Not bringing up anything that most here don't already know. But looking at Ezzard's record, from December of 1944 to May of 1951, he won 41 fights in just six and a half years. His only defeat during this incredible streak was a controversial decision to Elmer Ray who just about everyone thought Charles had beat. He avenged the loss a short time later.. He was fighting contenders sometimes as often as weeks apart and usually winning. He became heavyweight champion of the world in June of 1949 and compiled 9 title fight victories in just two years. I'm wondering if Charles shouldn't be in my heavyweight top 10. He certainly makes most people's top 5 on a p4p basis and rightfully so.
Charles was perceived as a boring safety first fighter the revisionisim that goes on here is astonishing at times. The write up to his Layne win commented on how he had momentarily metamorphasised into a crowd pleasing fighter for that fight.
I think if I fought 41 times in a 6 year period and against the likes of men such as Archie Moore, Jimmy Bivens, Joe Walcott, Joe Louis, Joey Maxim and Elmer Ray, I'd employ some safety first tactics too
I have him in mine. Kind of what I've been preaching on here for some time. But the push back is that he lost bad to Walcott in the third fight, and is just a great Light Heavyweight. But when you are beating top HWs, or LHWs that come in big and usually fight HWs..I think cedit should be due. His LHW prime is really only a two year run and the only top guys he fought that were LHW sized were maybe Marshall, Smith, and Moore. Remarkable run there and enough to put him as the H2H LHW king, but so much of his great work came against HWs.
Agreed. There is a huge difference between just merely fighting "light heavyweights" and fighting the very best the division has ever seen.. Charles beat Archie something like three times and as you say was regularly beating top heavyweights.. winning 41 fights in 6 years against the most elite competitors in the world is something you'll likely never see again.
Quite simply the greatest Light-Heavyweight of all time and absolutely strolls in to a top ten pound for pound, although I'd go even further than that and put him in the top five. Although he was only a shade or two away from splitting his combined six fights with Walcott and Charles right down the middle, I don't particuarly rate him as a great Heavyweight, albeit he was still a pretty good one. But that doesn't matter as his record between 160 and 175 is just insane. Very often, guys ranked inside the top three or four in the history of a weight class aren't around in the same era. Charles was forunate enough to have Archie Moore around during his peak and he went 3-0 against him, even throwing an inside-schedule victory in there for good measure. Whether it's Duran or Benny Leonard at 135, Ali at Heavy, Greb at Middle etc - nobody else has such a glistening rubber stamped approval of their superiority in their weight class as Charles has in the furnace of those three wins. The closest thing you can come up with is probably Saddler going 3-1 against Pep, but given the unsatisfactory nature of a couple of their fights and Pep's plane crash excuse (much as I think it gets over-played), it's not quite in the same class. 4-1 against Bivins, who might well crack the all-time top ten at 175 himself, 2-1 against Marshall who also wouldn't far off that group, 5-0 against a perhaps underrated Maxim, 2-0 against Burley, also beat Christoforidis, Smith, Ray, Baksi, Yarosz etc. It's just incredible the amount of genuinely excellent opposition Charles took care of in his peak years, and even more remarkable how few slip ups he had against them.....And most agree that he was sawn off against Ray in that first fight, too. After all that, he remains competitive at Heavyweight while sliding past his peak and having his edge blunted in the aftermath of the Baroudi tragedy. I almost have to laugh when I see historians and experts placing him outside the top ten. I appreciate we all have our own methods of rating fighters, but there are some things just so obvious and so indusputable that you have to question it. I mean, seriously, how can anyone say with a straight face that there are ten or more fighters with a resume to match or better Charles'? 'Tis a damn shame he never got the chance to hold the crown at Middle or Light-Heavy, which leads all too many to believe he was just some erratic Heavyweight champion for a short while who was liable to lose as many as he won against the top dogs.
Awesome post. One might even say that had it not been for the questionable decision in the fourth Walcott fight that Charles may very conceivably have been the first man to regain the heavyweight title.
Charles was an amazing fighter but not an amazing heavyweight .. the men he defended his title against were tiny and not impressive .. far and away the best was the old Walcott .. the streak you are discussing was almost all either at light heavyweight to at heavyweight against light heavyweights ..
Chris, excellent post on a truly great MW [yes I said MW] and the premier lightheavyweight of a GOLDEN AGE of LHs... Today posters don't realize how great a middleweight Ez was when he started his career. As a youngster good enough to beat Charley Burley twice...So good was young Ezzard at 160 pounds that I and others chose him to beat the MW Ray Robinson were they to have met. a great gentleman was Ezzard who died a painful death from lateral sclerosis at a young age...
Putting him top ten in heavyweights is just abit ludicrous but I think you would almost find consensus that he was the greatest lightheavy ever... as well as being top 10, if not top 7, all time greatest LB 4 LB.
I'm giving you the perception of him when he was actually fighting,I'm not saying anything detrimental about him from my personal point of view .I have many times stated he is an ATG p4p arguably the greatest of them! That does not change how he was viewed by his contemporaries, nor how I rank his standing as a heavyweight for all time.
But for not being given the opportunity to fight Braddock the same could have been more emphatically said about Max Schmeling. What if Conn had danced those last 3 rounds against Louis? What if Walcott had done what he had in their first fight against Louis and kept away? Boxing is a," what if ,but for," game and always will be.
I don't know. This is where the Ezzard Charles stuff kind of gets a little thick for me. Some fighters just have another guy's number. Antonio Tarver arguably won all three fights with Roy Jones (though officially he lost a majority decision in the first), and he even starched Jones in two rounds. In fact, he owned Jones at 175. Was Charles more dominant over Moore than Tarver was over Jones? And that was at the time when Roy was the dominant fighter in the sport and had been for years - Moore wasn't. There was no one better from 160 to 175 during Jones' time. (And Jones had just beaten John Ruiz for a portion of the heavyweight title when Tarver first faced him.) Established writers who watched Ray Robinson were wondering aloud whether Jones was better than Robinson (after the Ruiz fight). And Tarver was so confident against Jones he even mocked Jones during the fighter instructions before their rematch, when the referee asked if they had any questions and Tarver said: "Yeah. Got any excuses tonight, Roy?" Up to the moment he lost his title via decision to Hopkins (sure to be a first-ballot Hall of Famer) after fiilming the Rocky Balboa movie and having to drop a lot of weight to make 175, Tarver had avenged all three of his losses (two of them - against Jones and Harding - via convincing knockouts). Tarver didn't start to slide until he was nearly 40. Charles was already beginning his slide when he turned 30. But I don't read anyone saying Tarver's dominance over Jones rubber stamped anything. And, frankly, I don't think it should. I think Tarver's losses bring down many of his dominant wins. Same with Charles. I think his losses bring him down some. Ezzard Charles scored a lot of excellent wins. He certainly fought more often than fighters today do. Unfortunately, unless you were in the arena, most people never saw them. And by the time he was on television regularly in the 1950s, he was losing more often than he won. Charles is a hard guy to gauge. But there are a lot of fighters like Charles who are remembered more for their later losses that were widely seen than their early wins that weren't seen. And it gets more difficult, as time goes by, to simply dismiss the dozens of bad losses a fighter like Charles racks up when more recent fighters who distinguish themselves early and stick around too long often aren't given the same consideration. There is more grey area with fighters like Charles than there is "black and white." That's why statements like Charles' three wins over Moore "rubber stamp" his superiority don't ring entirely true.
Conn and Walcott chose to fight Louis the way they did and lost legitimately. And we don't know for certain how a Schmeling vs Braddock fight would have played out. Charles actually DID fight Walcott and according to most he actually DID deserve the win.. So there's far less of a coulda', woulda', shoulda' element in his case.
The knockout win by Walcott in fight three was the only popular win of the four. The decisions in all three fights were widely booed (reportedly the scores in all three fights that went the distance weren't very accurate). In fact, that's why they fought a third time, because according to Ring people in the arena were booing the verdict in fight two and Walcott walked around the ring waving his arms trying to drum up support in the press for a third fight. In the fourth fight, most thought Charles deserved to win, and the television broadcast signal dropped, and when people read the next morning in the paper that Charles lost, they couldn't believe it.