Your thoughts on the Arc of Boxing

YOu dont think Leonard learned anything from the 25 or so fights in 2 years that he he had as a pro? Does the Leonard who was taken 6 rounds on debut beat Benitez? And when i think about it, Did Leonard not leant and improve massively from his first loss against Duran?

And Holyfield didnt waigt 18 months or so to expand his bank balance, he didnt feel he was ready yet.

Saying this, i am a big believer in if your good enough, you will rise to the occassion and produce the goods. The thing is though that you are definitely goign to improve with experience. I dont think there is any doubting this.

And I hate to be the one to break it to you, but some guys in the Golden Age didn't shine the first time they stepped up against a "seasoned and classy pro" for the first time.[/QUOTE]

 

[/quote]

I completely misunderstood what you were saying -- I thought you meant that many of them weren't ready the first time they stepped up against a seasoned pro.

Many of those guys did fight pretty decent professional boxers -- not contenders, but good journeymen or club fighters at the very least -- in their pro debuts. And most amateur stars won those debut fights. I'm sure there are a few who didn't, but none come to mind.

But guys in the Golden Age weren't often fighting 10-round main events against 25-fight veterans with winning records when they turned pro, either, so exactly what the **** is your point?

Leonard progressed farther in 20 or so pro fights than, say, Rocky Graziano (who fought a guy who was 4-18-1, and would fight on 0-6 guy next time out) did by his 20th fight. Why? Probably because of his amateur background, which allowed his handlers to put him in with better pros due to his polish and experience.

So, again, by comparison with the Golden Age guys, what is it you are trying to say?

 

:yep


This has just gone to the top of my "must (ghost) read" list.

 

No, of course they need pro experience as well. But I think that their amateur pedigree coupled with good management make them mature quite quickly as pro fighters. Hence Leonard-Benitez, McCallum-Kalule, Holyfield-Qawi etc.

 

I need to get a copy of this book.
It gets some interesting reviews.

[url]http://www.mikesilverboxing.com/works.htm[/url]

 

In a pie eating contest?

Bronco Billy Wright KO3 Jim Braddock

 

Published Reviews

[url]"The Rise and Decline of the Sweet Science" by Robert Mladinich. first appeared on TheSweetScience.com November 18, 2008[/url]

"The Rise and Decline of the Sweet Science"

By Robert Mladinich

If you’ve ever wondered how boxing superstars like Roy Jones Jr., Bernard Hopkins, Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather, Jr., Lennox Lewis, Mike Tyson, Pernell Whitaker, Marvin Hagler and Roberto Duran would have done against their counterparts of decades past—wonder no more. Mike Silver has written the most definitive analyses of the classic “old school” vs. “new school” boxing debate I have ever read. This is a book that belongs on every fan’s bookshelf. It is an important work that reverberates with insight and wisdom, answering with startling clarity who deserves to be ranked among the greatest fighters of all time—and who does not.

Silver, a lifelong New Yorker, has carried on a love affair with the beleaguered sport since he trained as a youngster at the fabled Stillman’s Gym in the 1950s. Over the past few decades he’s been a promoter, as well as an Inspector for the New York State Athletic Commission, and a renowned historian who has offered commentary on HBO, PBS and ESPN. Anyone who knows him will agree that when Silver talks boxing, you can’t help but listen.

In his new book, “The Arc of Boxing: The Rise and Decline of the Sweet Science,” (McFarland & Company, 229 pages, 50 photos), Silver offers compelling evidence of the ongoing regression of boxing skills. He explains how—and why—the top fighters of the past 20 years are not on the same level as those who came of age during the sport’s Golden Age of talent and activity, which he defines as the 1920s to the 1950s.

When he writes that “unlike their golden age counterparts, one rarely sees today’s fighters—from rank novice to multiple belt holders—duck, parry, slip, sidestep, ride, weave or roll to avoid punches,” the reader is given a crash course in the lost arts of infighting, feinting, body punching, footwork, and counter-punching skills that used to be part and parcel of a seasoned contender’s repertoire.

Silver utilizes his own vast knowledge, as well as the insights of a respected array of panelists that includes trainers Teddy Atlas, Freddie Roach, Emanuel Steward and former lightweight champion Carlos Ortiz. In addition, over a dozen other experts, some of whom are old enough to have personally witnessed the greatest fighters of the past 70 years, offer their discerning comments. This may be the last opportunity to delve into the wealth of information and knowledge they have to offer concerning these issues.

Dozens of champs, both past and present, are scrutinized and evaluated. Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s fights with De La Hoya and Ricky Hatton are deconstructed, revealing weaknesses in Mayweather’s style that, the experts claim, would have been exploited by the top lightweight and welterweight fighters from previous decades.
“If Floyd was born 50 years earlier his athleticism and natural ability would be the foundation—not the end product—for his development into a seasoned and technically proficient fighter,” opines Silver.

Silver does not blame the modern day fighters for their inadequacies. He sees them as a product of their time. Many possess the raw talent but have no chance of reaching their full potential because fighters no longer have to “pay their dues the old fashioned way.” By fighting just 3 or 4 times a year against mediocre opposition, there is simply no opportunity to acquire the kind of extensive experience and bout-to-bout education that empowered the great fighters of the golden age.

The book reveals how the current vacuum of expert teachers/trainers has created “a fertile breeding ground for gimmickry and artifice that is of little use to a fighter.” An entire chapter is devoted to the misuse of weight training and the effects of steroid use.
Even the popular and ubiquitous “punch pad” workouts are taken to task. “Old school trainers rarely, if ever, used them,” writes Silver. “They believed that hitting the pads with the same combinations over and over had limited teaching potential and emphasized a robotic ‘bang, bang’ style of boxing. Their use did not encourage a fighter to think…everything that is taught with the pads achieved better results using the heavy bag.” The extent to which punch pad workouts are used, he adds, “is just another indication of the dumbed down quality of today’s boxing instruction.”

As Silver makes abundantly clear, today’s fighters are also impeded by the pressure to maintain an undefeated record. Promoters, managers and television executives have magnified the cost of defeat to the point that many former amateur stars are carefully navigated to maintain an unbeaten record while waiting to secure a lucrative TV appearance. This “must win syndrome” hinders the fighter’s progress. Over the past 20 years it has fostered a “mismatch culture” that minimizes the number of competitive matches because no fighter with any promise wants to take a chance on losing. When boxing was in its heyday, a defeat did not carry the same stigma that it does today. It was considered a normal part of the learning process.

Silver also places Bernard Hopkins’ decade-long dominance of the middleweight division in historical context. He gives Hopkins his due as a talented and well-rounded professional “by today’s standards,” but considers his placement among the all-time greats as unwarranted. He explains, “Great middleweight champions such as Sugar Ray Robinson, Harry Greb, Freddie Steele, Mickey Walker, Marcel Cerdan and Jake La Motta could never have defended their titles 20 times over 10 years against the kind of brutal competition that populated the middleweight division from the 1920s to the 1950s. It is even more ridiculous to think any of these fighters—no matter how great—could have been ‘dominant’ in their respective eras as they approached their 40th birthday”. The conclusion reached is that Hopkins’ dominance of a division that was once considered the toughest in boxing is not proof of his greatness— it is proof of how far boxing has regressed.

Silver believes that if Hopkins campaigned 50 or more years ago his talents would be considered just average. He believes it would even be questionable if Hopkins would have been world-rated, let alone win a world championship. “Both Roy Jones Jr. and Bernard Hopkins benefited from the worst assortment of challengers ever faced by a middleweight or light heavyweight champion since the advent of boxing gloves,” he asserts. “Is it any wonder they stood out as giants in a land of pygmies?”

Silver also exposes the fallacious nature of the absurdly high KO records of today’s fighters. Another eye-opening chapter debunks the myth that today’s 250-300 pound heavyweights (he calls them “dreadful dreadnoughts&#8221 would have been too big for the “small” 190 to 210 pound heavyweight contenders and champions from the 1920s to the 1970s. He is particularly critical of media “faux experts” who, lacking both perspective and frame of reference, too often attribute greatness to ordinary fighters, thereby obfuscating the superior achievements and skills of the truly great fighters of the past.

“It is high time for boxing’s overused words ‘dominant’ and ‘great’ to be given a rest,” writes Silver. “Since the 1990s both words have been used to wretched excess. Let’s be perfectly clear: there are no great fighters today, and under the present circumstances it is impossible to produce one.”
Last, but certainly not least, he describes what he believes to be the severe damage done to boxing and boxers by what he calls the “alphabet-promoter cartels” who he says “have had a free hand in ruining the sport for the past 30 years.”
Although it might sound like it, Silver is not a curmudgeon or a knee-jerk believer in the myth that what’s old is always better than what’s new. He, as well as his panel of experts, persuasively state their cases while speaking with great authority and insight. After reading this entertaining treasure trove of boxing “insider” knowledge I felt like I had taken a graduate course in the finer points of the “sweet science.” The book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand what happened to boxing.

 

Mike Silver's 'The Arc of Boxing' by Bobby Cassidy. First appeared on Newsday.com January 19, 2009

If you care about boxing -- it's future, it's past or both -- then you have to read this book.

To engage Mike Silver in a debate -- and this corner knows from experience -- is like engaging Smokin' Joe Frazier for 15 rounds. Odds are, you won't last. So take a peak at Silver's book -- "The Arc of Boxing, The Rise and Decline of the Sweet Science" -- and debate him if you dare.

The basic point of this book is that, while today's athletes are better than athletes from previous generations, and while that theory rings true in nearly every sport, it is just not the case in boxing. Here's a wonderful passage from the preface that illustrates the point:

"To blithely state that today's top professional boxers are better than their predecessors simply because measurable athletic performance has improved in other sports -- whose winners are determined by a stopwatch, ruler or scale -- is analogous to suggesting that a singer is great only because he is capable of reaching a higher note than anyone else. Of course, no reasonable person would agree with this statement because it totally ignores the complex nuances of the singer's craft, such as timbre, inflection, vocal range and phrasing."

There are few people who have the depth of knowledge to even mount this argument. Mike Silver is one of them. And he is perhaps the only one capable of making a believer out of you.

Throughout the book, Silver uses some of the top trainers in the game -- past and present -- to prove his point. Among those quoted significantly in the book are Emanuel Steward, Teddy Atlas, Mike Capriano, Rollie Hackmer and Freddie Roach.

There are several reasons that Silver believes fighters like Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Oscar De La Hoya don't measure up to the greats of yesteryear. One major factor is that they simply have not learned their craft the way fighters of 30, 40 and 50 years ago have. It is because they have not had the benefit of strong trainers and because they don't engage in as many fights. The author uses several interesting charts to track the average number of fights a fighter experienced before fighting for the title (70 in 1955 compared to 24 in 1995).

In this book, Silver dissects the fight game and the fighter, analyzing the myriad factors that contribute to the success or failure of a fighter. It ranges from a promoter's greed to conditioning to cultural influences.

While I don't necessarily agree with Silver's assessment that -- "Any top welterweight contender of the 1950s and 1960s would have pressured Mayweather into defeat or outboxed him. And you can throw in about a half dozen welter-champs from the 1970s and 1980s as well." -- it is hard to find fault with the author's basic premise of the book. Because when he writes that boxing asks questions of an athlete that no other sport does, he is essentially correct.

This book is so thoroughly researched and its point so articulately argued that you immediately want to rush out and buy fight films of Sugar Ray Robinson to see what we've missed. It is a thesis on why boxing is in the state it is in today.

 

[url]The Ring Magazine December 2009. Review by Paul Salgado[/url]
If you're a longtime boxing fan, you know the conventional wisdom is that the sport enjoyed two golden eras, the 1950s and 1980s. But for historian Mike Silver, it was these two eras that began what he perceives to be a long and steady decline in the game.

In his book, "The Arc of Boxing: The Rise and Decline of the Sweet Science (McFarland & Company, 229 pages, hardcover, $55.00), Silver argues that boxing's true golden age was the three decades from the 1920s to the 1940s, when masters like Tommy Loughren, Benny Leonard, Willie Pep, and Charley Burley fought. According to Silver, from the post war era onward, the sweetness began to erode and boxers started to lose the development of real science.

So what led to the decline? The advent of televised boxing, Silver believes, and the resultant demise of the once thriving club show circuit where fighters plied their trade. When small club shows virtually disappeared, so too did a once thriving gym culture where boxers apprenticed under master trainers and learned defense, infighting, clinching and bodypunching.

Forced to abandon the sport when they could no longer make a full-time living, these one-time sages of boxing took with them a body of fighting knowledge that nowadays remains known by only a handful of trainers

Silver calls today's style of fighting offensively biased "speed boxing," and observes that contemporary fighters show little strategy and diversity in their game. A lack of activity and an obsession with undefeated records, with which to please television executives, has also led to the degeneration of talent.

Undefeated records are impressive marketing tools, but too many uncompetitive fights and high knockout rations against inferior opponents have actually served to handicap today's young boxers in developing sophisticated skills en route to a title fight. So-called champions of the current era, writes Silver, hardly compare to someone like Archie Moore who had 177 fights before finally landing his title shot against Joey Maxim, 17 years after turning pro.

Moreover, as Silver reminds us, Moore won the linear belt, not one of the fractional belts that proliferated in the '80s courtesy of TV networks eager to broadcast bouts as title fights.

It would be easy to dismiss Silver as losing hinmself in nostalgia, but to his credit the author comes up with some compelling arguments. And he doesn't stop there. Utilizing short first-person narratives, he enlists a number of old school voices including Teddy Atlas, Bill Goodman, Mike Capriano Jr., and former lightweight champion 'Carlos Ortiz, all of whom dissect the sport and its participants, and critique the many changes that have led, they believe, to boxing's to boxing's currently diminished state.

The book may be a lament, but the author clearly loves boxing. True aficionados, whether they ultimately agree with Silver or not, are sure to enjoy his book for its unmistakable knowledge and passion.
--Paula Salgado

 

[url]A Boxing Book Bernard Hopkins Is Sure To Hate By Stan Hochman. First appeared in Philadelphia Daily News on June 18, 2009[/url]

MARCEL CERDAN against Bernard Hopkins? Cerdan by a knockout! Cerdan against Roy Jones Jr.? Same result, KO, Cerdan. Hopkins defending his championship 20 times, bleagh, a giant among pygmies.

Jack Dempsey over Joe Louis because Louis had problems with bob-and-weave fighters and Dempsey was a swift, bob-and-weave guy with a punch. Dempsey against the early Muhammad Ali, too, because he would have cornered Ali on the ropes and "ripped his guts out."

And, oh yeah, Ali could have beaten Wladimir Klitschko blindfolded, no contest, name the round if he could figure a number that rhymed with Klitschko. Other than zero.

Send your letters and e-mails to Mike Silver, who has written a lively book called "The Arc of Boxing: The Rise and Decline of the Sweet Science."
"The golden age of boxing was the 1920s to the 1950s," Silver lectured recently. "Today, we've got the age of gold. I didn't write this book to fuel the debate, I wrote it to end the debate."

Whoa, before you write off Silver as a cranky geezer living and loving the distant past, you might want to read what he has to say about the bleak state of boxing and how it got that way. For reinforcements, he brings along current trainers like Emanuel Steward, Ted Atlas and Freddie Roach.
"You need an eye to see what's happening," Silver said. "You might watch a surgeon and think he's doing the right thing. Another surgeon, watching the same operation, would see everything that's being done wrong.
"Floyd Mayweather against Oscar De La Hoya. People talking about Mayweather like he's the greatest fighter pound-for-pound. He is not a great fighter. Every time De La Hoya threw a left jab, he drove Mayweather back. He had no answer. De La Hoya was five jabs away from winning the fight.
"Boxing is the emperor with no clothes."

How did it get stark naked and feeble? Silver is glad you asked. He sounds like a guy doing an autopsy, not surgery.
"The alphabet groups killed it," he yelped. "Instead of eight divisions, eight champions, you have 17 champions.
"The talented old-time trainers retired or died and were not replaced. Instead of 10,000 professional fighters, you have 3,000 now. Guys get to fight for a title after 12 fights. In the golden age you were lucky to get a title fight after 50 or 60 fights."

He also blames scheming promoters like Bob Arum and Don King, punch stats, writers who aren't savvy enough to recognize mediocrity, and let's see, has he left anyone out?
Let's give Silver a breather and hear what Atlas says about Roy Jones Jr.: "Roy uses his reflexes and his anticipation rather than technique. His technique has a lot of holes in it."
And how about this grenade from Steward: "Only a tiny percentage of today's contenders would have gotten past the better four- and six-round fighters of the 1930s, '40s and '50s. They would have been crushed by the competition."

Silver anticipates your counterpunch and ducks. "Sure, professional athletes are bigger, stronger and faster," he snarled. "But you don't measure a fighter with a stopwatch. There are no great fighters today because they don't have the training they need; they don't have the competition they need; and they don't have the experience they need."
Silver saw his first fight in 1959. "Alex Miteff vs. Wayne Bethea, Madison Square Garden," he recalled. "A very dull fight, as I remember. But walking into the Garden, seeing that ring, with the lights over it, that's how an ancient Roman must have felt walking into the Colosseum for the first time. It was magical."

Silver explored the magic, studied the history, wrote articles about it. And now the book, which Bernard Hopkins will hate.
"Take every great middleweight from 1900 to the '60s," Silver argued. "Mickey Walker, Stanley Ketchel, Marcel Cerdan, Jake La Motta, all great fighters, some of them with the speed of lightweights and the punch to knock out a heavyweight.
"And there's no way they could have dominated a division and defended a title 20 times. Hopkins did, but that does not make him better than Walker, Ketchel, Cerdan, La Motta and Harry Greb. Don't forget Harry Greb. The guys Hopkins fought are on a primitive level."

 

[url]Mike Silver's 'The Arc of Boxing' by Clay Moyle, author of Sam Langford: Boxing’s Greatest Uncrowned Champion. Cyberboxingzone.com[/url]

I loved everything about this book. In my opinion it should be required reading for anyone who is inclined to post on any of the various on-line boxing forums to debate the merits of boxers from different eras. Mr. Silver maintains that the golden age of boxing occurred during the period of 1925 to 1955, and his book is chock full of interesting statistics to support this claim. Consider for example that in 1927 there were 2,000 licensed professional boxers residing in the state of New York, and that over 900 boxing shows were promoted throughout the state. In 2006 the state licensed 50 pro boxers and staged just 38 shows. Or that during the 1920’s and 1930’s approximately 8,000 – 10,000 professional boxers were licensed annually in the U.S., while in 2006 that figure had dropped to 2,850. And how about the fact that in 1925 a fighter had engaged in an average of 84 professional contests before fighting for the title, while in 2007 a fighter had fought an average of only 27 times before receiving a shot at a title. Facts like these, and many, many others shared in this book make it awful difficult to believe that the overall quality of fighters were witnessing today can compare with that of the “golden age”.

Mr. Silver’s fine book is filled with quotes from a panel of experts including the likes of Teddy Atlas, Emanuel Steward, Hank Kaplan, Carolos Ortiz, Freddie Roach, and numerous others, on a wide range of topics including inflated knockout percentages of today, the deterioration of trainers and boxing skills, the use of weights and punching pads, and the general decline in knowledge among not only trainers and boxers, but fans and the media covering the sport.

I found the chapter titled ‘Boxing’s Death by Alphabet’ concerning the dilution of the prestige of a world title particularly enlightening. Anyone who has followed the history of the sport at all is well aware that there are many more weight divisions today than in the past, and that there are multiple “world champions” for each weight as a result of the various organizations in existence today such as the WBA, WBC, IBF and WBO. But some of the facts shared in this chapter are just astounding. For example, “in the 1950’s there were approximately 5,000 fighters worldwide, and generally eight weight divisions, with one champion in each. That breaks down to one champ every 625 boxers. Today, with just the major sanctioning bodies and not counting the whackos, you have about one ‘world champion’ for every sixty-nine pros.”

There wasn’t much in Mr. Silver’s book that I disagree with. There is a lot more that I could say about all of the interesting facts and comments provided by the panel of experts concerning the numerous subjects covered in this book, but I’ll stop here and just say that I found it a very interesting read, and I highly recommend it for all boxing fans.

 

[url]Review on “Ringmemoribilia.com”[/url]

"THE ARC OF BOXING, The Rise and Decline of the Sweet Science" by Mike Silver has created quite a stir among boxing fans during the past year. If you've ever pitted your favorite fighter of recent memory against the pantheon of greats from past eras and hypothesized the result, go no further. How do the top boxers of the past twenty years stack up against the greats? What is the current state of the game? This book will give you the insightful ammunition you need to reach the only probable conclusions! There has never been a boxing book quite like it. Pick up a copy today.







[url]Review by Harry Schaffer of "Antiquities of the Prize Ring.com"[/url]
This is not merely another book arguing Sugar Ray Robinson was "better" than Roy Jones, Jr., although it does, or that the last "real" heavyweight champion was Rocky Marciano or was it Joe Louis and why wasn't Sonny Liston champion for a generation any way?
Mike Silver has assembled the views of true Men of the Ring* and interwoven their vision of the events and event makers of the sport with his own astute observations to produce arguably the most thoughtful, fact based comparative analysis of the state of boxing and boxers ever written.
While Mr. Silver ultimately argues the case of the "Decline of the Sweet Science" he may well have ushered in the resurgerance of the "Shadow Science" that other plane of existence where time has no meaning and Walker Smith a.k.a. Sugar Ray Robinson is forever twenty years old and it is the late winter of 1941 and in back to back acts of retribution Sugar Ray settles the score with Fritzie Zivic, while over in the Bronx it is a warm June night of 1938 with the world at the brink of war Joe Louis destroys Max Schmeling in 2:04 of the first round; where else but Yankee Stadium, or in that timeless land Roy Jones, Jr. drops Virgil Hill with a body shot and Jones is in that instant the bsst in his business and in his prime at 29 years . In this timeless world the battles are fought across the ages ; where Robinson can be forever 20 years old, Jones is 29 and Joe Louis is well Joe Louis and they are all forever young. It is in that world where the "Shadow Science" stops the hands of time and all are the best of their own personal best. Mike Silver takes you for a tour of that world.
Thus as Mike Silver despairs the passage of the Sweet Science he has assured that the epic battles will rage on in the land of the Shadows.
as too the debate rages on...
If you love boxing or boxing history you really must own this book.

-Harry Shaffer. Antiquities of the Prize Ring
*Teddy Atlas, Mike Capriano, Jr.,Rollie Hackmer, Freddie Roach, Emanuel Steward. Erk Arnold,Tony Arnold, Dan Cuoco, Ray J. Elson,Tony Fosco, Bill Goodman, Chuck Hasson, Hank Kaplan,Ted Lidsky, Ph.D., Steve Lott, "Tiger" Ted Lowry, Wilbur "Skeeter"McClure Ph.D, Carlos Ortiz, Sal Rappa, Kevin Smith, Teddy Todd Ph.D.,and Edward Villella.





[url]"The Arc of Boxing" reviewed in the 2010 edition of The British Boxing Board of Control Yearbook[/url]

"The Arc of Boxing: The Rise and Decline of the Sweet Science", by Mike Silver
Review by Philip Sharkey

My yearly reviews have been confined to books about British boxers, but a fascinating new book by former boxing promoter and New York State Athletic Commission Inspector Mike Silver is well worth mentioning. THE ARC OF BOXING: The Rise and Decline of the Sweet Science was not written "to add fuel to the old school vs. new school boxing debate. I wrote it to end the debate" says Mike and he has interviewed over a dozen experts, some old enough to have personally witnessed the best fighters of the last 70 years. Three of the world's most renowned current teacher-trainers, Teddy Atlas, Emanuel Steward and Freddie Roach also add their two cents worth. Roy Jones, Jnr., Bernard Hopkins and Floyd Mayweather Jnr. are some of the contemporary fighters compared with the champions from the golden era of boxing, generally recognised as stretching from the 1920s to the 1950s. Even Roberto Duran, trained by Ray Arcel is not considered by some as good enough to beat Billy Petrolle or Sid Terris (neighter of whom where champions in the 1930s). Arcel himself only has Duran scrapping into his top ten lighteweights of all time.

Although the book talks almost exclusively about fighters from the United States one can't help thinking of modern day British champions facing 'Golden Era' fighters: Jack Kid Berg vs. Ricky Hatton, Randolph Turpin vs. Joe Calzaghe or Naseem Hamid vs. Ned Tarleton, would I'm sure, provide British boxing fans with the same level of debate. It is a thought provoking book. Other sports can be measured in heights jumped or distances ran or swam, but boxing is a far subtler science, the sweet science in fact!

 

There are some solid points made in the synopsis (Death by Alphabet, the role of King and Arum), but some highly biased sources are employed and some ridiculous conclusions are drawn. Similarly unflattering points could be made in regards to the fight game of the past (undersized heavies, mob influence, racism).

Funny that Arcel was picking Duran as the greatest behind Benny Leonard until New Orleans. Then, suddenly, Duran- no longer even a lightweight- seemingly dropped in his rankings. I guess that's where he picked to grab Arcel's estimation of Duran as scraping the top 10.

 

Sometimes these experts being quoted are just talking, and their statements can't be taken always as set and considered statements that they meant to be kept as their rigid opinion. They are not necessarily geeks in the same way as some of the periphery expers, the "boxing historians" and "buffs". They say **** to get a point across, not to lay down a definitive scripture.
Of course, they mean what they say in an everyday way. But they don't care as much for what they say or mean as much as the likes of Mike Silver do, probably.

Duran coming barely inside the top 10 lightweights is arguable. It's just such a deep division. He was a great lightweight, that's indisputable.