Top 20 best pro boxers of the 1980s

Ok, I agree with almost all the names in there. Was it in order?
I'd have Pedroza over Chacon personally, although in terms of memorable moments Chacon was clearly the more significant fighter.

Curry should probably top the list of welterweights for the second half of the 80s, so I'd have him above Honeghan, even though Honeghan beat him.

Just wondering which Lopez you're referring to - Tony?

After the first four names on my list (Leonard, Hagler, Hearns and Spinks), it gets more subjective. As for 11-20, it's very, very close between a lot of them.

 

Top 20 part 1 (1-10):

1. Sugar Ray Leonard
2. Marvin Hagler
3. Thomas Hearns
4. Michael Spinks
5. Mike Tyson
6. Larry Holmes
7. Salvador Sanchez
8. Julio Cesar Chavez
9. Eusebio Pedroza
10. Azumah Nelson

I'm happy with my 1 and 2 and my 3 and 4. At no point did Hearns or Spinks gain consideration for the top spot, it was only Leonard and Hagler who were in contention. Who you place at number one is likely to depend on two things: who you thought won their fight in '87 and how you feel about Sugar Ray Leonard. Hagler was the greatest champion of the 80s in my view in terms of his longevity and dominance and he had a genuine marquee win over Hearns (and to a lesser degree, Duran). But Leonard beat Duran, Hearns and Hagler (again, depending on your view). Does that trump Hagler's achievements? All I'll say is, today it does. Tomorrow it might not!

Had Spinks chosen not to cash in his chips by facing Mike Tyson, he'd be in the conversation for the number 1 spot. But he did, and it has put a huge black mark against his legacy (unjustifiably so in my opinion). Even then, he could take the number 3 spot here. In the same time period as Spinks was unbeaten (1980-87), Hearns fought Leonard, Benitez, Duran and Hagler. He won two and lost two. While that was happening, Spinks was beating Eddie Mustafa Muhammad, Dwight Braxton and Larry Holmes. He also unified the light heavy title. If you think Spinks is number 3, no problem here. Hearns was the bigger name and the more exciting fighter and I make no apology if that has swayed me in my judgement slightly. But I also feel Hearns continued to challenge himself in the two-three years after the loss to Hagler. Spinks sat on his lineal champion status until he met Tyson.

Anyway, the top 4 I have, in whichever order, are solid and I'm happy with them.

The toughest thing is to balance relative achievements against expectation and pressure. Referencing the 'achievements of Yung Koo Chang v Mike Tyson' thread elsewhere, how can you compare a light-flyweight who competed outside the world's gaze with the at-one-time most famous sportsman in the world? What Tyson achieved will always weigh heavier on the collective consciousness than that of a still relatively unknown fighter from the far east. I don't know that it is fair but I do think a distinction has to at least be acknowledged, even if not agreed with. Bearing that in mind, Tyson makes my top 5. Chang does not (in fact, he is ommitted completely from my top 20 too). Not an oversight, just a choice. The depth of quality in this era was such that a fighter as good as him misses out. And he's not the only one.

Larry Holmes might not have been the undisputed unified heavyweight champion but he was indisputably the best heavyweight in the world between the beginning 1980 and the end of 1982. From around 1983, age and motivational issues started to impact his performances. He was handed the IBF title but his grip was loosening as the mid-80s approached. Spinks caught him at exactly the right time.

Salvador Sanchez was definitively an 80s fighter. He won the title in January 1980 and as everyone knows had his title reign and life cut short. His legacy has probably benefitted from the unfulfilled expectations that people now place on him but he was so tremendous that they are still believable. Regardless, he won the title from a tremendous champion in Danny Lopez, repeated the trick 6 months later against Lopez and then beat Wilfredo Gomez in one of the contenders for "performance of the decade". His victory over Azumah Nelson got better and better as Nelson proved his own greatness later in the decade.

The three fighters rounding out the top 10 were tougher to pick but in the end I plumped for them over a number of other possibly equally deserving fighters because they made their reputations in this era, they were dominant champions and performers and only one of them would lose a title in the ring that decade. The best of them was Julio Cesar Chavez but Pedroza and Nelson run him close during this era at least. Chavez won world titles at three weights between 1984 and 1989 and beat fighters as good as Rocky Lockridge, Roger Mayweather (twice), Jose Luis Ramirez and Edwin Rosario. Pedroza stayed in one place rather than making a gradual climb up the divisions and might have ranked higher had he faced Sanchez. He lacked a marquee win but was a truly dominant champion in the first half of the decade. Nelson recovered from his brilliant but unsuccessful challenge against Sanchez to beat (an admittedly faded Wilfredo Gomez) before starting his own dominance of the jnr lightweight division that went well into the 90s.

Part 2 coming soon...

 

Thanks man! Just to clarify, it was less around Chang not having the body of work and more about the conditions in which it was achieved relative to Tyson, who did it with the pressure of the world's media on him the whole time. Hard to compare fighters from the opposite end of the weight spectrum and opposite ends of the boxing limelight.

 

Part 2 (11-20):

11. Aaron Pryor
12. Jeff Fenech
13. Roberto Duran
14. Wilfredo Gomez
15. Wilfred Benitez
16. Alexis Arguello
17. Donald Curry
18. Lupe Pintor
19. Jeff Chandler
20. Gilberto Roman

Ow! Putting together 11-20 hurt a lot more than putting together 1-10. I'm not even going to pretend this is a definitive list. It's not even my definitive list! I could do this again tomorrow and come up with at least 5 different names to drop in, maybe more.

I was practically tossing a coin on positioning and I had to leave out more top fighters than I could put in. Anyway, this is my reasoning...

Aaron Pryor is a definitively 80s fighter. He made and lost his reputation all inside that decade. He gets short shrift on these forums and it's hard to know exactly how great he was because he missed out on one or two potentially classic fights that might have proved or disproved it either way. But I feel his bludgeoning of Cervantes and brilliant victory over Arguello in 82 (black bottle excepted) are enough to put him amongst the era's elite.

Jeff Fenech blew through three weight divisions quicker than anyone had ever done before. He didn't stick around long enough to make an enduring impression in any of them but he was such a ball of intensity that I couldn't leave him off this list.

Roberto Duran is a perfect example of how hard it is to place these fighters in a meaningful order. On the one hand, he had arguably the greatest win of the decade in beating Leonard but then he had no real consistency and didn't dominate - the exact opposite of the Duran of the 70s in fact. But he came back twice and both of those wins are etched in boxing folklore. He's hard to ignore and gets in ahead of more consistent performers.

His fellow 70s counterparts Wilfred Benitez, Wilfredo Gomez and Alexis Arguello, like Duran, kicked off the 80s at pretty much the top of their game. Unlike Duran they managed to keep their reputations intact for the next couple of years, until Gomez ran into Sanchez and Arguello met his match in Pryor. Gomez managed to keep going after his set back well into the mid-80s until the wheels came off completely against Azumah Nelson. But Arguello was effectively finished after the rematch with Pryor. Benitez schooled Duran and survived Thomas Hearns before his prime well and truly ended in 1983. The feeling is that their very best years were in the previous decade but they still did enough to merit inclusion, at least in my eyes.

What to do with Donald Curry? There was a time at the beginning of 1986 when he was seen as possibly second only to Marvin Hagler in p4p lists of active fighters. He had unified the WW title at the end of 1985 with a brilliant KO of Milton McCrory. But the loss to Honeyghan was one of the biggest shocks of the decade and the one punch KO by Mike McCallum effectively put an end to a promising top flight career. However, he did enough to deserve a spot in the 3 years he was champion.

Pintor and Chandler are almost inseparable and the failure of that matchup to materialise is one of the great missed opportunities of the decade. Pintor's comeback at jnr featherweight in 1985 is why I have him a shade in front of Chandler on this list.

Rounding out the top 20 is Gilberto Roman. He's a fighter who I've only recently started to appreciate (thanks @Flea Man) and he pushes out a host of lower weight fighters to the final spot.

A selection of just some who missed out:
-Mike McCallum
-Hector Camacho
-Yung Koo Chang
-Jiro Watanabe
-Khaosai Galaxy
-Miguel Lora

A few further thoughts:

My top 20 list has 9 American fighters in it and the top 6 fighters are all American. Perhaps that shows a bias (although I'm British) but it's reflective of the 80s being the last great era for American boxing, when boxers were truly crossover stars, made for TV.

Many of the fighters who left an indelible impression on the 80s were not always the very best. But to ignore them completely is to misunderstand the era in my view.

So, here's to the guys who might not have made the list in terms of pure achievement but definitely made the era what it was in terms of pure excitement:
-The other "Fab Four" - early 80s jnr lightweights Bobby Chacon, Cornelius Boza-Edwards, Rafael Limon and Rolando Naverette
-Matthew Saad Muhammad
-Ray Boom Boom Mancini
-Frank The Animal Fletcher and John The Beast Mugabi
-Edwin Rosario - an "80s fighter" if ever there was one

 

I'm not wedded to the idea either.