The Top 100 Pound for Pound All-Time Greats

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#76 Mike McCallum (49-5-1)

McCallum may languish nearer the bottom of this list for reasons political. He chased tirelessly after both Roberto Duran and Thomas Hearns during an under-celebrated career that was exactly that kind of marquee name away from obtaining the next level. Duran, he likely would have beaten at his favored light-middleweight; Hearns may have been a reach. Unfortunately these two stayed busy with other people (including each other) and McCallum, who brought to life the ghost of Charley Burley with all the talk of the risk versus the reward in taking him on, was bequeathed the dubious honor of Royal Duck to the four-kings era, one he could have helped define.

Still, he did more than enough to be stuck to this top one hundred like glue. A superb an concise puncher, he boasted a granite chin amongst his many compelling attributes, even surviving multiple flush bombs from perhaps the hardest puncher of all time pound-for-pound, a light-middleweight Julian Jackson, in the first round of their ’86 contest. McCallum slipped, ducked, belt-line-blasted and jabbed his way back into that wonderful shootout, backing Jackson up by the end of the first, dropping him early in the second with a right upstairs and a left to the body then spending much of the next minute finishing him off with the dogged, elastic, fluid, professional offense that defined him.

Undefeated at light-middleweight against men such as Donald Curry, Milton McCrory and David Braxton, he did slip a little when the inevitable move to middleweight in search of big fights occurred, losing to and then avenging the defeat by Sumbu Kalambay, controversially drawing with and losing to James Toney (whom some will tell you he beat twice), but he also added the WBA strap, absolutely broke a superb Michael Watson (“11 rounds of back and forth hell&#8221 and beat Herol Graham and Steve Collins. An ancient McCallum even lifted a strap up at light-heavyweight before dropping off to 2-3 in what remained of his career.

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#75 Azumah Nelson (39-6-2)

The greatest African fighter in history? As we shall see, not quite, but there will be those who disagree with my placement of The Professor and rank him as just that.

Nelson actually boxed in the United States as early as ’81, his third year as a professional, but he mostly boxed on the African continent until, in an interstellar blast of an introduction, he was matched with the wonderful featherweight champion Salvador Sanchez as late substitute, just 13-0 as a professional. Such was Sanchez’s towering reputation and so lowly was Nelson’s, that the fight was seen as something of an insult to fans. Instead, the two turned in perhaps the greatest featherweight title fight in boxing history, a phone-booth war fought with genuine elegance. When Nelson, behind on the cards, was finally stopped in the fifteenth round it did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm the sport in America felt for him. Two years later, still only twenty fights into his professional career, he unfolded no less a figure than Wilfredo Gomez to lift a featherweight strap in Puerto Rico. Nelson successfully defended that title six times including the devastating first round knockout of European champion Pat Cowdell, who he utterly devastated in England in ’85. Nelson went where the money was, a road warrior who was all smiles. In ’88 he won a super-featherweight strap which he would defend into double-digits before relinquishing to Jessie James Leija, reclaiming it from Gabriel Ruelas and, in a last hurrah, stopping Leija in their third fight in six. Most famous for his controversial draw with the superb Jeff Fenech and the rematch in which he stunned both the Australian and the wider boxing world, Nelson never did things the easy way which is what sets his legacy apart.

He excelled because of a near flawless skillset. There will be fighters on this list that are way ahead of Nelson in each and every category one can use to judge a boxer’s abilities, but few will have his overall completeness. So, his chin was superb but not uncrackable. He hit with power, but could be borne. He was fast but not lightning. He threw with volume but not abandon. What underpinned this exhaustive whole was old-fashioned craft. “The Professor” was so named for his ability to hand out boxing lessons.

Away from home against great fighters, he was superb, and perhaps only the genius of Pernell Whitaker (who decisioned him at lightweight in 1990) kept him from three-weight honors and a place higher on this list.

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#74 Oscar De La Hoya (39-6)

In early 1997, Oscar De La Hoya managed to do what The Professor could not and beat that genius Pernell Whitaker in an oh-so-close tussle for Whitaker’s welterweight title. The margin of the scores between them was controversial (I had it to Oscar by a single point—a point that was deducted from Whitaker in the third round due to a ludicrous WBC rule which called for the uninjured party to have a point deducted from his score in the event that the other party was injured in an accidental clash of heads), but as a fight it was close enough that the decision was widely respected. One month before, Roy Jones had posted his first loss, a disqualification, in equally controversial circumstances. For many, this made Oscar De La Hoya the greatest fighter on the planet in an era that boasted, in addition to the incredible Jones and the equally incredible Whitaker, Ricardo Lopez, Bernard Hopkins, Evander Holyfield and Shane Mosley. It was Shane Mosley who would unseat De La Hoya definitively in June of 2000 although he had technically been beaten by Felix Trinidad nine months previously. The fight with Felix was easily the most controversial decision of that time and is now almost universally regarded as a robbery. In point of fact, his defeat to Shane Mosley may be even more questionable—this is the fight Mosley would later admit to having “accidently” used performance enhancing drugs before. Oscar then enjoyed his own “stroke of luck,” winning a title up at middleweight, taking a controversial decision over Felix Sturm before suffering the only stoppage loss of his career to that point, against Bernard Hopkins.

Oscar won title fights at 154 lbs. on four occasions; he won title fights at 147 lbs. on eight occasions, excluding the blatant robbery against Trinidad; at 140 lbs. he managed just two title victories including a fourth round stoppage of Julio Cesar Chavez; at 135 lbs. he won seven title fights; as a giant super-featherweight he won two placing him in the twenties for successful title fights at six different weights. Even allowing for modern inflation caused by the handing out of title belts like licorice, this is an outstanding achievement.

During his prime years he arguably lost just once, against a drugged Mosley, and despite a sometimes square and often stiff-shinned and galloping style, he proved himself a savage head-to-head proposal in the ring. Few fighters in his era can match him for quality of left hook and even fewer have his jab (“one of the best ever” according to the late, great Emanuel Steward). Oddly, he could be out-jabbed on the stranger nights of his career (some will tell you Quartey did so) and was guilty of abandoning his jab against Floyd Mayweather when apparently on his way to a stunning upset way past-prime, but when he was on, as he was against Felix Trinidad or Miguel Gonzalez, Oscar’s jab was all but peerless.

Excellent power, timing and solid speed came all the way from super-featherweight to light-middleweight intact and he developed, throughout his career, a nice line in feints and traps. Stopped just twice, once by a middleweight and once fighting as a walking corpse against the typhoon that is Manny Pacquiao, Oscar is proven in the departments of heart and chin. Although he fought as a giant at the lower weights he crammed his welterweight’s frame into, he traveled all the way to middleweight in search of glory and whilst that little sojourn perhaps didn’t work out the way he would have wanted it to, it proved to me that it was this smiling, media magnate crossover matinee idol, not James Toney, that was the real throwback from the nineties to the forties.

A tendency to beat the best he faced coupled with that period as the world’s best see him sit snugly in the seventies. Some may call this too high; for the modernists he will be too low. That comforts me that I’m likely to have got him just right.

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#73 Carlos Zarate (66-4)

Upon turning professional Carlos Zarate knocked out twenty-three consecutive opponents. The great bantamweight’s feelings at being taken the distance by the otherwise unremarkable Victor Ramirez in January of ’74 is not known, but what is known is that he dealt with this disappointment by stopping his next twenty-eight consecutive opponents. This streak included nine defenses of his bantamweight strap which he also procured via knockout against the excellent Rodolfo Martinez who had himself lifted the title with a stunning four-round knockout of the brilliant Rafael Herrera, forming a link that runs between Carlos Zarate and the stacked era of Ruben Olivares.

Not that Zarate’s era could be named as strong. As an emperor he brooked no resistance—any semblance of excellence in his subjects was snuffed out with the regal candor only a true puncher possesses. Reigning champion Rodolfo Martinez, was harassed, outboxed, out-generalled and eventually broken by the rampant challenger in just nine; Commonwealth champion Paul Ferreri, then on a 50-3 streak, lasted into the twelfth winning perhaps just one round in the process, and coming men like Alfonso Zamora (then 29-0) and Danilo Batista (26-0) were dispatched in chanceless performance that saw each of them left mentally supine, Zamora struggling to remove the towel of surrender from where it had landed on his vacant face, Batista escorted back to his corner wearing a pleasantly blank expression, the picture of broken resistance. Worse, these fighters, the world at their feet when they entered his domain, seemed somehow broken by their disastrous encounters with Zarate, unable to leave the devastating punches behind them in their fresh ring encounters; having been previously unbeaten they turned in all manner of bizarre knockout, disqualification and points losses in his terrible wake.

When he stepped out of his beloved bantamweight to meet the monstrous Wilfredo Gomez up at super-bantamweight in 1978 his record stood at 52-0 with 51 knockouts. It is the most devastating run of form in any weight class. Gomez shattered him and sent him back down to bantamweight where his title would eventually be stolen from him in a highway robbery against the excellent Lupe Pintor. A brave comeback upped his losses to four and it is a shame he never got around to knocking out fellow title claimant Jorge Lujan, but in his prime years at bantamweight it is possible to envisage Zarate taking on all comers at the weight without loss, such was his dominance over a middling field.

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#72 Miguel Canto (61-9-4)

Miguel Canto, all five-feet nothing of him, may have had the most beautifully cultured left hand in boxing history (nobody tell Ken Buchanan, who doesn’t quite make the list—sorry Ken). So splendid was this appendage that Canto could quite literally beat world-class opponents one-handed. He did so in his third bout with the superb Betulio Gonzalez in a fight that was somehow rendered a split decision in spite of the fact that finding five rounds for the former world champion was legitimately difficult. Gonzalez was the fighter who had sawn off Canto’s pre-prime beating him over fifteen in the Mexican’s first tilt at a title. After dropping a close one, Canto regrouped through ’74 and in ’75 defeated the excellent Shoji Oguma for the legitimate flyweight title of the world. He defended this for four years packed tight with fourteen defenses against some of the very best flyweights ever to grace the division. They included Martin Vargas, then on a twenty-eight fight unbeaten streak and an overall run of 41-2-3 and two rematches with Shoji Oguma and Antonio Avelar, who would go on to lift the title after Canto had faded. He even picked off Gabriel Bernal, way past his prime, in ’81, another fighter who would later pick up the title. Such was his domination of his era that champions came squirming from his win ledger like maggots from a corpse when his time was up.

The fourth future or prior champion he defeated during that reign was Betulio Gonzalez. In their third fight, Canto perfected his art, jabbing with variety and speed before disappearing from Betulio’s view, stepping outside of his punches then hitting across him, rapid-fire jab clutches graduating to hooks. I gave Gonzalez, who would go on to beat Oguma, Vargas and Guty Espadas, just four rounds.

His physicality and lack of power may have seen him struggling to keep some of history’s best flyweights off him in a way that the equally tiny Pascual Perez may not have suffered due to his violent hitting, but anyone who couldn’t keep an inordinate amount of pressure on him would probably be made to look silly at some point.

It’s not that left-handed wonder-making that gets him into the seventies ahead of his Argentine peer however, but that huge run of defenses in as strong a flyweight division as we have ever seen.

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#71 Carmen Basilio (56-16-7)

Ranking Carmen Basilio is difficult for a number of reasons, not least the fact that he died three short months ago, and I’m sad about it. Even more than that, there is some malleability to his record. It lends itself to massage. Witness:

Basilio beat a genuine candidate for the #1 spot in Sugar Ray Robinson, but his victim was the comeback version, a fighter who had already lost, in Gene Fullmer, to a fighter that he would have dismantled at a canter in his savage prime. After avenging that loss with a narrow points victory and fight of the year contender, Sugar retired once more. It was as if a loss and a draw to a fighter like Basilio somehow meant he didn’t belong.

Witness:

Basilio had a loss and a draw with Chuck Davey in 1952, a fighter whose appearance on film does nothing to quell rumors of a fighter protected by a higher power. Ike Williams claimed to have thrown his fight with Davey that same year and it’s not a stretch to imagine that Rocky Graziano’s inexplicably leaden performance was a part of the same pattern that saw him suspended for failing to report a bribe, and later for vanishing on Fred Apostolini—but what about Basilio? Was he in on the game? If so, why the horribly close first fight? And why did he open up Davey’s face like a packet of fudge in the second fight?

Witness:

Why couldn’t he do anything with Gene Fullmer, who beat him twice for the middleweight title?

This last question is the easiest to answer: Basilio was never a middleweight. He was a welterweight and an exceptional one.

He couldn’t budge the even more exceptional Kid Gavilan who bested him in the closest of decisions in ’53 but when he came again he was presented with a problem almost as insurmountable in the disastrous triage of talent that was Gil Turner, Tony DeMarco and Johnny Saxton. Turner had at one time seemed nothing less than the second coming of Ike Williams, a fast and savage puncher with superb boxing abilities, but he had dropped off after Gavilan separated him, too, from his title aspirations. DeMarco was an enormously strong man, a superb left hook and a menacing, turgid style his greatest assets. Saxton was in many ways the most difficult of the three and was in possession of a win over Gavilan, not a puncher he boxed behind a splendid jab matched perfectly to a sneaky, blistering right hand.

Basilio fed these three men his dust, going 6-1 against their combined might, separating himself from them completely. Where was he going to go if not the middleweight division? Abandoning the welterweight title he had so coveted, he headed north. Sure, Fullmer handled him, but Robinson did not.

Their rematch, a split decision loss, was a fight that Basilio fought in a fog, his left eye closed by a broken blood-vessel in his eyebrow, chasing Sugar Ray one-eyed for most of the fight. Robinson didn’t so much retire in disgust as in…I don’t want to say anything rash, but perhaps in an uncertainty— uncertainty that he would be able to beat the savage Basilio again.

Toss in (oh so casually) his pre-primed 1-1-1 series with Billy Graham, plus victories over Ike Williams and Lew Jenkins and you have a fighter who belongs on this list regardless of emotional attachments.

And that strange Chuck Davey series? In the light of all this, who gives a ****?

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Well that's the kind of chin it would have taken to upset that knockout run, for sure. Of course, Zarate knocked out more than one guy who had never been knocked out before.

 

Yeah, Basilio felt a little high to me when I was writing him but i just couldn't get him moved down. I could have flipped him with Canto and felt ok but that was about it.