Top 15 middleweights 1940-1950

men who passed through lighter divisions while coming into maturity shouldn't be included in lower weights, even one they stopped in for a while.

ie Len Harvey, said to have fought from Flyweight to Heavyweight, with noted success as a welter & especially a middleweight and then finishing with success at Heavyweight. Well you can't actually call Len a FW, BW, LW, WW or HW can you.

Harvey was in fact a Light-Heavy cum Heavyweight, Len Harvey IS therefor a very definite Light-Heavyweight.

his accomplishments in other weights seals his 'overall' status and excellence as a Light- Heavyweight great.

same with Armstrong, he is/was very definitely a Lightweight marvel and so on for all such fighters - 1 definitive weight.

Charles, Moore, Lytell, Wade(?) are L-HWs and lamotta too is nowhere near 'among' the 15 greatest middleweights of alltime.

pick even the 3 supposed best from EVERY Era/Decade, that gives you approx. 15 decades which is 45 'supposed best middles and believe me there are at least 30 of them that surpass jake, and more importantly H2H would beat him handily.

again Lists are IMPOSSIBLE, for a few more reasons too than I have noted above, namely TOO MANY Great fighters overall floating around the TOP 20 or 30 fighters just as capable the world over. Simple.

 

Just to throw a spanner in the works Suze i'm not sure Charles could top the list. By the end of 42 he never came remotely close to making middleweight again and rarely truly made 160 at all. For sure he beat Burley x 2 but Burley tho great was basically a light middleweight at that time.

Certainly if it's resume he probably hasn't fought there enough. I know it's a muddle given he beat Burley but Charlie hung around for most of the decade as did others.

 

Happy to see your top ten.

Well, how does each fighter do against others in your top ten

Charley Burley
Charles--(0-2)
Williams--(3-3 & 1 NC)
Marshall--(0-1)
Moore--(1-0)
Abrams--(0-0-1)

Total 4-6-1 & 1 NC
fights 5, beats 2, loses to 3, draws 1

Holman Williams
Burley--(3-3 & 1 NC)
Marshall--(2-1)
Moore--(1-1)
Booker--(1-1)
Cerdan--(0-1)
LaMotta--(0-1)

total 7-8 & 1 NC
fights 6, beats 4, loses to 6

Archie Moore
Burley--(0-1)
Williams--(1-1)
Marshall--(2-0)
Booker--(0-1-2)

total 3-3-2
fights 4, beats 2, loses to 2, draws 1

Marcel Cerdan
Williams (1-0)
Abrams (1-0)
Zale (1-0)
LaMotta (0-1)

total 3 wins 1 loss
fights 4, beats 3, loses to 1

Jake LaMotta
Marshall (0-1)
Williams (1-0)
Cerdan (1-0)

total 2 wins 1 loss
fights 3, beats 2, loses to 1

Burley isn't all that impressive. He goes 4-6 against the murderer's row, but even if we drop Charles and add Lytell, he would end up 5-5, with an even record, splitting with Williams and Lytell, while beating Moore and losing to Marshall.

Bottom line, in the 1940's Burley did NOT prove himself better in the ring than Charles, Marshall, Williams, Abrams, and Lytell, although fighting all these men in his 20's. We could add Doc Williams and Jimmy Bivins. A lot of guys not to prove superiority over to be the best of the decade and the top ATG.

Williams actually did better against the murderer's row, going 7-6, splitting with Burley, while winning the last 2 decisions, beating Marshall 2 of 3, and splitting with Moore when Moore had grown into a light-heavy. He also split with Booker. But the problem with Williams is that he lost to Cerdan and LaMotta and so is a weak reed on which to build the case for the superiority of the murderer's row, so is usually rated behind Burley, although generally ranked ahead of him in the yearly ratings back in the 1940's.

As for Moore, he lost a lot of fights during this era. He might not have been the fighter he would later become. *I didn't count the later Charles fights at light-heavy against Moore.

 

The Mamakos part of this doesn't mean much. Mamakos was in the middle of a 3-11 run with 10 KO defeats when Charles got him.

Mamakos doesn't prove much about Charles, but he does raise the legit issue of why Zale had so much trouble with this rather ordinary fighter.

I think you have a good point that perhaps Zale should be dropped several notches. Still, Zale did better against better fighters like Apostoli, Hostak, and Abrams. Perhaps it was just one of those styles make fights things.

As for Mamakos, I found an obit which covered his career in which he was quoted as saying that he really didn't try very hard after losing the Zale fight, wanting to retire, but always taking one more "last" fight for the money.

 

Eddie Booker
Archie Moore (1-0-2)
Lloyd Marshall (1-0)
Holman Williams (1-1)

Total 3-1-2
fights 3, beats 3, loses to 1, draws with 1

But, Booker was really a light-heavy by 1943 & 1944, so the weight pull takes some of the shine off this if we are considering him as a middle.

I don't think Zale ever beat Soose. He did split 4 with Bolden. No question that even in the old days observers felt Zale was nothing more than a journeyman until he started moving about 1940. I don't think his only impressive scalp was Abrams, however. Hostak and Apostoli were nothing to sneeze at.

*I did come across an article saying that Zale was in the Navy and was actually in battles out in the Pacific. I think it best to be circumspect about criticizing him for anything that happened between 1942 and 1945.

 

Great thread. The best in weeks.

 

You can easily add Kid Tunero, Steve Belloise, Fred Apostoli, Cocoa Kid and Rocky Graziano to this list. Man, this was a deep era.

 

yes, it has been interesting getting off the heavies and I have learned a lot discussing the 1940's middles on this and the Zale and Graziano threads.

The elephant in the room in this one is WWII. With a total population of 130 million, the US had 15 million men in the service (plus over 1 million women) with lots of others in essential war-related jobs. The impact in Europe was even greater.

Difficult to argue against the observers who felt the war-time competition was weak. They have strong logic on their side.

 

This is just about the hardest era to evaluate imo.Great fighters without signature wins owing to boxing politics some of the "Row" extreeeeeeeeeeeeemely difficult to quantify.
I don't think anyone can be confident in their picks here I certainly am not . I'll give it a go ,but I won't presume to rank them.
Zale
Burley
Lamotta
Wiliams
Lytell
Marshall
Abrams
Villemain
Cerdan
Moore
Booker
Charles
Chase
Overlin
Basora/Wade Okay I cheated bit
* For me you have Charles too high, he had a weight pull in both Burley fights,though he was young.

 

Great era indeed.

For me Burley and Williams are a little high. Like Ed said they are 4-6-1 and 7-8 vs the field of top competition, so I see them as important benchmarks. Not high water marks.

Cerdan and Zale underrated, both are impressive on film.

Cerdan is 3-1 vs
Williams (1-0)
Abrams (1-0)
Zale (1-0)
LaMotta (0-1)**** But his loss is due to a foul when LaMotta threw Cerda to the matt and he injured a shoulder ****