To some degree, depends on whether you consider Johnson to have been a "boxer" according to the strict standards of today. If you want to be cheeky, you could argue that Johnson was the greatest-ever fighter in a sport that evolved out of existence by sometime in the 1930s. Just like John L. Sullivan is the last true LPR champion.
He's just overrated by man y. Solid defense, but not the best opposition and known more for his arrogance than anything.
Once he became champion his most dangerous opponent was his own country. They were throwing great white hopes in there out of desperation. I would imagine that where the $ was. While he was still in America I don't think he could have accepted a challenge from another black fighter. There had been race riots, already. Had he had a chance at a normal type of title defense I doubt he would of had a problem. Jack Johnson deserves the benefit of the doubt on that.
From what I've seen, Johnson's style doesn't look much more advanced. It's more like a road not taken in boxing. Not that any of them were particularly close to a modern boxer. Langford probably looks the most modern of the lot at that time.
That is the most credible way we can appreciate him. Yes this is the correct answer if you want Johnson at the top of your HW list somewhere.
He simply doesn't meet the eye test and his losses are fairly bad. Marvin Hart was pretty darn crude and Willard imho sucks besides his size. H2H is a fairly large component of who I consider top 10 and frankly Johnson gets ****ing mauled by Ali, Louis, Holmes, Lewis, Klitschko, Foreman etc. We can say he was great for his era.
It is true that there was a search for the great white hope, but it is also true that Johnson received rich offers to fight against valuable black boxers (Langford, McVey, Jeanette), but he refused, because he feared losing the title. He also avoided giving O'Brien a fight, too dangerous too. But O'Brien was white. Johnson defended the title against faded old glories (Jeffries, Fitzsimmons), middleweight (Ketchel), tomato cans (Ross, Murray). Johnson wanted to keep the title, that's understandable. But he avoided the best fighters when he became champion.
I think historical "greatness" should count more than head to head, especially when the two are widely separated by time. But in theory, I guess you could create a hybrid head-to-head ranking system where the question is how the fighter would stack up against everybody else under his own era's rules. So Johnson and, say, Marciano would rank in a similar place -- each of them would be very hard to beat under the conditions of their own eras. Conversely, under such a system, you presumably wouldn't count a fighter's probable poor performance *outside* of his era's rules against him. Since it would be unreasonable to expect fighters to train for a sport they didn't compete in.
Some of his wins were against old men and little guys. Ketchel was a MW, Burns and Hart were tiny, Langford was a young MW at the time and JJ avoided Langford like the COVID later on. He got KO'd by Choynski. Fitzsimmons was 100 yrs old. No, he didn't throw the Willard fight and it was very warm but not 100 degrees; that's a myth and anyway Willard had to deal with the weather as well. Notwithstanding the above, JJ was a beast in his day and had a difficult style to deal with. Grabbing and clutching then throwing fast combinations in the wink of an eye. He was decent sized even fro today's HW'S. And he did fight some big men, Martin and Willard for example. I think he's a top 10 HW, around 9 or 10. He beats Wilder, Fury and Joshua IMO but the much quicker Usyk gives him problems.
Permit me to make my case. Johnson starts to be recognized as a top man in late 1902, and he loses the title to Jess Willard in 1915. During this period he has more than 50 fights, and most of these fights were against name fighters. His only meaningful loss during this period, is the aforementioned loss to Hart. Johnson pretty much made a clean sweep of the name fighters, even though a lot of the fights happened at the wrong time. For all of the valid criticisms, this is an incredible run of form and dominance. Now to address your criticisms. We can give Marvin Hart the benefit of the doubt about the verdict, but even on that basis he was a future world champion, who appears to have been a bad stylistic match for Johnson. Taking fifty fights against predominantly named fighters, over a thirteen year period, he was bound to drop one somewhere. I don't agree with the argument about the size of his opponents either, because he also fought a heap of big heavyweights. There are some old timers who are vulnerable to that criticism, but Johnson is not one of them.
