How do you define an ATG? Where the boxer should be ranked all time in his division/P4P to be one? Where the definition of ATG ends?
"I know it when I see it" is a famous phrase used by US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in his 1964 concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio. He used it to describe his threshold test for obscenity, admitting he could not intelligibly define "hard-core pornography," but knew it when he saw it.
On this sub it seems top 10 in your division seems pretty common from what I see. Not in all divisions but generally on average. I don't know about P4P the standard seems to be higher there and it seems to work against heavyweights and maybe even some of the very lightest weight classes to a extent.
Ive always thought of it like this: An all "time" great is a guy you could drop in any decade and he'd be able to compete with the best of that era, winning a majority of his fights against them, like Ali did.
Well, it can't be a hard number for me, like top ten in their division or something like that, because it would be retroactively un-greating past fighters or keeping clearly great new fighters from a status based only on someone else getting there first. Makes no sense. In short, I call it when we see it, like McGrain's example. There are a lot of cases of borderline guys I've never had a strong feeling of that cut either way. I have no system to cut out subjectivity for something like this. Ever-changing contexts with belts, promoters and TV channels in cahoots, etc, can make an incredible talent force me to judge on a poor quality of opposition when I can see they're supremely gifted and that kind of thing, and I can't in good conscience just rate them low if I think they're cut from the same cloth as Chavez or Hearns.
In that case, just out of curiosity, would you consider Marciano an ATG? Many do, but I think he'd be hard pressed to beat a majority of the top guys from the 90s for example. FWIW, I don't think your definition is a bad one, but there would be a few exceptions IMO.
It's a balance of how one did against his contemporaries, how one would stack up in any era and how one affected/changed the sport itself. Like anything considered seriously, it requires nuance. For example, Jack Dempsey did very well against his contemporaries, but the scope of those contemporaries was limited by the color line, and those remaining don't present as fearsome head-to-head challenges, but also he changed boxing enormously, almost in a watershed event, by creating the BIG EVENT and catapulting it to the stratosphere of modern sport. So, we balance these realities and, I believe, we get an All Time Great.
