Roberto Duran vs Floyd Mayweather's opponents- does he reach 49-0?

That 71 sure had an awful lot of complete no-hopers, huh? Can you imagine if Floyd had been fighting guys like Jose Vasquez (1-1), Andres Salgado (1-3), Pepe El Toro (2-1), Alirio Acuna (0-3), Alvaro Rojas (5-5), Ezequiel Obando (0-3), Bernardo Diaz (2-4) etc. 40+ fights into his career?? Not to mention the dozens of guys with respectable looking records but no wins of note, multiple recent losses, etc.

Duran had several quality wins scattered in there but let's be honest here.

 

That's one way of looking at it. Another is he beat a very tough fighter in Ernesto Marcel, caught everyone's attention in New York with a one round win over Benny Huetes, and destroyed a former Super Featherweight champion in Hirosh Kobayashi.

 

Could you imagine if Floyd had to fight more than twice a year, in places where he couldn't ignore drug penalties and inject whatever he wanted into his body.

 

Maybe but a case can be made that Duran's lightweight accomplishments exceed Mayweather's entire record. He won the lightweight title and defended it 12 times, so there's 13 quality wins.
Prior to becoming champion he beat Ernesto Marcel, and former Superfeather weight champion Hiroshi Kobayashi, throw in Palomino and you've got some pretty decent wins.

 

Well Duran was a WBA champion so he had some terrible defenses. He's a little overrated as a lightweight. But still clear ATG.

 

Not a serious case. I know that you pretend to have watched all of Floyd's fights and followed his career but posts like this make it impossible to believe you.

 

Does he get to fight a large majority of no-namers, no-hopers, bums, and B-minus fighters throughout his first 60 fights? Only thing stopping him would be his hand injuries.

PS- Are you suggesting that it was harder to get away with cheating back in Duran's era?

 

His first 72 was far inferior to Floyd's 49

 

A bit of an exaggeration I admit, but at the end of the day, nobody is ranking Floyd higher than Duran. Floyd has some good names on his resume but the problem is that for the most part it's past prime Oscar, past prime SMM, past prime Pac, mixed in with Baldamor, Berto, and fighters of that level. I mean come on why would he fight Berto?

 

Guilty of exaggeration on my part, but Duran's over all resume is certainly better than Floyd's. The win against SRL is far better than Floyd's best win. I actually think Duran's close loss to Hagler is better than any of Floyd's wins but I'm probably in the minority on that one.
But add the Palomino, Barkley and Pipino Cuevas, into the mix and his over all wins certainly exceed Floyd's. But he also had losses along the way that Floyd never had, so in my view Duran had higher peaks and lower valley's than Floyd, but Floyd was more consistent.

You seemed to conveniently ignored this post because it doesn't play into your agenda now does it?

 

Which was exactly my point. Floyd's hands would not hold up (and Duran would not be undefeated for 18 years).

Cheating has and always will be in boxing. It's just the type that Floyd does nowadays has artificially extended his prime to an incredible length. And I don't think it is unreasonable to say that a large part of his greatness is that ridiculously long peak.

To criticize someone for fighting often against weak fighters does nothing more than betray an ignorance of the history of the sport. Duran fought plenty of excellent fighters, plenty of rated contenders. Same as Floyd they both fought a ton of really good fighters. The only difference is Duran had to have other fights to collect a paycheck, the same as every non heavyweight before the 1980s.

 

No ignorance on my end. I'm fine with Duran fighting bums and novices throughout his career to make ends meet. But I don't believe that serious boxing fans should rate wins over (0-2) and (5-5) fighters, individually or collectively. Throwing around the career win stats of someone like Duran in comparison to a recent great like Mayweather who had far fewer of those extremely soft touches is dishonest by omission. Especially when people are on here criticizing Mayweather for fighting Berto for his 49th fight when Duran fought Andres Salgado (1-3).

 

Agree about the Leonard win. I don't really think Palomino, Barkley, and Cuevas are better than anything Floyd did--De La Hoya, Canelo, and Hatton is not a worse line up than that. The Hagler fight wasn't a negative for Duran, but I don't count a clear loss as being so great; it sort of reminds me of Oscar being competitive with Hopkins before the liver shot.

 

Doesn't compare to Oscar. For starters Duran went the distance and was the first fighter to do so, with respect to Hagler defending his title, and secondly, the judges had Duran ahead of Hagler up until the championship rounds. In other words, had it been a 12 round fight, Duran would have won.

Barkley's win was great, Duran was 38 and Barkley had just beaten Hearns, how can that not be considered a great win? Hell it was the fight of the year.

That win was certainly better than anything I can think of that Floyd did. But I might compare the Palomino win to the Hatton win, that doesn't seem too far out of line, although the Palomino fight was at 147 and if I'm not mistaken the Hatton fight was at 140. Both were good wins in fact I would say the Hatton win was one of Floyd's best, not that he won, but they way he won it.

 

Well Duran fought for 5 decades, only he and Johnson managed to do that. He fought in the 60,s, 70's, 80's, 90's and 2000's. But admittedly he was a shell of himself after the Barkley fight. But you fight that long you're going to get peaks and valley's and you're going to fight champs and chumps.