LEGITIMATE and demonstrable blatant ducks.

If you make a nomination, be prepared to defend it. :nono

For clarity's sake: "Mayweather ducked Margarito because some fringe whiners really wanted to see it at one point and they didn't meet up thus proving he was scared of losing his zero!! :nutcase" is an inelegant argument and would not count toward submission here.

We're only talking here about irrefutable cases of boxers ducking each other with empirical fact (and minimal editorializing or conjecture about motives or innermost thoughts) from throughout history.

There needs to have been clear and present opportunity, demand and substantial mutual incentive in the first place - and it needs to be provable that Boxer 1 in some manner rejected the match without a mitigating reason such as injury or Boxer 2 pricing themselves out, refusing testing on the grounds of 'fear of needles', etc.


I'll start:




Amir Khan blatantly, irrefutably, legitimately ducked Jon Thaxton from early 2007 until late 2008.

http://www.eastsideboxing.com/weblog/news.php?p=13863&more=1

(there are tons more articles documenting the spouting off and coyness by turns shown by Amir regarding Jon during their British & Commonwealth co-reign, but this one summarizes the situation well enough)

During that period Thaxton repeatedly called him out. Thaxton was in a legitimate position to be seen as credible (more so than anyone Khan did face around then) and in fact beneficial to Khan's career. (again, more than anyone he did opt to face). Thaxton was Khan's mandatory, and Khan was Thaxton's. Each was on the other man's radar and the British public wanted it, and it would've been the domestic event of the year in either of those years, or at least up there.

Am I saying Thaxton would have beaten him? No. Khan probably would have won.

Did Thaxton's very rocky decline in 2009 sort of allow Khan to smirk this off and sweep it under the rug as their careers plotted forth in almost opposite vertical directions? Yeah, probably. Hindsight is 20-20. During that period, however, Thaxton was game and credible and wanted Khan and was a lucrative option and they were mandatory for each other and Khan evaded him. Thaxton was a decent fighter, and southpaw - and until facing two consecutive lefties in 2011 (McCloskey and Judah) Khan had never faced one in the pros. Khan took a path of least resistance instead of proving himself the #1 lightweight in the UK head to head with the sole other claimant standing in his way. Remember, in mid-'08 Gomez was effectively coming off a TKO loss (a real one, down hard and then basically out on his feet - unlike Thaxton's loss in his Euro title bid, a TKO on cuts) - and Prescott was supposed to have been stylistically tailor-made bow-wrapped gift for Khan, a cherry pick gone wrong.

Blatant duck. Far more so, as far as I'm concerned, than Khan not pursuing a rematch with Prescott - regardless of whether Thaxton went on to do poorly after 2008 or whether Prescott did alright for himself now and then after his flukey initial claim to fame.

 

I expect a cavalcade of supporting data, BE! :deal

Like, twice as many paragraphs as my OP! :bart

 

Go face the corner and take a yourself, moron.

I didn't say they had to be ducks at world level or even that a ducked party need be someone the majority of international fans have ever heard of. That all has naught to do with the criteria set forth.

Khan wasn't always up at that level, you do realize that? There was a time when he was still yet to break free of the domestic scene. At such time, he should have faced Thaxton and was by no means in a different atmospheric layer altogether, where Thaxton was a piddling nobody in comparison, as it would later be once Khan broke out at world level and Thaxton's career nosedived in a dovetail with Khan's success.


In the context of that slice of Khan's career, regardless of whether it matters now in the grand scheme or whether it seems in hindsight that Khan would have thrashed him, from 2007 until 2008, he ducked Thaxton. You would be very hard pressed to argue otherwise, in the face of nearly insurmountable evidence.

 

Burns vs. Broner and to a greater extent Bradley vs. Khan are in my view more under the umbrella of "conjectural" ducks, where basically one fan base says white and the other says black...one says up, the other says down. It's the same thing with the Mayweather and Pacquiao nonsense and various other cases that have been quibbled over plenty on here. I'm looking more for examples where it was quite unmistakable that one party wanted nothing to do with another despite having ample money or status up for grabs...not based on circumstantial inference or "reading into" one's behavior, but on actual quotations and choices of career path...or more damningly, matches being signed and sealed but one party backing out with phantom, vague, flimsy or nonexistent excuses.

It's subjective, I'll grant that - but there is a line between "I think A is scared of B!" and "XYZ happened, showing that A didn't want B" - which any reasonable adult (there are some of us still in the foxholes here :yep) can plainly see.

Bowe vs. Lewis is a great shout. It doesn't get any more irrefutable than belts in the rubbish can.

 

Reasonably, no, it really isn't. At the end of the day it's still an educated interpretation of the facts, but in this case the facts are far more plentiful and to any intelligent person quite a deal more convincing.

Bit of a cop-out, innit? That's like you saying I'm "making up" the sky being colored blue and saying I can't therefore refute that all of Shakespeare's works in fact were the collaborative efforts of several monkeys jumping up and down on a printing press, since objective reality can't be satisfactorily proven any more than your ****** jumping theory disproved.

We have more evidence of the blue sky than of monkeys accidentally stomping out the Bard's oeuvre. Likewise, we have a slew of evidence of Khan ducking Thaxton and very little in the way of concrete (pardon the phrase ) evidence of Mayweather actually being frightened of Margarito.

Ward ducking Bute or vice-versa? Either way, file that under purely conjectural.

 

Real golf or mini-putt? :think