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

Reading this thread, I began to doubt my own beliefs that Pep was one of the best - perhaps the best - of all time. So I went and watched some footage, and I'm confident again now that he was.

 

I've never heard anyone refer to Willie Pep as being slower or inferior to the human eye than many of today's fighters. In fact, he still commonly reguarded as being one of the fastest and most finesse fighters of all time. Frankly, I think that every young amateur fighter should be required to sit down and watch films of Pep before having their first fight.

 

I don't think boxers of the '40s and '50s looked worse than today's contenders at all. If anything, they look better. Fighters like Enrique Bolanos and George Araujo were far more dynamic than most of today's bunch.

 

You do realize that film clips are often transferred at the wrong speed,
etc, so a film, at least on speed, should be watched cautiously.

And that does not explain why champion fighters lost so often back in the forties. Gridiron football champions didn't. Baseball champions didn't. Basketball champions didn't. They basically follow the same pattern as modern champions.
In boxing it is quite different. Champions in the old days lost a great deal. Only a few stand out, such as Louis, Robinson, Marciano, and Pep, as not suffering all kinds of losses. I posted the records of top heavyweights of the 1930-1955 era a while back and pointed out that anyone could select the two best fighters off the records, Louis and Marciano. I also posted the top heavyweights of the last 25 years and pointed out that without knowing who they were, there is no way to tell who were the top men. Brian Nielsen or Riddick Bowe, or Lennox Lewis, etc, all look about the same in winning or knockout percentage.

By the way, modern fighters don't necessarily look better to all eyes.
A while back I watched a doubleheader of Gavilan-Bratton and De La Hoya-Hernandez. The old fighters looked better to me, although they had 52 career losses between them, much more than the modern fighters will ever have.

 

Why is this ridiculously absurd discussion even taking place? Willie Pep was an insanely tough and durable ironman, who boxed for 29 years, nearly 20 of them after he broke his back in a plane crash, had over 340 fights, and a record of 6-0 over the 15 round distance while wearing six ounce gloves.

I come to ESB Classic for thoughtful and knowledgeable discourse to try elevating my pathetically meager intellect, and I stumble across this thread started by somebody named China_head_Joe. (Damn it, I come here to try getting away from my own kind, but there doesn't seem to be any escape!)

 

I'm well aware of the point you were trying to make. I in turn thought that I'd make an attempt at adding a little humor, given that the seriousness of this thread diminished about 15 pages ago.

 

No it isn't.

You're still spewing the same crap over and over again, like a friggin' broken record. You have yet to make a single valid argument.

 

Pep's record needs to be thrown out of the window. The guy fought like every week. Alot of his fights were glorified sparring sessions. I doubt anyone here has ever seen a live Pep fight, so it's kinda hard to judge him. However, I suspect a bunch of old school newpaper hacks saw Pep beat up nobodies with like a 6-35 record and came away impressed. They of course told everyone how great Pep was, failing to mention he beat up a bum, and the legend grew.

 

Joe, is that YOU?:shock: