Top 3 fighters since Ray Robinson`s prime ????

Marvel got owned.

 

This is probably how I see it too.

 

couldn't agree more.. leonard is a bit overated

 

by next year, pacquiao would be there

 

Hate to be unoriginal,but my three as well. :good

 

:good As fine a fighter as Pacquiao is,it's a tad premature to rate him in the same breath as yet.

 

Monzon
Duran
Mayweather

 

I presume you are talking about the travesty of justice we all know as Hagler versus Leonard. (I have to presume this because actual matches between the top two fighters of the 1980s could only have involved Hagler-Duran or Hagler-Hearns.)

Yes, a shopworn aging warrior pounded out a clear victory over a returning Leonard does indeed prove something - that the ever-calculating Leonard miscalculated and didn't wait long enough to challenge the fighter he knew would have decimated him years earlier (in much the same fashion as Hector "Macho" Camacho decimated him years later).

Of course, that's the real world. In the fantasy world of some boxing judges, Leonard could almost always depend on a few "strangers" to help him out in the end. Just as they did in preventing his loss in the second Hearns fight from showing up in the record books, they gave him a most undeserved distinction following the Hagler victory, which Leonard had not the courage to risk once gifted. Cluck. Cluck.

But we do have Leonard getting pounded from ring post to ring post in the first Duran fight and Leonard's swollen and baffled countenance from the first Hearns fight to prove Ray wasn't nearly the sweet welterweight people so desperately wish him to be. No dominant fighter was he. Ergo, no top spot for him.

It's time to wean yourself off the Kool-aid. Oh Yeah!

 

Muhammad Ali
Carlos Monzon
Alexis Arguello

 

Duran and Ali seems pretty given. As for the third my head tells me Leonard, but I kind of want to go for Whitaker. Can anyone give me some good arguments for doing so? Could a case be made for Napoles, or is that way off base? Hearns?

 

Whether SRL won or not, it's not really relevant to who was better between him and Hagler. 1987 Marvin was a totally different animal to early 80s Marvin, the fight doesn't mean anything like as much as it would had it happened around 1981 when they were both pretty much prime.

I think Leonard was the better fighter by a whisker, but that's because he was slightly better at his peak, not because he edged a fight when they were both past-prime in the judges' minds by his calculated running and flurrying.

 

I would like the TS to clear up whether this thread is talking about top 3 pound-for-pound, or top 3 on ability, as everyone's answers would surely be different for those two categories.

I only have one constant (Duran), as my answer was:

P4P - 1.Duran, 2.Ali, 3.Monzon

Ability - 1=Duran, 1=Leonard, 3.Whitaker