Your Top 3 most underated/overrated fighters of the last 25 years?

I compared their top wins...in this thread...you chose to quote another post. Wonder why?

 

What I'm saying is....exactly what I said. How you choose to interpret or spin that is up to you. So, in your "expert" opinion, Whitaker's resume of wins offically consists of a draw, a loss, an excellent win over an ATG and a handful of good wins over solid champions. Not a bad resume by any means, in fact its very good. But Whitaker wasn't a "very good" fighter was he?

 

Becuase you choose losing to Oscar as one of Whitaker's best wins.

 

Meldrick Taylor is a good shout on the basis of talent. The guy had every attribute you could possibly want in a fighter.

 

I feel every fighter is overrated by some & underrated by others, I`ll stick with what Ive read on ESB over the yrs tho....

Overrated....

Whitaker
Lewis
Duran
Hopkins
Pacquiao


Underrated....

Chavez
Lopez
Calzaghe (this is a tricky one because Joe has a section of fans that overrate him a lot but the MAJORITY of posters dislike the guy & dont give him a fair deal so he belongs in this category more than the other one IMO)


Ps. keep in mind, a lot of what is said is true about those 8 fighters but some posters go a little overboard regularly concerning these guys & blindly overlook some things to suit themselves.

 

Holyfiled tends to be overrated. Fought five opponents more than once, has a negative record against Lewis and Bowe, neutral records against Moorer and Ruiz, only a positive one against Tyson. If you can't establish your self as the better fighter against four different opponents over multiple fights, you are not the beat of your era, as some claim Holyfield was. Fighters with tremendous heart tend to get overrated, dominant fighters like Lewis tend to be underrated.

 

Clearly you are a little touchy for taking pelters for this ill-advised and ill-informed thread, so I will resist the urge to be equally spiteful in response.

You said "one win doesn't make a resume".

I am saying to you that Julio Cesar Chavez and Azumah Nelson are ATGs, that Buddy McGirt and Jose Luis Ramirez are both excellent fighters who were the very best around at the time, that guys like Greg Haugen were good, strong title opposition, that the win over Julio Cesar Vasquez was a great achievement, and that the performance against peak Oscar was fantastic.

There is far more to that resume than one win. It was an idiotic statement to make.


And re the thread as a whole - no, Whitaker is not overrated in any way, which was your original point. He beat the best available, and looked amazing doing so. He couldn't have done any more than he did, and is now rated accordingly for what he did.

In the last 20 years or so, the opposition simply does not exist for guys like Whitaker and Jones to have as many fights and as many fights against top class opponents as guys like Archie Moore and Ezzard Charles were able to do in the 40s and 50s. We can only rate them on how did they in the era they lived in.

You can name off the top of your head guys that Mayweather could've fought and didn't: Tszyu, Mosley, Williams, Margarito, Cotto.

Can you do the same to the same extent with Whitaker?

 

Sweet Pea is consitently overrated.....the man is an ATG no doubt but got damn some make him out to be a damn god.

 

:nono

The only CLEAR win by either man was the 2nd fight won by Morales (but I really dont want to do this all again, I just find it hard to resist when I hear that Barrera `clearly` beat Morales... never happened)

 

If you score a fight to someone, you count it as a win. It is absurd not to. If you genuinely believe someone won a fight, how can you not count it as a win in your own opinion, because three fat old guys in suits misjudged it? Why would you remove your own opinion (on a fight) from your own opinion (on a career)? Ludicrous.

So that dude can count Oscar as a win if he wants, because that fight was sufficiently close that a Pea win was a valid choice.

Personally, I thought Oscar sneaked it so I don't count that as a win for Pea (whereas I of course count Chavez as a brilliant win for Whitaker), but that was one of those fights where the result is irrelevant, it was the performance which took the importance. Pea was past-prime, 2 weights above his best, and fought the absolute peak version of a brilliant fighter like Oscar, and made the fight agonizingly close. Therefore, the fact that Pea couldn't quite get the victory is not a black mark against him at all. The very fact that he took the fight and performed so well enhance his greatness, they do not diminish it.

 

The first fight was a clear win for MAB.

 

MAB clearly won the first fight,ive watched that fight from three different channels and all the commentators had MAB winning,all the top boxing mags had MAB winning and the public at the fight also thought that MAB should be the winner.

Only the Morales fanatics have him beating MAB in they're first fight.

 

Wrong again there buddy...

Whitaker's resume contains a robbery loss to a HOFer in Jose Luis Ramirez, where the robbery was so glaring and bad, that most feel Whitaker won almost every round.

Whitaker's resume contains a robbery draw against an ATG in Julio Cesar Chavez, where the robbery was so glaring and bad, that SI's next cover was this...

This content is protected

Whitaker's resume also includes a close, highly disputed decision vs a PRIME Oscar De La Hoya. What makes this so interesting is, Whitaker at this point was nowhere near his prime physically and was in rehab shortly before it. And still many people feel he won the fight.'

Whitaker's resume also includes wins over HOFers Ramirez, McGirt x2 and Haugen and ATG Nelson.

Whitaker's resume also includes wins over Vazquez, Rivera x2, Mayweather, Paez, Hurtado, Brazier, etc.

Add all of this together and you get on the best resumes of the past 25 years or so...overrated should never be in the same sentance as Pernell or his resume.

Why dont you learn about a fighters resume and the fighters on that resume before you pass a biased, uneducated judgement.

 

Your 'overrated' list is a brave one, Bill. I think certain aspects of certain fighters are overrated. No one would say that Whitaker (for example)wasn't a great fighter, but his "official" resume of wins doesn't match the talent which he had, AND this notion of him being vastly superior to Mayweather in every way imaginable says a lot about how ESB tends to romanticise fighters from the past, and overlook current greats.

I don't buy that Lewis is overrated, unless you really want to push the 'lost to Rahman and McCall' angle. I think Pacquaio's talent is probably a tad overrated, he's improved from the one dimensional fighter of old, but still has no in-fighting abilities to speak of. That said, his extraordinary career is certainly deserving of all the adulation it gets.

In what way(s) do you think Hopkins is overrated?

 

Name the fighters you have ever seen that had better boxing ability, and more variety to their games, and had more all-round brilliant performances through their peak years.