Ive seen the majority of Whitaker`s fights & there is one thing that is obvious to me, he left a bit of magic in the ring vs Vasquez at 154, I know it wasnt a heavily taxing fight but I think going up to 154 then back down to 147 took something away from Whitaker. His previous performance vs McGirt was about as good as he has ever looked, right up there as one of his greatest performances, he beat Vasquez but looked NOTHING like his old self doing it & that pattern continued back down at 147 tho not to the same extent as he was much more comfortable. He looked nothing special in the Jacob`s, Hurtado or Rivera fights, he was clinging on to his p4p title with the RJJ & DLHs breathing down his neck. It goes to show, even the best boxers of all time struggle going up then down weight, the Whitaker that fought McGirt was undisputed p4p king, to me, that was the last of the real top drawer Whitaker, that Pea would have beat DLH & Trinidad IMO.
I was planing on making a thread asking if Whitaker's move up to 154 had a negative efect on the rest of his career. I think it did. It is realy difcult for a boxer near the end of his career to drop weight classes, no matter how good he might be. You beat me to it.
Was probably more the undertraining and oversnorting that effected him. I don't really think it was the weight drop that effected him. It wasn't like he packed on nothing but muscle to get to 154. He basically came into that fight fat. Even mid 90's I think he could have made 140 easy if he wanted to be at his leanest and meanest. He was no big welterweight by any means.
Whitaker did very well against Vazquez. His jas was surprisingly quick. His handspeed was as impressive as I've ever seen that night considering how many weights he had jumped up.
How so? The only thing different about that fight is that it wasnt the usual near shut out kind of dominance we were used to seeing from Pea. Vasquez made it hard with his strength, rough style and jab but got outlanded by some margin.
He was never the same, but I don't think the jump up and down itself had anything to do with it. I think it was just a typical natural, gradual decline that begins after a long and hard career against high-level opposition, as he had, and it just happened to begin around the time of the Vasquez fight.
