The Best of the Rest: 160lbs Tier II Tournie - Last 16 Fight 1- Mike McCallum UD15 Emile Griffiths

What i've done is i've lifted top tiers out of my top fifty at the poundage and organised them into a seeded tournament to uncover "the best of the rest" at the poundage, with you, the denizens of the world's greatest boxing history forum, casting the deciding vote. The difference between this middleweight tournament and the equivalent at 175lbs is that I've left ALL the guys with no footage in this time. I understand that makes things difficult and for some, frustrating but there are just far too many excellent and intriguing fighters from middleweight history. I understand this makes making a pick very hard, but i hope you'll still place a vote and make a post because obviously without your input the whole thing becomes meaningless.

Pick your man! Write however many details you like or don't in a post below. But maybe try to post, to keep things moving a little bit. You have three days.

And let's be nice. No reason for disagreeing over total fantasies after all!

15 Rounds, 1980s rules and ref. 10 points must. I'll only vote where there's a tie.

LAST SIXTEEN FIGHT 1: Emile Griffiths vs Mike McCallum

EMILE GRIFFITH (85-24-2)
The wonderful welterweight and light-middleweight champion Emile Griffith first elected to dip his toe into the choppier waters of middleweight not against soft-sell opposition designed to give him the feel for the bigger division but against ranked men, taking on and beating old foe Denny Moyer and the recently eliminated Don Fullmer back to back in August and October of 1962. Griffith couldn’t quite dominate Moyer, who forced his way back into their third and final fight savagely in the eighth and ninth rounds, but Griffith was always better suited to the habitat Moyer favoured, up close where identifying punching opportunity and accuracy, Griffith’s two greatest attributes, were at a premium. This was a problem hanging over Griffith, however, given that he was a natural light-middleweight moving up in search of glory and money; inside is the last place you want to be against a bigger opponent, on paper.

Griffith moved beautifully, too, and can be named among the most legitimate of polished all-rounders when fresh, but as soon as fatigue began to find him, it was to the inside that he went. This was fine in the early 1960s with the title passing merrily between Paul Pender and Terry Downes, both of whom Griffith likely could have out-boxed up close, but when the title started to move between **** Tiger and Joey Giardello, Griffith seemed without hope of ever picking up the title. Boxing inside against Tiger, especially, was akin to surrender.

This is what Emile Griffith did, though, when his status as the welterweight champion of the world and his performances against borderline ranked fighters proved enough to get him into a Madison Square Garden ring with Tiger in 1965. Not for the first half of the fight, though. In the first half of the fight, Griffith worked to keep the fight at range where he did not, could not dominate against Tiger, very probably the superior technician. But he also, with generalship and mobility, prevented Tiger from dominating – his whole fight plan was one big interference with the great champion’s own.

So it was that when Tiger started to dial his jab in, Griffith stepped inside on an apparent suicide mission. But legendary trainer Gil Clancy had gambled, and convinced an uncertain Griffith, that he had and even at welterweight had had, the strength of a middleweight. To his own surprise, Griffith was able to match Tiger for spells, even pushing him back in rounds seven, eight and eleven. Even though he was handled on occasions, it was Tiger, not he, who visited the canvas in round now. The knockdown was the very definition of flash but it was legitimate, Tiger’s right knee buckling behind a one-two for the first visit to the canvas of his storied career.

Griffith got the decision in a fight that could have been scored any one of three ways and although it should be noted that most ringside reporters saw it for Tiger, film shows a desperately close encounter which I think can validly be given to Griffith.

Meeting with Joey Archer for his first defence, Griffith took the opposite attitude and attacked, bullied and handled his bigger opponent for a narrow decision deemed controversial in some quarters; so he re-matched Archer and beat him again; then began his three fight series with Benvenuti.

Griffith began to suffer up at middleweight and as the 1970s dawned, it would be Monzon who would be Griffith’s chief-tormentor; but despite a certain inconsistency in his middleweight work that did not exist for him at welterweight, he continued to add to resume in the new decade, including men like Stanley Hayward (who also bested him once) and Bennie Briscoe.


MIKE MCCALLUM (49-5-1)
Among the greatest light-middleweights of all time, Mike McCallum’s career up at middleweight remains a nearly – nearly lineal middleweight champion of the world, nearly the conqueror of James Toney. In the end, a draw and a majority loss in two fights that could have been scored any one of three ways was the final result of his pair with Toney at 160lbs; such are the tiny screws upon which boxing greatness are turned.

Still, McCallum probably overachieved given the limited amount of time he spent at middleweight. He boxed as few as seven times at 160lbs and won just four of those contests. Outside of those two razor thin failures against Toney, McCallum also went 1-1 with Sumbu Kalambay, making him 1-2-1 versus the best, but they were the best. Mike lost his first fight with Sumbu, as to his vengeance, he earned in a split decision three years later, it was a desperately close fight that illustrated McCallum’s exquisite ability for identifying and boxing to an opponent’s killzone while underlining his limitations at the weight. He just didn’t have the physicality to bully Kalambay out of there in the first half of the fight and Kalambay insidiously boxed his way back in and the contest became another desperately close one that could have gone either way.

Still, when allowed to dominate as he was against another superb technician, Michael Watson, he was lethal, remorseless in his heavy-bagging of the world-class Watson who McCallum broke in eleven. He couldn’t break a spirited and green Steve Collins though and he was run extremely close by a riffing, winging Herol Graham – and that, really, is the story of McCallum at middleweight.

 

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Two good men.

 

Untrue.

All it is is the top bottom 32 of my top 50 at the weight pitted in a tournament. By definition, you're wrong.

This is about the third time I've explained this to you? I won't explain it again and will delete any references to it in any of these threads going forwards.

 

Sure, very validly.

Here's the IBRO list:

https://www.ibroresearch.com/2020/03/15645/

In order that you can avoid having this argument in this thread, feel free to email them:

https://www.ibroresearch.com/contact/

Good luck.

 

Email them.

 

Knocked out in the first round by Marshall.

 

Well opinions vary: the forum's opinion is that Marshall was better than Cerdan.

He certainly beat better fighters.

 

that's the point.