The DEFINITIVE top 20 all time P4P list!

Yep, good wins. In fact he has 5 outstanding wins, Corrales, Castillo II (lost first one), Judah, Hatton & (old, gun shy) Oscar, but how does that resume compare to the guys above him? Hell, how does it compare to Oscar? He just didn't get enough done! He's an all time great, Im not knocking him - he's the third greatest fighter of his generation (close between him and Oscar, mind) and one of the top 35, 30 fighters who ever lived. Not shabby, but not top 5 by a mile.

As I said earlier, nobody will be screaming about that resume in 20 years.

 

dsimon writes:

There is another issue here as well that sort of gets "pointed out in your diffrence with Hut Hut." Fighters now a days fight less... less rounds, less bouts, though perhaps longer years.

It is because by and large the guys are athletes now more than fighters, and have a career they are managing. Like Mayweather who decided to retire relatively early and Lewis as well.

Hence, the problem is how this has parity with fighters who generally fought many more years and bouts.

Or, should Mayweather get deducted because of when he retired? Dito for Lewis. My two cents is that Mayweather should not. He should not get shit for it because the lighter divisions are murder when you slow down a little bit. Lewis on the other hand could have and should have fought Vitali again to cement his legacy because he was still at the top of his game relatively at least.

This issue is just one of those things, it is not resolvable and always debatable.

 

I guess Ring Magazine makes it 5 belts per weight class.

And if you include the People's Championship, that's 6 per division.

 

If you didn't consider Tarver the 175 pound champion at the time of the Hopkins fight, then i have no idea what to tell you, other than that you are part of the problem with boxing.

 

There's really no way to answer this without revisiting the dragged out Roy-never-fought-Dariusz-never-fought-Roy debate.

If you want to argue that the lineage should've been broken and then re-created when, say Jones fought Tarver, I can go along with that.

But at the same time, how are we then claiming Hopkins to be a 175lb. champ, and Floyd a 5-division world champion? That's really what I was questioning.

That's the real problem, that so many people flip flop on what they choose to recognize, basically for the sake of convenience.

Fighters who have alphabet titles claim that lineage (and/or Ring belts) mean shit, whereas Ring champs claim it to be the only belt that matters. Then you have Golden Boy Promotions as a whole, who one day decides that their magazine boasts the only ratings that matters, then the next decide that Oscar was a 10-time world champion in six weight classes.

IMO, you can't have it both ways. If Bernard was a 175 lb champ (which in effect would now make Calzaghe the 175 lb champ), then he wasn't truly the middleweight champ until he won the MW tournament in 2001. Much like Floyd was a legit champ at 130, 135 and 147, and a paper one at 140 and 154.

 

I don't know about any of that, but what I do know is that when Johnson and Tarver fought each other, that was for the divisions championship, regardless of what POS belt was or was not on the line. Tarver came away from those fights as the holder of that title and Hopkins took it. Thats all I care about.