Why do fighters that retired undefeated get **** all over?

I think some of the dislike against undefeated recordd has a lot to do with guys like Wlad or Duckelo; who had some defeats when they were still young and rising, but once they became champions they "discovered" the magic potion to go undefeated.

Wlad grabbing and clinching his way to a long championship reign versus mediocre competition.
Duckelo picking easy titles by ducking dangerous contenders while fighting weakened drained tomato cans.

 

But also not only that…. he was a bloody southpaw!

 

Undefeated fighters without exception are only undefeated due to not having faced as high a level of competition as their historical peers.

Because of this, undefeated resumes are by their very nature not GOAT level resumes as they lack consistent prime ATG level competition, yet are ironically treated in the opposite fashion and are instead thought to be goat level resumes simply on account of them being undefeated. This leads to the people that don't overrate them getting annoyed by people that do.

Furthermore, most undefeated fighters were either in weak eras, weak divisions or cherry picked their opposition. There is no ATG fighter in their prime that repeatedly fought other ATG fighters in their prime and went undefeated. This isn't a coincidence lol. It just doesn't happen.

If Usain Bolt, Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Michael Phelps, Louis Hamilton etc as absurdly dominant as they were didn't go undefeated, then why would a Joe Calaghze or an Andre Ward ? Weaker competition or shenanigannery, that's how.

 

I think I understand your point, but some undefeated fighters absolutely faced better opposition than many (in some cases most and possibly all) of their peers from previous eras. Just depends on which past champion(s) you want to cite from what eras, but Floyd Mayweather absolutely faced better opposition than say some guys in the 1980s or 1940s, etc.

 

Some guys sure, but not the GOAT level guys his name is usually mentioned amongst / over.

 

Well in all of boxing history, sure, any fighter you name in any weight class you can probably find someone who fought tougher opposition. Doesn’t make them greater.

I don’t think, to pull one name out of the hat, that Ray Robinson fought the toughest roster of welterweights of anyone in history and he was undefeated against other welters, right? I also think there’s only a few in history who I’d give a chance to beat him at that weight.

Marciano didn’t fight the best slate of heavyweights of any heavyweight ever, but he’d beat imo a lot of guys who suffered some defeats who fought better opposition. I don’t know if he’d beat prime Joe Louis, for instance, but I wouldn’t say it’s a slam dunk Joe would win.

FMJ fought a pretty damned impressive slate of opponents across the weight classes in which he competed. And beat them all. People like to deconstruct and say ‘well this’ and ‘well that’ but he won the fights. We don’t get to say ‘well this’ and ‘well that’ about a lot of fighters from far enough back — if the sport had been covered like it is today, we might find that some of Greb’s better wins came against a guy who had a sore hand or a cold or whatever, or maybe someone drained from making weight, but history doesn’t record that kind of thing for us.

In short, being undefeated does not make one a lesser fighter. Mike Tyson is absolutely not a greater fighter because he lost to Buster Douglas and Evander (twice). You can only beat the guys in front of you, and Marciano fought the best of his day and he didn’t find a ‘Tokyo Douglas’ moment the way Mike did. FMJ wouldn’t be greater if he had lost to Canelo or whomever you choose.

 

For some people, yes. They're just mad the guy went undefeated.

Others they're simply not buying into the hype and can analyze their career and h2h skills objectively. It's exceptionally rare for an athlete of any combat sport to have a long, elite level career with no losses while simultaneously facing the best competition as often as you can.

Fighters can show a lot more grit, skill, and ability overcoming adversity in rematches/regaining the championship as opposed to dominating over mid level opponents. Yes it's cool to simply never lose in the first place, but if you never face any elite A class opponents, is it really that big of a deal? A basketball comparison is Bill Russel who was undefeated for an absurd amount of time with nearly a dozen championships, but the league was pretty tiny back then and there were few truly elite players on his level.

This is why people glorify eras where the talent pool is deep: the 70's HWs, the Fab 4 of the 80's, big crop of welters involving Pac, Cotto, Mosley, Oscar, etc. When there are several good fighters and they're all fighting each other doing their best to win, everyone wins. The fans are treated to some truly spectacular fights, and the fighters get paid big money for big fights.

If you cherry pick, hold titles hostage, become an A side diva, delay fights until they "marinate", or enjoy a weak/mid era refusing to move up in a weight or are quick to retire before any new young elite talent shows up, there are likely going to be asterisks* in your record. In the case of nearly every undefeated boxing champion, they had at least 1-2 of these issues or more. It's equally wrong to swing the pendulum the other direction pretending said fighters were just terrible and relying on pure luck, but there's a reason people tend to be a little more harsh when assessing undefeated boxers.

 

Yes peoples response to bloated records is to make losing a virtue. Like losses are viewed as proof of authenticity almost. And thats not the right way to address the issue.

 

Being critical of someone who is undefeated isn’t unreasonable as long as you don’t interpret ‘undefeated’ as ‘flawless’.

Usually an undefeated record has benefitted somewhere down the line from a dose of luck - it’s even rarer for an undefeated fighter to have not had some close and likely controversial calls to get to that point. After all, if someone retires with just one defeat on their ledger, how big a difference is that to having no defeats. Gene Tunney went through his entire career with only 1 loss but he had some very close decisions that went his way too.

Marciano’s first fight with Roland LaStarza was supposed to be razor thin and that was before he became champion. Plenty of people think Jose Luis Castillo has a legitimate argument for beating Floyd Mayweather in their first fight.

You can’t underestimate the role luck plays in going through an entire career without a loss.

 

It's all about the 0 nowadays..

 

There could be another line of reasoning but it's only for the harcore boxing geeks: when the lineage is broken, it sometime takes years to re-establish it. So if you retire on top, you mess up the clear succession of the man who beat the man. It would be nice if Vitali beat Lewis just for the sake of keeping the continuum, but hey, Vitali would have retired on top right after that, so in this case, wouldn't matter that much.

 

Gonna stick my neck out here and make an unpopular statement. Mayweather has the deepest resume of any unbeaten fighter, and one of the deepest of any fighter....

 

I guess we’ll see how people respond, but I think that opinion would be much more unpopular on the general/world forum.

For Mayweather, a LOT of the deconstruction/criticism of his record was due to tribalism — Pacquiao fans lived to tear down FMJ’s record so their guy was ‘better.’ Any win of any sort in their eyes was crooked or shouldn’t count.

Hopefully we don’t have quite as much of that on Classic, although certain guys (Leonard, Holmes, Lennox) get imo way too much stick from people with agendas to attack their legacies. I would suspect we’re about 10 years away from knowing how history looks at Mayweather on this forum.

 

Quantity over quality.

He only faced arguably 4 elite A level fighters despite such a long career spanning over a decade (Oscar, Mosley, Canelo, Pac).

Oscar, Mosley, and Pac were all past their primes regardless of whose fault you think it was the fight wasn't made sooner. The Canelo win is impressive mostly due to Floyd's age, but Canelo at the time was pretty inexperienced at the elite level and not as good as he is today.

 

A man who's never tasted defeat has never truly won.