Willie Pep - would his fans please justify his placement in their top all time lists

Agreed,

Your views are to be taken with the utmost of seriousness.

:tong :silly :bananamaniac :**** :finger :banana :mj :tdh artya :smh :ass :lama :fart :asskiss :arran :nutcase :finger5

 

Interesting.

Do you consider any American featherweights today as good as Pep or Saddler ?

 

Oh God Sonny,

You're only breathing new life into him.

 

Here is a few reasons....

Most people regard him as the best ever 126 lb boxer.
Most (or at least A LOT) call pep the best defensive boxer ever.
His won/loss record is better than 99% of boxers who ever lived.
Robinson says pep was the best p4p.
Gil clancy has pep no1 p4p with robinson at no2.
Most of his losses came well past his prime.
Pep never had a lot of losses.

:good

 

How these guys would do head to head against pep is immaterial. For one thing, you can't possibly make predicitions on the outcome of fights between men who fought 50 years apart, and had no common opponents. Additionally, even if Pacman, Guzman and Morrales were in theory able to beat Pep, it shouldn't take away from the legacy that he established in his day.

 

You raise good points, but don't forget that the talent from north of the Rio Grande was a mile better back in the forties. Boxing was a hugely popular national sport in the United States. It is a fringe sport today and with better nutrition, Americans largely grew out of the smaller division. Nat Fleischer and others lamented the lack of good Americans in the smaller divisions as far back as the sixties.

I have the 1951 extended Ring rankings. Of the 23 men ranked (not including class A to class C fighters) 7 were Americans, including Saddler, Pep, Bassett, etc, 7 were from Western Europe (Famechon, Fermenti, Clayton, etc), 5 were from Latin America (Diaz, Valero, Padilla of Mexico, Morasen of Cuba, Plummer of Panama) one from Africa (#3 contender Roy Ankarah of the African Gold Coast) and two were Mexican-Americans (Salas, Chavez) probably born in Mexico. Among the class A fighters were Hideo Goto of Japan and Gwat Tan Tek of Indonesia.

It is obviously not entirely true that all the top fighters were Americans
and boxing had a certain foothold in the Philippines for certain, as well as Japan and parts of East Asia, such as Singapore, that were then part of the British Empire, as far back as the twenties and thirties.

 

Americans were a great deal shorter and lighter on the average back then. Check the heights and weights for inductees into the armed forces. Americans, on the average, are two inches tallers and about fifty pounds heavier than they were back in the fifties.

 

There were also plenty of Western Europeans.

 

Prove that the standards were lower. The fact is that only a few fighters in the forties or fifties were able to go on long winning streaks. Pep is one, but even Pep had five losses by his thirtieth birthday. Only Louis and Robinson were champions in the forties without suffering a whole slew of defeats. Why did Henry Armstrong lose so often? Why did Ike Williams? Why did Kid Gavilan? All had twenty or more losses. So did Ezzard Charles and Archie Moore. If the standards were so low and the average fighter so bad, why did the average champion lose so often?
I would like the critics of the "old days" to once give an answer to this. I pointed out in one of the lost threads that in other sports that we could compare boxing to, such as gridiron football, or baseball, or basketball, in the United States, the number of teams able to run up great records declines as the level of competition rises. There have been numerous unbeaten college gridiron football teams. There has been only one unbeaten NFL team. Wouldn't the fact that champions suffered so many defeats indicate that competition was superior?