Ricardo Lopez not enough credit

My introduction to Lopez was the second Alvarez fight. I read in this thread where he was a bigger guy fighting smaller opponents, and the Alvarez fights fly in the face of that comment. It may still be true, or perhaps not, but that second fight with Alvarez showed he had far more than just physical advantages. He was a very gritty son of a ***** too, and exceptionally competitive. Alvarez couldn't make weight, and came into the ring ridiculously bigger than Lopez did. Didn't matter. Lopez came in tough, and gutted out a decision win against the naturally bigger man. I was a fan from then on.

 

Thinking more about it, that's actually a really solid comparison.

 

Lopez was definitely huge for a guy able to make Straw, freakish really considering he hardly ever seemed to even have any weight problems even as he got older.alvarez was the same, a huge weightcutter but he was always struggling with it.

Both are big light-fly\average fly size.Ideally minimum\straw and light fly would never have existed and Gushiken, Chang, Zapata, Carbajal, Lopez etc would all have added to the Fly talent pool.

All the modern weight cutting for advantage once the junior divisions came in for the sub-bantams is a major gripe of mine.Imagine how good Bantam and Fly would have been throughout the 80s if we take them away.

 

Agree completely.

 

Foster fought a lot more good fighters than Ricardo did imo.Just that many of the ones he actually beat were before he won the title and then towards the end of his reign when he was declining.

A good number of Foster's title challengers really were mediocre though, that's definitely true.

Hard to think of a good comparison for Lopez from one of the bigger weightclasses.Maybe Calzaghe comes closest for quality\length of reign ratio in modern fighter.He's a notch or two above for quality though to me.Grigorian a notch or trwo below because of Alvarez and maybe a couple others like Sorjaturong.

 

Yeah Foster did fight much better guys on the way up. I guess Calzaghe is a better comparison the only real difference between them being Lopez was more dominant.

 

Much more dominant.Calzaghe had a fair few nights of looking mediocre against lmited challengers.That was about 70% due to his attitude as much as showing outright weaknesses in his armour though.Still, he wasn't nearly as consistent...that's one area nobody can really criticise Ricardo, he was like a machine there.

 

I like this post. Apart from the Sweet Pea bit ;-)

 

Agree with all of this 100%, the last bit is my major gripe, but there can be no doubt light fly gave birth to way better fighters and way better fights than straw ever has.

 

No doubt, though a lot of that was because of the sheer volume of good Flyweight talent around circa 80 and into the early 90s.It could sustain another relatively viable looking weightclass(as Bantam could with Superfly), even if when you really look closely they were needless additions.As soon as we entered a period where there wasn't as much talent coming through around Fly and Bantam the jr weights just become a big detriment.The addition of Straw was just ridiculous, if they absolutely needed to make yet another weightclass a superheavy one would have made much more sense.

Not that there hasn't still been a number of good competitive fights there to this day, but that's besides the point as you don't need good or great fighters to make great interesting fights.I just see them as talent pool diluters and often-times a refuge for fighters who wouldn't be able to cut it as a champ if there were only the two weightclasses.

 

Agree 100%. It sucks for me especially as Fly is one of my favourite weights and was deprived of some class battles. Back in the day Chang and Zapata showed they could move up. Flyweight in fact has some prominent guys who would've been light fly/straw in a later era (Wilde, Perez, Canto) and what a waste that would've been. In the 90s you would've loved to have seen Lopez, Carbajal, Chiquita and Arbachakov all at Fly.

I mean, even now, Segura is still cutting to make Fly now, why he ever needed to be at light fly I don't know. Marquez is what, 5'2 or summat? Wouldn't it be great if Joyi, Gonzalez, Marquez, Moruti, Viloria, Mayol and Concepcion were all having it out in the next two years?! And that's excluding the most probably finished Wonjongkam and...Sonny Boy Jaro :-( Part of the reason modern boxing doesn't match up is with because the amount of weight classes and the added allure of 24 hour rehydration periods, it dilutes the depth of the divisions. Add in the belts and it's another hindrance to great era's breaking out of the pack. Showtime have done a decent job with their two tournaments, but it still took too long.

 

Lopez at least had Alvarez . Foster had absolutely no1 .

 

Super bantam is largely redundant as well. Some 122lbers have done as gold at feather, some haven't. It happens. Would Wilfredo Gomez be any less a fighter if he'd beaten smaller feathers in non-title fights before stepping up to fight the best at feather (Sanchez) and failing?

Barrera and Morales could've kicked the **** out of each other without having to make 4lbs less. Fenech showed he didn't need to stop off there before kicking arse at 126lbs.