How great was Ricardo Lopez?

How great is he? Great enough to be Colonel Bob Sheridan's choice for greatest fighter he's ever seen.

THAT great.

Outside the top 100 for me :good

 

Another fight where he was humongous compared to his opposition.

 

Yeah he should've stopped picking on midgets. **** straw off and fight Arbachakov, Sasakul or summat. Considering how good he was there were no deserving challengers at the always talent thin minimumweight. My beef is that he didn't seek higher challenges. Given the small weight disparity between the very tiny weights it isn't comparable to a great middleweight denying an opportunity to move north to light heavy, nor a bantam to move to feather, especially given as they are also more talent rich divisions.

Essentially being the greatest straw weight means nothing to me, so it's all about opposition. Show me the quality opposition and I'll believe in the lofty reputation bestowed upon Lopez. As it is, he only fought about five or so operators of any real quality IMO. And some of them were benefit of the doubt aesthetic based evaluations.

I hope you see what I'm getting at, to the uninitiated it may seem like I'm hating but that's not the case, I paid top dollar a few years back for a career set before it was all on YouTube, have watched all his filmed fights bar one at least once (not in my collection but on YouTube so I should get round to watching it really, Vs Grigsby) and think technically, and aesthetically Lopez is not far from perfect, if he isn't already an absolute genius.

But I give more credit to Chucho Castillo. Sure he wasn't as consistently on the winning side but nor would Lopez be against the equivalent competition at fly or light fly IMO.

Seriously the light fly pool is just draining fly, straw drains light fly and I doubt anyone could naturally make that weight nowadays without 24 hour weigh in's. If Lopez cannot be castigated for fighting there he must at least be given flak for being a bad decision maker.

My problem with his light fly tenure I'd that Alvarez really isn't all that as a fighter.

 

Top 100 all time for sure. The only straw weight of note that he missed was Chana Porpaoin, he defeated the Thai's conqueror. He struggled with Alvarez, who was pretty damned good when he wanted to be, but he eviscerated everyone else. And it wasn't simply because he was bigger than his opponents, because when he fought taller guys like Potelo and Caramillo he blew them out, too. He dominated most of his opponents because he was better than them, by quite a margin.

And for that, I've got to him some credit. Weak weight class and he should have gone up to 108 a bit sooner. That said, he did enough during his time in the ring for me to consider him a great fighter.

 

This is all fair, my gripe was not with height but with the lack of quality in his division. He'd still have been taller than Arbachakov (I think) but it's talent+size that would've forced him to prove himself in the upper echelon.

I can see him in the 90-100 range, my biggest problem is with these 'top 50 of all time' opinions. I cannot see the argument for Lopez>Chang other than mental mindset and the '0'.

 

Some of you seem to be saying Lopez's hair was too short for his facial features to suit him. But, if that's not what p4p means, I don't know what is. Look what Holyfield was able to accomplish with Tyson.