The best I`ve faced: Hagler (the ring magazine)

Yes they were....he may have had bad skin, but his chin is very good!

 

Don't draws count then? Your argument only works if you ignore the drawn scorecards and the others who favoured Hagler that I mentioned who were not on your list.

If Leonard's activity favoured Hagler, then Hagler's recent activity favoured Leonard. Hearns was still three brutal rounds against an all-time great puncher. Hagler was eating a lot of punches in that one. That's was followed by 11 brutal rounds against another hard hitter Mugabi. Before that, there were also 10 bruising rounds against Roldan. Who do you think lost more from 84-87, Leonard or Hagler?

 

I think Hagler himself knows he lost it. He wasn't acting very confident when the final bell rang. Not all fights are called robberies by the losing side.

For a fight to be controversial, I'll give you my definition. The loser needs to outland the winner in a fight with no knockdowns and the majority of media cards need to say the wrong boxer won. When both happen, then you have an argument for controversy.

Hagler has neither. He can blame himself, and I think still does. Others can frown upon how Leonard won it.

 

Yes.

 

No, I'm saying the draw cards have far more validity than the Hagler winning cards. Count the draws, Leonard still has 13 saying he won vs 6 saying that Hagler won.

By the way, didn't Leonard have vision problems and drug problems back then?

And both Boston papers had Leonard winning comfortably.

 

The drawn cards also didn't think Leonard won, which rather hurts your argument for this huge consensus for a Leonard win.

Wasn't Leonard told after surgery that the eye was as good as new?

Btw, do you value Howard Cosell's opinion more than Eddie Futch's?

 

Few people have summed up the Hagler/Leonard fight, as correctly as Hugh McIlvanney did in his Sports Illustrated article, a couple of weeks after the event.


Sports Illustrated
April 20, 1987


THE ILLUSION OF VICTORY
Another view of the Leonard-Hagler decision


By Hugh McIlvanney


It is not only in Las Vegas that professional boxing's system of scoring shows all the intellectual consistency of a rolling pair of dice.

Don't blame the desert air for the rush of blood to the brain that caused Jose Juan (Jo Jo) Guerra, a WBC judge, to make Sugar Ray Leonard a winner by 10 rounds to 2 over Marvin Hagler while another official, Lou Filippo, was giving the April 6 fight at Caesars Palace to Hagler 7 rounds to 5. If the record of judges sanctioned by its State Athletic Commission is anything to go by, Nevada is a congenial environment for officials with the glorious eccentricity of mind brought to his work by Guerra. But bad decisions know no boundaries.

The simple truth is that at this stage of its long and erratic history, prizefighting is still nowhere near establishing any consistently accurate means of measuring performance. If the comparative effectiveness of two fighters is so difficult to calibrate (or so open to extravagantly subjective interpretations) that Guerra and Filippo can contradict each other as outrageously as they did, then even when everybody stays honest, boxing clearly carries a far higher risk of recurring injustice than any other sport.

When judges talk about focusing on paramount criteria—on identifying effective aggressiveness, clean punching, ring generalship and quality defense—they are merely emphasizing the complexity, perhaps the impossibility, of the exercise. Much of the time all they can do is review a fighter's performance, much as a theater critic would an actor's, making the pseudoscientific adjustment of putting their impressions into figures.

No one has ever understood the boxing judge as reviewer of theater better than Sugar Ray Leonard. Even Muhammad Ali, who substituted histrionics for real fighting often enough in the latter part of his career, was usually more concerned with disconcerting his opponent and getting the crowd on his side. Leonard sought those dividends too against Hagler. But the overriding priority for him appeared to be the manipulation of official minds.

Naturally, to achieve that end, Ray had to bring a lot to the party. Physically and mentally, he was astonishingly strong, sharp and resilient after what had been, essentially, a five-year layoff.

Thus, looking and moving so much better than anyone had a right to expect, Leonard was in a position to exploit the Schulberg Factor. This phenomenon—a compound optical illusion—may not have been discovered by Budd Schulberg, the novelist and fight aficionado, but he receives credit here for pointing it out to a few of us who were asking ourselves how Hagler came to be so cruelly misjudged. Budd's reasoning was that people were so amazed to find Sugar Ray capable of much more than they imagined that they persuaded themselves he was doing far more than he actually was.

Similarly, having expected extreme destructiveness from Marvin, they saw anything less as failure and refused to give him credit for the quiet beating he administered.

What Ray Leonard pulled off in his split decision over Hagler was an epic illusion. He had said beforehand that the way to beat Hagler was to give him a distorted picture. But this shrewdest of fighters knew it was even more important to distort the picture for the judges. His plan was to "steal" rounds with a few flashy and carefully timed flurries and to make the rest of each three-minute session as unproductive as possible for Hagler by circling briskly away from the latter's persistent pursuit. When he made his sporadic attacking flourishes, he was happy to exaggerate hand speed at the expense of power, and neither he nor two of the scorers seemed bothered by the fact that many of the punches landed on the champion's gloves and arms. This was showboating raised to an art form, and the brilliance with which it was sustained was a tribute to Leonard's wonderful nerve, which is cut from the same flawless diamond as Ali's.

But, however much the slick ploys blurred the perceptions of those on the fevered sidelines, they never broke Hagler. He has a different kind of spirit, but it is no less resolute than Leonard's. The hounding intensity that kept him unbeaten through 11 years from 1976 will soon be a memory, but he had enough left to press on through his early frustrations, throw the superior volume of hurtful punches. I'm convinced Hagler won the fight; a draw, and the retention of the title, was the very least he deserved.

"It's unfair, man, it's unfair," Hagler said helplessly to the master illusionist at the end. That's an old cry and—given the haphazard way boxing judges its heroes—all too often a true one.

 

Here is Hagler's bizarre retort to claims he should have fought much more aggressively -

Marvin Hagler - 'Cause Leonard trained for that type of fight. He watched all my films and he knew that i might fight that way. Well i never like to fight the same way twice. It's funny, a lot of people were saying that i was done. That i didn't even have another fight left in me. I was old. (Becoming testy) Well, how come he didn't knock me out? How come he didn't knock me down? Huh? Why don't you turn this thing around and ask him why he didn't do those things when he had the opportunity? I'm older and he's much younger and much quicker. How come he didn't knock me out? Okay? That's the way i feel. And i said to him, "you ain't got nuthin'!".

 

Dr Ferdie Pacheco on the effect the loss had on Hagler's psyche -

I think Leonard destroyed everything that the guy stood for. Hagler struggles for years without recognition, then he finally becomes somebody, finally fights his way to the point where everybody thinks he is an absolute destruction machine. He's right there with Carlos Monzon and Sugar Ray Robinson as one of the greatest of all time. One more fight is all he needs to solidify his spot in history, he thinks. Leonard wins and everything Hagler achieved goes out the window. One fight has blown his mind. It makes you want to grab Hagler, shake him, and say, "get yourself together. You're not the first guy who lost anything. "

 

Ray took advantage of the way Marvin thought. He saw how Marvin was worked up when Hearns acted all confidence and said he would knock out Marvin. So Ray was humble and said he was Marvin's friend, that worked among other things. Hearns did the wrong thing by making a guy like Marvin mad. Although, had Tommy not broken his hand and been able to land a few more punches when Marvin was righty,landing the punch on the side of Marvin's head it would have been interesting.

 

Bruce Finch? Ray was a lot better than Finch. Hearns also knocked out Finch.

 

JT - You and I agree on a lot of things, but I am at odds with how Marvin's reaction to the result provides any insight into the fight itself; his state of mind and thoughts on the fight today... ...and quotes from Pacheco are about as useful as calling Jeffrey Dahmer as one's character witness in a murder trial.

 

Leonards one of the very few things we disagree on.

Hagler's explanation and defense of his poor tactics gives great insight imo. It shows point blank how much SRL was in his head. Marvin should not have been worried about what a guy having his first fight at 160 was expecting, a much smaller guy who had fought once in 5 years and not at all in 3. He should have been confident in his own abilities and came in with common sense tactics of pressuring the smaller man, bullying him and making him fight.

There is more than one comment in the thread pertaining to how badly Hagler coped and the quote is for those guys. Hagler is obviously bitter in the article mentioned so it fits in pretty well. Pacheco does a fine job in explaining what was almost certainly going on with Hagler.

FWIW i don't overly subscribe to Hugh's article at all either. I find it a bit one sided and condescending considering it's only his opinion and there is immense speculation involved. Almost everyone has gone back on the fight numerous times and scored it again, watched it again and not many at all have changed much. It's just Hugh's opinion score wise and his fictional opinion as to why people didn't score it/see it like he did.