so Larry accomplished some things to even be fighting Bobick in that event.

 

sure. That is a good point. I guess i interpreted the title as fighters who weren't elite amateurs but were good amateurs. Holmes was also stopped twice by Nick Wells so while Holmes was certainly a good amateur, he wasn't elite.