Video - Top 100 Boxers

Good work.

I think there's a bit of bias to more recent fighters, since more divisions means there's more points avalible.

 

1.You're doing a best fights of the 50s next? What ever happened to those decade's best fights survey's that stopped in the 80s? I've been waiting for the 70s and 60s forever. I was hoping to use those as the basis to make a private viewing list. Without the extra input from the classic section, your typical 50s fight list will probably just follow Ring's fight of the year list and I've seen those already. You'd better have something interesting up your sleeve.

Have we even had a best fights of the 50s thread down here before?*No, wait, I found one. I even posted in it.

2.The Rummy List is a test of longevity more than anything. Look at all those steroid cheats from the last decade. Bernard Hopkins. Ha! Mayweather? Up there with pre-roids Archie Moore, Joe Louis, and Muhammad Ali. Bull****. That's how J.M. Marquez scores so high too. You don't get bigger, stronger, and faster after 35.

3.Ring has the look of one continuous list but it functions more like 3 or 4 with the changes it's made over the years. Besides the roids advantage of younger fighters, you also have the list ranking twice as many divisions. Plus, it's infuriating how inconsistent they were. How they'd list a weight class for a couple of years, stop, then start again decades later.

4.Their bias was a little sickening at points too. Giving Canelo Golovkin's championship points for years is one example. Monzon and other South American fighters not being listed until they were champs is another.

5.It didn't matter if you were in a golden era of elite competition in a prestige division or if you ruled a ghost town by yourself. Calzaghe fought no one and just racked up 10s year after year at Super Middleweight. Putting him between Willie Pep and Emile Griffith made me laugh.

6.Which brings me to another point. Emile Griffith had 112 fights. Willie Pep had 241. Joe Calzaghe had 46. Of course, you'll keep your longevity better if you don't fight anyone. That's why Ezzard Charles was burned out by 30. He'd already had 100 fights by then. Most of the best guys are retired by 33 and will not do well on these duration based scorecards. Where did Barney Ross even rank on this? Dude retired at like 29. Anyway, the scores will naturally skew more toward guys who fought once or twice a year over guys who fought ten or twenty times. That's how you're going to get Henry Armstrong at #55 or so.

7.Weight climbing did nothing to effect scores. Guys who fought in five or six divisions are getting the same treatment as guys who fought in one. Mickey Walker barely made the list and Ray Leonard didn't. Wasn't Mickey Walker rated below Stevie Johnston?

 

I don't think it's nearly as much to do with steroids, as (as you pointed out), having far fewer fights, and especially far fewer hard fights with top competition, plus shorter fights.

 

I get that they were a pain in the ass, but for my money your decades best fights surveys were some of the best and most useful threads I've seen in the six years I've been on this forum.

By the way, kudos on all the hard work you put into this latest bunch of videos. Not a lot of guys are making that kind of thoughtful contribution to our forums. They'll make a valuable document for people grappling with the history of the sport. That sort of thing is important. The montage's, tribute videos, and lists of fighters that I would find on youtube were instrumental in nurturing my nascent enthusiasm for the sport. Cool documentaries like When We Were Kings or music videos by Hanzagod definitely made a difference when I was hovering between boxing and mma. A sport that generates this much paraphernalia, and has a long history of statistics which you can use in hypothetical comparisons is half the fun. It's the sort of thing that baseball, football, or basketball have which mma and kickboxing don't seem particularly interested in. They are sports without a past.

I don't believe that anybody even started doing any historical reporting on great fights or keeping records of fighter rankings in mma or kickboxing until around the 2000s. The Ring is a sort of miracle in that respect. It's an oddity, the fact that nobody else was doing the kinds of things that our chroniclers were, that our sport was decades ahead of everybody. For all of it's inconsistency or flaws, it's amazing that we have anything like it at all. Anyway, I guess what I'm trying to say is, thanks Rummy I enjoyed your video, and it's these kinds of things that make me love the sport.

You don't actually think that Hopkins was clean, do you? I mean at least not the last decade of his career?

 

I just think it's just the less important factor.

Might be less competition in general too, the less competition the more you can decline and stay on top.

 

bump

 

Tremendous video to cap off a tremendous series. Quite amazing that Tyson could have been floating near the top 10 mark if not for his prison sentence and suspension.

 

Thanks for all the hard work. I agree it was a great learning experience.

One question--is that middleweight photo of Sugar Ray Robinson really Sugar Ray Robinson. The welter photo is Ray, but the middleweight photo doesn't look like him at all to me. Could be just an odd angle.

 

I was discussing Bob Fitzsimmons on another thread, and I was wondered how he would do under your system.

Well It was easy to give him 10's for 1891 to 1898 (8 years) as champion, and again full 10's for 1903 and 1904 as champion. For the rest, I relied on mattdonnellion's pre-Ring Magazine rankings at heavyweight. While Fitz was middle champion from 1892 to 1896, Matt also rated him at heavyweight, with scores of 5, 8, 8, 9, 9 from 1892 to 1896. He got an 8 in 1899, 9 in 1900, 9 in 1902. Although the light-heavyweight champion, Matt rated Fitz at heavyweight in 1903 and 1905 for scores of 9 & 5.

Adding that all up, Bob Fitzsimmons, a triple champion from middle to heavy over 14 years, ended up with 179 points. But this does not include any points at all in any division prior to 1891 when he won the middle title.

Fitz would thus rate very high on your list, possibly top three.

I guessed Fitz would probably have the best total of the old-timers and he does reach an impressive total.