Greater Fighter: Eduardo Lausse or Rodrigo Valdez

You are once again picking and choosing stuff that supports your argument and ignoring everything else. OK, I can do that too:

If a journeyman(at best) like Eddie Pace can go the distance with Monzon then why not Lausse?

If a 12-fight youngster like Tom Bethea can go the distance with a 70-fight vet like Monzon, why not Lausse?

If Carlos Salinas can hold Monzon to a draw, why not Lausse?

(see what I mean?)

 

And just for the record, he lost to Selpa by tko when his seconds threw in the towel. His rib had been fractured in the 6th round, yet he fought on for several more rounds.

Two years later he BEAT Selpa.

 

Going 10 rounds with a pre-championship form Carlos Monzon is very different to going 15 rounds with him, not to mention being competitive. Sure, some examples can be brought up where Monzon went the distance with an inferior fighter, but overall he beat a greater number of quality fighters and even stopped them inside the distance.

For Lausse, not much aside from the win over Gene Fullmer can be brought up in his defense. Not that anyone argued that Lausse was in Monzon's class, but I believe he would be decisively outclassed to a greater extent than Valdez was against Monzon.

It is not that Lausse's losses make him out to be a bad fighter, he just doesn't have too many quality wins to counter-act these losses while in or near his prime. He didn't exactly go through a "murderer's row" of middleweights and still picked up some losses that are difficult to explain away.

 

Exactly. You've just explained, in a nutshell, why Lausse was a really good fighter and Monzon was a great one. No argument from me.

Whether he would have given Monzon more trouble than Valdez is debatable. I lean towards Lausse, but who knows?

 

BTW....Lausse has a mere 10 losses in 87 fights to "explain away". With a win-loss ratio like that does he really need to?

Keep in mind that he also went undefeated in 35 straight fights, with a 34-fight win streak(with 29 knockouts) from 1952-1956.

 

So did a lot of Argentinian fighters. I was talking more so about his record against quality, top 10 ranked opponents which is very, very thin.

With only a couple of wins over top ranked opponents, and an equal number of losses or struggling performances against such opponents (along with some lesser men like Selpa and Savage), it gets more difficult to explain his inability to stay as a top contender for long (basically a single year).

I've made the same criticisms about Valdez, but Valdez to his credit beat every opponent he fought other than Monzon in the span of 8 years.

 

Sow ho do you guys pick between Lausse and Pender?

 

From what the record shows, he beat three top 10 opponents (Fullmer, Tiger Jones and Johnny Sullivan), drew with one (Savage) and lost a split decision to another (Boyd). The wins over top ranked opponents outweigh the losses to top ranked opponents.

What is the win-loss ratio with top 10 opponents for Valdez?

Valdez has 8 losses in 73 fights. Lausse has 10 losses in 87 fights. Neither one fought a large number of top 10 ranked opponents. Their records appear very comparable to me.

 

The problem is that during the span of his prime, Lausse also had losses to an opponent who wasn't close to being top 10 which is worse than losing to a top 10 opponent.

 

How do you know Selpa wasn't even close? You mentioned before that Selpa was a "journeyman". Do you know anything about his career? How much research have you done into it? Are you aware that he was a champion down in Argentina? Are you sure that he was inferior to ALL of the top 10 middleweights ranked by The Ring at that time?

I'm not positive, but I'd be willing to wager that the answer is no to all those questions.

For the record, Valdez was floored and beaten in his seventh year(so claiming that he was "green") as a pro by a jouneyman named Pete Toro. Was Toro so superior to Selpa? Or what about Ralph Palladin, who beat Valdez despite having a mere 16 fights to his name?

 

He also fought far less frequently. Lausse had more fights in 4 years than Valdez had in twice as many years. Perhaps if Rodrigo had crammed like Lausse did then we'd see a few more losses on his ledger, eh? Perhaps more losses to the Pete Toros, Ralph Palladins or yes, even the Selpas of the world.

 

One has to be quite sceptical when it comes to many Argentinian fighters. Few of them travel outside the country and pad up their records against local competition. There have been several quality fighters out of the country, Lausse being one of them, but Selpa is more so an example of a local boxer who was only a blip on the radar in the world ratings. He was described as "unheralded" by the newspapers which reported Lausse's upset loss. He never made much of a mark on the world scene outside of upsetting Lausse.

Losing to him not only once but twice surely crashed Lausse's stock by quite a bit, as evident by him falling completely out of the rankings after rating as high as top 3 at one time.

I've been quite kind on Lausse for not bringing up his patchy early record, and in that respect one shouldn't bring up Valdez's either. Either way, as one can see on youtube, Valdez did very well in those questionable losses at the early part of his career and arguably deserved to win. Toro and Palladin certainly weren't any worse than Selpa, they competed against quality opponents regularly and even came up with some victories.

What's similar about these two is that both fighters seemed to come into their own between the ages of 25 and 30, quickly falling apart afterwards.

 

His prime? Lausse was a give and take brawler. Fighters of that sort historically have a short shelf life. Lausse losses to Selpa were his 77th and 78th bouts of a gruelling career. He had less than 10 fights after the last loss to Selpa(which included a WIN over Selpa). So I think it's safe to say that Lausse was past his best.

 

He was a puncher but he had surprisingly effective defense for a fighter of his style, rolling his shoulders and bobbing & weaving while looking for a spot to throw his left hook with full leverage behind it.

I wouldn't say that he necessarily had a grueling career, he blew away the majority of his opponents and only had a handful of tough fights in the United States. Think of a Tiger Jones in comparison. Losing to Selpa at 28 years of age is a definite blackmark on his record, despite the amount of fights he had. He looks serviceable enough against Wilf Greaves years later. Valdez and Lausse both seem to follow the same pattern as stated previously, with both having the best runs of their careers between the ages of 25 and 30.