The Top 100 Pound for Pound All-Time Greats

Longcount made it for me.

 

“I’m not going to bleed any more. I’m not going to spit it on the floor. I’m going to swallow it. I’m going to win this title. Take the mouthpiece out. Don’t give me no mouthpiece. Just let me go.”—Henry Armstrong

“You’ll pardon me, gentlemen, if I make this fight short. I have a train to catch!”—Sam Langford

“When are you going to fight me ya bum?”—Harry Greb

“Do. Or die.”—Sugar Ray Robinson

 

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#10 Roberto Duran (103-16)

Roberto Duran has the appearance of a fighter whose peers can be counted on one hand in terms of skill. So brilliant does he seem that despite his having one of the most celebrated careers in boxing, Hands of Stone may have underachieved on a journey that sprawled from bantamweight to light-heavyweight and across five decades.

It is a fact that Duran lost to every single one of the unquestionably great fighters he faced. In 1984 he was massacred by a terrifying Thomas Hearns at light-middleweight, separated from his senses for the first and last time in a boxing ring by a rampaging all-time great turning in his career’s best performance. Marvin Hagler had beaten him less dramatically five months previously up at middleweight, outpointing him in a close fight that Duran, incredibly, was only two points short of winning in one of the more stirring losing efforts that can be seen. Two years before that, it had been the turn of Wilfred Benitez who outboxed a strangely fireless Duran over fifteen rather tepid rounds, but most famous was his 1980 quit job against Ray Leonard, who had outboxed, bamboozled and, like Thomas Hearns would, out-psyched the ring’s supposed king of machismo.

How then to defend such a high ranking?

Well, firstly, Duran did manage to win a fight against the quadrant of Hagler, Hearns, Benitez and Leonard, and it may be the single greatest win attained by any boxer at any weight. Leonard was absolutely primed in 1980 and must therefore list amongst the most formidable fighters pound-for-pound ever to lace up gloves when Duran, two weight divisions above his natural lightweight, proceeded to kick Ray’s ass in perhaps the most brilliant display by a winner and a loser ever seen in the ring. Much is made of the plan adopted by Ray Leonard in that fight but even more is quite rightly made of the astounding marriage of defense and offense conjured by the animal Duran, a pure embodiment of savagery just as Stanley Ketchel or Terry McGovern was one, but Duran had somehow been harnessed by his own natural understanding of the sport and by the boxing men around him. Whereas his distant ancestors had been hurricanes, Duran was a tornado, focused, the thinking man’s demon.

“Nothing could prepare you for Duran,” Ray Leonard would say after their two infamous clashes. “Duran was a fight within itself. Duran was crazed, talented, technical…an extremely good defensive fighter who was very elusive.”

Duran: “Leonard was shitting his pants.”

That was who he was. He lived and died by that type of brimming emotion. He quit shamefully against Leonard, but he came again against Pipino Cuevas and then Davey Moore to lift a strap at light-middleweight. He lost in that brave, surging, surgical performance against Hagler but aged thirty-eight he came to the middleweight division once more and lifted a strap in that weight division, outhitting a large and aggressive middleweight in Iran Barkley, the man who had just destroyed Thomas Hearns. Duran by that stage was trading on nothing but a name; Barkley came to rub it out forever but flat out could not do it; nobody could. Nobody ever will.

He staggered on for another decade, sometimes surprising us, sometimes boxing in total farces, and sometimes both as was his final but somehow glorious failure against Hector Camacho. It will be for his twelve-defense brutal domination of a lightweight division ruled by borderline great Ken Buchanan when he came to his prime that he will be remembered for, and that stunning performance against Ray Leonard. And those losses? Weighing them against who he was and how he boxed is perhaps the final indictment of a project like this. Trying to measure a fighter like Roberto is like measuring the wind. Number ten, for what that is worth, is where he has blown in. Get yourself a big screen TV and a pair of Sennheiser headphones, some peace, some quiet, and the right fight and he is, simply put, number one.

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#9 Joe Louis (66-3)

Joe Louis is the single greatest champion boxing ever produced. He bossed the heavyweight title for an astonishing twelve years between 1937 and 1949. Nor was he a champion who, like John Sullivan or Jack Dempsey, racked up championship years in inactivity. Rather he was the most fightingist champion of them all, boxing twenty-five successful defenses despite the rude interruption that was the Second World War, a conflict that Louis famously claimed the inevitability of victory in because “ we’re on God’s side.” No figure was capable of discharging the wired racial tensions that ruled USA in this time completely, but Joe came close; a legitimately beloved American hero.

And one of the very greatest boxers to have ever drawn breath.

Louis has a single prime loss, if a fighter who has spent fewer than two years boxing as a professional can be considered primed, to former heavyweight champion Max Schmeling in 1936. He avenged it in utterly devastating fashion two years later by way of a first round knockout in what may be the single most significant prizefight in history, fought close to the eve of the outbreak of war between a black American and Nazi propaganda puppet Max Schmeling (who in reality was a decent, moral man). Still celebrated as one of the greatest displays of controlled savagery in ring history, Louis may even have bettered it, albeit in less dramatic circumstances, against the 250-pound Buddy Baer. Outweighed by more than forty pounds, Louis slaughtered Baer in a more cultured fashion than he had slaughtered Schmeling. Enlisting in the army days later, Louis went slightly stale during his enforced ring exodus, raising the terrifying prospect that like his lone heavyweight peer Muhammad Ali, Joe’s absolute peak may have been sabotaged by wider conflict.

Before he even lifted the title Louis had defeated former champions Max Baer, Jack Sharkey and Primo Carnera, all by devastating knockout and in one-sided fashion. Top contenders like Paulino Uzcudun and King Levinsky offered even less resistance. Taking the title from Jim Braddock, he twice defeated his successor, Jersey Joe Walcott having met all but one of the men to even briefly hold the #1 contendership to his title, defeating all of them. He retired (briefly) in 1948 as the undefeated, undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. His comeback two years later was doomed from the beginning, but even devoid of his legendary speed he was so superb a boxer as to be able to decision the top contenders he faced, men like Jimmy Bivins and Cesar Brion. Only other all-time great fighters were able to defeat him, Ezzard Charles outboxing him to a decision, and a superb Rocky Marciano forcing a heartbreaking stoppage.

My selection as the greatest puncher that has boxed at any weight, it is very possible that the heavyweight capable of beating him in his devastating prime of 1938-1942 had not yet been born.

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#8 Joe Gans (145-10-16; Newspaper Decisions 14-2-4)

Joe Gans sits atop the deepest pile of lightweights ever assembled and was regarded during his prime as the most brilliant boxer in history. It can be argued that Gans represents the culmination of boxing technique and that since his reign fighters have done nothing more than flesh out the bones of the technical blueprint he embodied. Gans doesn’t scrape the heights of boxing greatness due to his cultivation of what some historians name a more modern style however, but due to his incredible domination of a murderous lightweight scene, additional honors at welterweight and the sum total of the extraordinary list of top fighters he outboxed or dispatched over the course of a two-hundred fight, eighteen-year career.

Gans boxed a lifetime and more before he actually came to the title. When he lost to the wonderful George McFadden in early 1899 he already enjoyed reputation enough that the result was regarded as a real surprise. Gans avenged that particular defeat on five separate occasions, just to be sure that McFadden, the division’s great nearly man, had heard him. Having placed that top contender under control, Gans took his shot at Frank Erne and the title and, likely peaking, outboxed the champion with all the skill that made him great. “The clever and shifty [Erne],” wrote The Evening World, “was like a novice before the superb blocking, the scientific punching and wonderful footwork of the colored lad.” Unfortunately the same newspaper derided him as the “champion quitter” after an accidental clash of heads opened a terrible cut above Joe’s left eye. Claiming blindness, Gans quit in the twelfth. Although the cut was undoubtedly extremely serious, Joe Gans had now handed the white power structure an extremely good reason to keep him from title honors.

Fortunately Gans was too brilliant to be denied. After beating McFadden again and knocking out former champion Young Griffo, Gans seemed to hamstring himself once more, taking an apparent dive against the deadly Terry McGovern. This was perhaps the most controversial fight of the century and such was the disgust it caused it resulted in the banning of boxing in Illinois. In tandem with his quittage in his last title effort, it left Joe’s reputation in near ruins. He produced the only reaction that could have saved him, a three-year, forty-fight long unbeaten streak that saw him tear a swathe through the murderous lightweight division. He twice knocked out his former conqueror and past and future title claimant Bobby Dobbs, as well as fourteen other men, forcing Erne back into the ring. After nearly ten years as a professional, Gans realized his ambition with a handful of punches and in around eighty seconds. He lifted the title with a first round knockout.

The confusion over the details of the Gans title reign seems to be a modern affectation; there is little doubting, despite the claim of the twice beaten Jimmy Britt to a piece of the championship, that Joe’s peers knew who was The Man. He went 18-2 in title matches between lifting the championship and his death in August 1910, hampered in the two losses by the tuberculosis that would kill him. In addition to Britt, he defeated Battling Nelson, Kid Herman, Dave Holly and Kid McPartland as well as Mike Sullivan, adding the welterweight title. He was also busy in non-title affairs in which he bested Jack Blackburn, the tragic Mike Ward and was extremely unlucky not to get the nod over fellow pound-for-pound great Joe Walcott, whom he outboxed over 20 in 1904. Sam Langford described him as the greatest boxer of all time. A close look makes one feel rather foolish in disagreeing.

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#7 Muhammad Ali (56-5)

Archie Moore surmised Muhammad Ali brilliantly when he compared him to a man who “can write beautifully but doesn’t know how to punctuate.” He spoke with Ali’s lip in mind when he told this story, but it surmises him perfectly as a fighter, too. Ali did indeed toss out the established grammar of boxing in a sporting career that for a while was almost as controversial as his public life.

The establishment said he danced too much. He ran. He didn’t have the right economy, he would burn out. They said he didn’t sit down on his punches properly because he was always on his toes. Was it the flat out bigotry of a white press disgusted by this “uppity ******,” a fighter who called sportswriters who disagreed with him “bum” instead of “sir”? Was it just that he boxed in a style so new and shocking to the heavyweight division that the generally conservative sports editors of the time couldn’t understand what they were seeing? Or was it that Ali was so disturbingly fast that they missed the fraction of a second in which he wanted to throw a hard punch that his feet were glued to the canvas, in the old way, done in a new way.

Boxing grammar calls for a fighter to wear his hands high. Ali wore his low, at his waist, but they were rarely still, instead they moved sharply about his hips, touched together, fanning his left out to his side, tipping his right to his head as though in salute, and to the men given the job of appraising him, it looked like some painted dance done for show; “clowning” they called it. In fact, it had more in common with a stoat hypnotizing a rabbit. So fast was Ali that the fluidity in his hands became, as rounds wore on, a terrifying series of feints. Any given movement by Ali’s hands could be a precursor to any number of punches or nothing at all, not a unique tactic even in 1963, but taken in tandem with his floating footwork and his ability to conjure hard punches whilst moving laterally or even whilst retreating made it the most deadly first-line of defense and preparatory offense ever seen in the heavyweight division.

Boxing grammar demands that a fighter move to his left and to his right to slip punches and must not pull back. Ali did the opposite, gliding directly backwards in tandem with head and upper-body movement that left his opponents firing at air whilst showing a completely unparalleled ability to counterpunch with murderous intent purely off the back foot. He did not move back, reset, counter, like the heavyweight technicians before him, nor did he move back into countering position like the heavyweight slickster Jersey Joe Walcott, rather he found the counter whatever his position upon his retreat. He was absolutely unique.

Most tellingly, boxing grammar calls for a fighter, any fighter, to attack the body of the opponent as part of almost any wider strategy. This is the punctuation mark that Ali was most widely fought on by the boxing establishment he invaded and redefined.

“My wife is crazy about him, my kids are crazy about him, and I’m crazy about him,” said Archie Moore upon finally throwing his hands up and admitting defeat in trying to bring home to Ali some of what he saw as the universal truths of the boxing ring, “but he just won’t do what I tell him to do. He thinks I’m trying to change his style.”

Ali never did break. He can be seen on film throwing a few body punches here and there, most notably against Alex Miteff, who he folded in half like faulty deckchair, but in general he stuck to the Ali-ism that he felt suited his style: “Keep punching a man’s head and it mixes his mind.” Sportswriters, commentators, they burdened Ali with a vanity his persona did lend itself to, claiming that he didn’t punch to the body because he didn’t want to “mess up that pretty face,” but in fact Ali had recognized what the rest of the world hadn’t yet come to see—he punched quickly enough and accurately enough to find his way through any guard that existed in the heavyweight division—and he hit hard enough to “mix” a man’s mind, or “stir” it, as Archie Moore put it after their sad 1962 confrontation.

Having torn up the rulebook and absolutely refused to tape it back together under the tutelage of Moore, the search began for the seeming impossible, a cornerman who could work with and improve him. In Angelo Dundee they found the perfect man.

“You couldn’t actually directly order him to do something,” Dundee would say of his charge. “He resented direct orders. You sort of had to mould him…mostly, it was all him.”

Mostly, it was. Dundee’s brilliance as a cornerman and tactician is lauded extensively elsewhere, here it is necessary to point out that style and wider strategy for a fighter regarded as one of the greatest stylists and strategists of all time was almost entirely the per diem of Ali himself. The sportswriters were wrong about him running, clowning and pit-a-patting, but they were right about the question of economy. Ali knew it though, and was working on a version of the legendary rope-a-dope he would use to defeat George Foreman as early as his training for Sonny Liston. The fight in which he won the championship was the first fight where the establishment began to bend. “I think we’ve just seen one of the greatest rounds we’ve seen from anybody in a long time,” Joe Louis said after the first three minutes shared by Ali and Liston. Marciano was less convinced asking nobody in particular, “What the hell is this?” as Ali danced and battered Liston around the ring.

They say the gazelle and the cheetah evolve side-by-side in a symmetrical race to a nonexistent finish line that maintains between them a perfect balance that ensures the survival of each species. In Ali, the scales were tipped forever in favor of the gazelle, so far in excess of his contemporaries that he would go untroubled even by lions. The result was one of the best hauls against contenders for the all-time top ten in a given division by any fighter, ever. He beat Liston twice, George Foreman and Joe Frazier twice for five scalps against men who are arguably top ten heavyweights of all time. Just outside that top ten stand men like Floyd Patterson and Ken Norton, whom he also beat, and even a level down he has a raft of top men—Cooper, Chuvalo, Williams, Folley, Quarry, Bonavena (over who, like Foreman, he holds a unique stoppage), Ellis, Mathis, Mac Foster, Bob Foster, Lyle, Shavers and Spinks—a list of names unequalled by most heavyweights even leaving aside the very best names he took. He defeated ten men who held a version of a world title and was victorious in twenty-two title fights and all of this in spite of the fact that he had the very best years of his sporting prime taken from him by the authorities because of his failure to be drafted into the military during the Vietnam War.

When I was a boy, I was sure Muhammad Ali was the greatest fighter who ever lived. As a young man, I became sure he was not. Now that I’m older I have moments when I wonder to myself, and longer spells when I feel sure that had he been allowed to box on during those three wasted years, he might indeed have been The Greatest.

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#6 Bob Fitzsimmons (68-8-5)

Bob Fitzsimmons beat the Nonpareil Jack Dempsey in such one-sided fashion in 1891 that the first chairman of the yet to be founded New York State Athletic Commission, William Muldoon, immediately named him one of the best he had ever seen. “I have never dreamed of such a man,” said the former trainer of John L. Sullivan. “He is a terrific hitter, a two-handed fighter and a great general.” The last point needs to be stressed—Fitzsimmons had outboxed and out-generalled the greatest general the fight game had yet seen, and with great ease.

“It wasn’t a hard fight. I did not even get thoroughly warmed up.”

Dempsey’s face, meanwhile, was a mess of gore.

Fitzsimmons dismissed talk of his challenging the world’s heavyweight champion James Corbett, naming him both too big and too clever. But the seed had been planted. After his single defense of the middleweight title he made his first move in that direction, stopping Peter Maher, who had been beaten just once in his last forty fights, by no less a figure than Peter Jackson, the Black Prince. The Antipodean press had not been shy in comparing Fitzsimmons to the great Jackson and now those comparisons were being justified. Maher, a warrior of the old school, quit to Fitzsimmons: “ I’m done, don’t hit me anymore. I can’t reach you, I’m done.” It emerged afterwards that Bob had “broken” or more likely “dislocated” his right thumb in the first round, explaining what had become one of boxing’s first jab clinics. Weighing in under the modern super-middleweight limit, Fitzsimmons had become a heavyweight contender.

That road ended after the savage beating of Joe Choynski, a knockout of Jim Hall, who held a stoppage over Fitzsimmons from 1890, a tour as middleweight champion, and some other easy victories, at the doorstep of the heavyweight champion Jim Corbett. Another of the era’s admired scientists, Corbett was also teak tough having boxed a sixty-one round draw with Peter Jackson and taken the title from the legendary puncher John Sullivan. But Fitzsimmons was at an excruciating peak. Widely regarded as the best general in the sport—bar, perhaps, Corbett—he had been chin-checked by the huge-punching Choynski who Bob said “came the nearest to putting me out, he gave me the worst punching I ever had.” Regarded, even whilst outweighed by anything up to twenty-five pounds by Corbett, as the puncher in the fight such were the lethality of his fists, Fitzsimmons would need to prove his stamina and overall durability to beat the heavyweight champion.

This, he did, knocking the best fighter on the planet out with a single and legendary bodyshot, “the solar plexus punch,” after fourteen rounds of eating varied heavyweight punches. Fitzsimmons had become the first and remains the last man to hold lineage at both middleweight and heavyweight. His style had endured a total overhaul, turning him from the boxer-puncher of his middleweight days to a punching trapsmith the likes of which had never been seen before. It stressed power over his much admired mobility and was the full reverse of what would be expected from an opponent moving up in weight. Bob made it work because of a unique set of physical and technical abilities that made him the best at any weight despite his own weight.

He also showed outstanding longevity. After losing the title to the marauding James J. Jeffries, a heavyweight even by modern standards, he boxed on for a number of years, adding the linear light-heavyweight title in his fortieth year, an incredible feat for a fighter of that era, and taking his last significant scalp, a great one, against Jack O’Brien two years later. Fitzsimmons’ achievements are as extraordinary as any performed in the ring and arguably are without equal— though the men with cognitive arguments lie below this line. What keeps Fitzsimmons out of the top five is not what he lacks, but rather what these other men have—beginning with the terrifying prospect of a fighter who has beaten no fewer than six of the men who have made the top 100.

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#5 Ezzard Charles (93-25-1)

Teddy Yarosz, Charley Burley, Jimmy Bivins, Lloyd Marshall, Archie Moore and Joe Louis are the names of those men. First amongst them is Archie Moore. What makes Ezzard’s three victories over Moore at light-heavyweight incredible is the status of Archie Moore at light-heavyweight. He is almost universally regarded as the greatest or second greatest light-heavyweight ever to box. Charles is the man who holds the other berth. Imagine, if you will, what it would have meant had Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali shared an era and that Joe Louis had three times beaten Muhammad Ali. Can it even be imagined what that would have done for the standing of Louis, especially if Ali had gone on, regardless, to rule the world as perhaps the greatest champion in the history of his division anyway? By my reckoning Moore, the fifteenth greatest fighter in history, was beaten by Charles in a whitewash, once by way of brutal and desperate knockout.

Joe Louis, ranked #8 here, was past his prime and on the comeback trail for his 1950 heavyweight title fight with Ezzard Charles—the heavyweight crown was the only one this great light-heavy would ever wear—but had enough left to come out firmly on the losing end of what was a technical masterclass. Charles showed one of the great jabs that night, and had other punches to match.

Charley Burley, ranked at twenty-five on this list, was an established and experienced operator when he twice met Ezzard Charles in the summer of 1942. In their first fight, Charles was within perhaps a single punch of handing Burley his first and last stoppage loss in the fourth round before coming close to being stopped himself in a torrid fifth. With that horror-show round behind him, he stepped up and in to outfight Charley. Burley, one of the ring’s great learning fighters, organized an immediate rematch tricking, trapping and counterpunching the then middleweight Charles, who boxed clever before once again stepping inside to take the play away from his smaller opponent. He was, at that time, a teenager, and had not yet left school.

Jimmy Bivins, who I have at forty-five, is the last of Ezzard’s top fifty victims, a fighter with whom he went 4-1. He became only the second man to stop Bivins in their 1947 encounter, knocking him out like no man had before or since, stretching him “flat on his back” with a counter over the top of Jimmy’s jab which left him prone “for several minutes” after he had been counted out. Charles lost to Bivins when he was twenty years old, once he hit his stride his domination of one of the all-time greats was complete.

Teddy Yarosz, ranked #79, had, like Louis, seen better days at the time of his 1941 meeting with Charles but Charles was still but twenty years old, and had taken a huge risk in matching yet another great at such a young age. Yarosz was not in the fight. He landed “only about three good lefts” and “clinched frequently” on the way to what reads like a 10-0 drubbing having been dropped in the first and vanishing into a defensive shell.

Finally, there is Lloyd Marshall, the enigmatic Marshall, ranked lowest of the Charles victims at #83, but granted a special place in the hearts of boxing historians everywhere because he has a dubious starring role in one of the greatest films ever made: that of his being knocked out by a prime light-heavyweight Ezzard Charles in 1946. Fought in the tiniest of rings it is a fight that is fought by necessity at a lightning pace, but remains technically brilliant, a showcase of infighting, outboxing, body-punching and defense. Charles demonstrates the sneaky right he uses to poleaxe Bivins, the sublime uppercut he would use to terrorise Pat Valentino in a 1949 title defense, a snapping jab, feints by footwork, but most of all speed that footage of his heavyweight campaign does no more than hint at. The knockout is baited by two feints, one with the lead foot, one with the head, and when Marshall takes the second one Charles steps in and disappears his left fist into Marshall’s ribs. It looks like no other knockout that I have seen aside from one of the most celebrated of all time, the one Charles would suffer at the hands of Jersey Joe Walcott years later. The most telling difference is the art Charles shows in baiting that hook.

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#4 Henry Armstrong (150-21-10)

Henry Armstrong is boxing’s bogeyman. Yes, he was skilled, so skilled in fact that he remains, seventy years after his retirement, the definitive exponent of the swarming pressure style, but it was not skill that defined him. What made Armstrong perhaps the most dangerous fighter in all of boxing history was more elemental—violent pressure, a blackout punch, an inexhaustible engine, an iron-chin, an iron-will; these were the tools Armstrong used to drive himself to triple-crown immorality. At the sharp end of this list there are only speedsters, technical geniuses, the most advanced of trapping counterpunchers, and Armstrong, and it was Armstrong who can be named the ultimate executioner of champions.

The bloody slaughter of boxing royalty began in 1935 with a ten-round decision over the obese but brilliant former flyweight champion Midget Wolgast who he outworked in the back stretch to outpoint despite a terrifying left-handed rally from the canvas by an inspired Wolgast through the third and fourth. Next up, Baby Arizmendi, who not only enjoyed recognition in some corners as the featherweight champion of the world, but also held not just one but two wins over Hammerin’ Hank. Armstrong would claim that those losses were caused not Arizmendi’s ability but certain business arrangements combined with suspect officiating. True or not, Armstrong leant those accusations weight by way of his 1936 trouncing of the Mexican. The LA Times had it 10-0 to Armstrong and described the champion as “mercilessly outclassed,” and stated that Arizmendi’s “cheekbones, eyes and lips were badly swollen and dripping blood.” Henry had just Armstronged his first world-class opponent, pinned him to the ropes, beat him like a dog. A terrible force was set in motion that night. Just two weeks later, Armstrong buzz-sawed his way through Juan Zurita, a fighter who would snatch up a piece of the lightweight title in Armstrong’s wake but could not last four rounds in the ring with him. Two months later, he crowded, bullied and decisioned NYSAC featherweight champion Mike Belloise in a non-title fight. In early 1937 he rematched the native New Yorker, still recognized as champion is his hometown and left him insensible and unable to continue after four; four rounds, too, was the limit for former light-welterweight champion and Kid Chocolate conqueror Frankie Klick who did well even to survive the first after swallowing a right hand that sent him clattering around the ring like a frightened pony—nobody can have been surprised when the ultra-durable former junior-lightweight champion Benny Bass also managed just four before hearing the first count of his career in the summer of ’37; a terrible and deafening scream of power-punching pressure was hurtling down the corridors of fistic history and it’s champions were being thrown before it like leaves before a hurricane.

Spilling journeymen and contenders about him as he rocketed to the unified title, Armstrong did not establish universally recognized lineage until his six-round destruction of Petey Sarron, who actually befuddled Armstrong in the first as he “jumped about rigidly upright or scrambled about in a low crouch,” (The Pittsburgh Press) but once he found his range Armstrong set Sarron adrift amidst a “blizzard of red leather.” Armstrong forced him to stand and fight in a war he couldn’t hope to win in his wildest dreams, and a withering body attack opened the way for a right hand shot that bundled him to the canvas like a bag of laundry for the only stoppage loss of his fierce life.

Armstrong stopped future featherweight champion Chalky Wright in just three rounds at the beginning of 1938 before pouncing upon world welterweight king Barney Ross and utterly crushing him in fifteen whilst weighing no more than a lightweight, so he remained a lightweight, and demonstrating an unbreakable heart, swallowing the bellyful of blood that poured from his cut mouth to out-tough the sheetrock 135-pound champion Lou Ambers to become undisputed feather, light and welterweight champion of the world. It was the welterweight championship that would make him. He made nearly twenty defenses, defeating future lightweight champion Lew Jenkins, future middleweight champion Ceferino Garcia, who he was unlucky not to get more than the draw against in their 1940 rematch for the middleweight title. When he finally dropped the welterweight title in a bad-tempered fight with back-alley wizard Fritzie Zivic seven months later he had knockout wins over former strap-holders Juan Zurita and Leo Rodak ahead of him still, and not least a revenge win over Zivic; sheet-lightning; a ghost-wave at night; a solar flare, the rarest of natural disasters he cut the flesh of great champions and broken-down journeymen into the same useless shambles of non-resistance.

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