Wayne McCullough is my pick. Guys like Hagler, LaMotta, McCall etc never took sustained, prolonged, vicious beatings like Wayne did, his resilience was superhuman. I'd also mention James Toney here. For an old, fat ex-middleweight to go toe-to-toe with the likes of Peter and Rahman up at heavy is pretty special.
Are you kidding!? Did Wayne take anything even remotely close to the "St Valentines Day Massacre" LaMotta suffered at the hands of the great Sugar Ray Robinson & never went down!
The above two posts are the reasons why my picks have always been 1. LaMotta 2. McCullough But.... we can always speculate on Wayne being on par here, but the evidence separates them by a razor thin margin for me.
McCullough certainly showed the goods, but his opposition (while very good) wasn't up to par with guys like LaMotta, nor did he take such shots from larger fighters like LaMotta did against Nardico and Murphy, among others. Boy, did he look tough against Morales, though. So many flush punches, often in combination, only to dance it off or come storming right back at Erik. Tough as nails, that guy.
Very hard to distinguish between the guys at the top of these lists/ratings etc when it comes to chin. But Pops to say Lamotta didnt stand up to the kind of sustained punishment that WC did is a mindboggling statement. Jake was pretty underrated defensively but he walked through some wicked punishment in his time...against guys that were better fighters and bigger punchers p4p than Wayne ever had to contend with. Wayne is among the best chins Ive ever seen though...absolutely no disputing that.
McCullough was virtually a pinata vs Scott Harrison. I've never seen footage of LaMotta being beaten so mercilessly, and I include the massacre in that. McCullough-Harrison was something else.
Jaime Garza, one of the hardest pure puncher ever in the lower weight classes, was hitting Villasana so hard Marcos' entire body was spinning sideways... Like some kind of demented human top. Wasn't just his head turning, whole body was turned sideways. Earnie Shavers hit Tex Cobb with similar shots that spun Cobb around.