The Best of the Rest: 160lbs Tier II Tournie - Round 1 - Fight 11: Lloyd Marshall UD15 Marcel Cerdan

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, 1950s rules and ref. Ten points must. Weigh in is 18 hours before the fight.

I'll only vote if it's tied, then I'll decide the result.

Round of Thirty-Two Fight 11: Lloyd Marshall vs Marcel Cerdan

LLOYD MARSHALL (70-25-4)

Footage of Marshall has illustrated a true gunslinger, a riffmaster general of whatever division he was gracing, a fighter as exciting and excellent and as flat-out different as anything else that has been seen. He was also superb, serpentine, lethal, sudden and deadly. Big at the weight, he struggled to make the 160lb limit and was inarguably among the best super-middleweights in history many years before the division was conceived; he defeated Ezzard Charles while weighing 165lbs, Holman Williams at the same weight, Anton Chistoforidis at 168lbs – it is a prestigious list and one too lengthy to enter into here.

Take Jake LaMotta, the Bronx Bull; a great middleweight by anyone’s standards – Marshall crushed him, outclassed him, cut his cheek, his nose and even rocked the man with perhaps the greatest chin in boxing history in the fifth round. Along with fellow greats Fritzie Zivic and Sugar Ray Robinson he would be the only man to beat the bull in the five year period that arguably constituted his savage prime. Charley Burley, the Don of the Murderer’s Row that terrorised the welterweight and middleweight division in the 1940s, too, couldn’t quite fathom Marshall’s astonishing style, although a hairline fracture to the hand probably didn’t help the Pittsburgher. Marshall emerged with the hairline decision.

Surging aggression, as well as unpredictability, was his friend, as when he met Billy Soose, a fighter with huge experience who still had his best years in front of him in 1938. Despite a damaged eye, Marshall boiled into the breach left by Overlin’s apparent fatigue to take a narrow decision. Other ranked men he bamboozled included Joe Carter and Jack Chase, both of whom fell to this jazz-man slaughterer of champions.

MARCEL CERDAN (111-4)

Cerdan’s extraordinary paper record is a little deceptive when it comes to ranking him as a middleweight; when he first fought in a meaningful middleweight contest, he was already 88-2, having established himself in the war years first and foremost as a welterweight. The end of the war was a signal for the 5’8 Cerdan to step up to the 160lb division where he was indeed dominant over European competition in his native France before boarding a steamship to the United States. The competition that Cerdan bested in this time was not bad, but nor did any of the middleweights he bested emerge as top contenders or champions or make any mark upon middleweight history in their own right. It was not until he made it to America that Cerdan marked himself truly special – allowing that he had already established his excellence, professionalism and consistency – with a victory over the wonderful Holman Williams. Williams, a veteran of one-hundred and seventy contests, was clearly beginning to slip and had recently been beaten by Bert Lytell; of the sixteen fights that remained Williams, he would win just five. Nevertheless, he was a significant scalp for a visiting fighter, as was that of Georgie Abrams.

Abrams was also past his prime and had only one more career win ahead of him but was still dangerous and Cerdan hit the trenches in order that he might best him. Both fighters emerged cut from a bruising encounter that seems to narrowly but clearly belonged to Cerdan; after which he set sail for Europe to pick up the European title from a fighter called Leon Fouquet, who is listed by Boxrec as 2-4-1 going in. After returning to America and hammering the solid Jean Walzack and then going back to Europe to go 1-1 with Cyrille Delannoit, Cerdan got his title shot at Tony Zale. It would be Zale’s last ever fight and Cerdan was extraordinary in taking the title, his left hook in particular, a thing of beauty and a punch he would use to force “The Man of Steel” to the canvas win the eleventh round. Zale did not emerge from the twelfth.

Cerdan was the lineal middleweight champion but he completed no successful defences, injuring his shoulder swinging for Jake LaMotta in their celebrated contest and then killed in a plane crash before their re-match. This is tragic but it restricted the number of years Cerdan fought in the division to five; this is the same as the number of ranked opponents he defeated.

 

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Marcel Cerdan managed to make things sticky for Lloyd Marshall while failing to threaten a victory, timing Marshall's more awkward rushing with expertise and forcing him to adopt a more technically sound base for his attack - which, unfortunately for the Frenchman, kept him firmly under control for a wide UD scored 10-5 twice and 11-4.