Well honestly, how many eyes does one need? Eh, I'm not one for the "lineal champ" argument. Far too often he's not actually the best fighter int he division, so I disregard that almost entirely.
Tommy's notable Welterweight fights in the 80's were Cuevas, Randy Shields, and of course Leonard. Starling's whole welterweight career pretty much spanned the 80's. Like I said, I could see the argument strictly on accomplishements. Aside from Starlings more notable wins and the technical classics with Curry, he had some good scalps like Tommy Ayers, Lupe Aquino, and Kevin Howard. I don't think much of his TD6 loss to Bumphus. He would've broken down and stopped Bumphus IMO. I'd be interested in seeing his loss to Pedro Vilella, but have never seen it around.
It's not Hearns' resume that separates him from Starling. His welterweight resume is not that great. H2H is the reason why people rate him over Starling or Curry.
In this case though I'd say it's fair. For me, if you do think Palomino and Cuevas were too close to call then Benitez was certainly the man when Ray beat him. And Tommy never beat Ray. Honey' had slipped a bit but had demolished Vaca and had beaten THE MAN in Curry. I'm with you in some cases. But here it's legit; Starling beat Breland, never really 'drew' with him second time round, lost to Molinares, but Moliares went AWOL and Moochy beat Honeyghan in his very next fight. Starling was the champ', I'm not sure Tommy ever was as even if you say Ray didn't beat 'the man' then their bout surely decided who it was. And, sad to say as a Hearns nuthugger and who finds Leonard irritating, Tommy wasn't the man at 147.
They are very close. Starling's best victories hold up just fine against Cuevas, Shields and half-blind Saensak.
Brown might have been a bit green here(i agree it was a bit of an immature tentative effort at times) but he was still at least as good a fighter as the shuffle forward in straight lines while thinking i can just bang everyone out of there fighter he became by 1990. Brown only really had a 2 year or so window of being a really good fighter, looking back.Beginning right after this and ending about half way through his title run.He was a sort of poor man's Mike McCallum for a short while there.