Great Fights you never hear anyone talk about

I am fully aware you don't need Hall of Famers to produce a great fight.

I saw Golata - Pouha when it took place and it didn't wow me then, much less now. It was a good heavyweight scrap, but that's about it.

Be honest (which means please just don't disagree with me for the fuck of it)...if you were making a list of the greatest heavyweight fights, where would this fight land on your list?

 

Of course not. But there is a difference between great and greatest.

Would Joe Frazier maker your shortlist of Greatest Heavyweight Champions??

Not mine.

But he was great. even though he got smacked around 4 times out of 5 by two other champions of his era.

It all depends on the context.

 

Frazier also won the biggest fight ever against the greatest heavyweight ever.

 

ugh. You're just splitting hairs now.

And personally...I think the difference between "good" and "great" is really the issue here. The word "great" is tossed around FAR too often.

Do you REALLY think Golata-Pohua is a great fight? Or are you just arguing for the sake of arguing?

And I didn't say "short list" of greatest fights. I didn't say how long the list needed to be. If you had to rank all the heavyweight fights ever in order of greatness, where would you ballpark this fight? Top 50? Top 100? Top 200?

Say the top is Ali-Frazier and the bottom is some random heavyweight fight in 1959 between complete unknowns (so obscure that BoxRec doesn't have a complete record for them) that makes Ruiz-Rahman SEEM like Ali Frazier? Where would it rank?

Oh, wait...or is all this because Golata is 1/2 of the fight? Hmmmm.....

To me, Golata-Pouha is more of a good scrap that Double is elevating to shoe-horn into this topic than a forgotten gem of years past.

 

Ummm...I call exaggeration (again!!). Frazier wasn't smacked around 4 out of five times as you suggested.

 

Wayne Rigby vs Michael Ayers 1

 

That's just it. Everytime we see a few combo's, the fight is called "great". What a "great" fight. Juan Manuel Marquez...what a "great fighter"....:dunno:

I don't think Golota vs Samson Pohua is on my list of great fights. Or yours or should be on anyones.

Andrew Golota is a bit like Tom Cruise. It doesn't matter how well Tom acts in any given flick. I know he's a fuck-up. I know he is a loon, and I hold it against him. Same with Golota. I can't add him to any list that involves the word "great" unless its a list of "Great Fuck-Ups".

That said, under todays rules and using todays parlance, Golota vs Bowe and Golota vs Grant were "great fights".

For me, "Great" is what stands the test of time. In 200 years, Pohua vs Andrew Golota is not going to be featuring in any Big Browser of Boxing shortlists.

 

Good post. Some people think I'm being a dick when I don't think a particular fighter is "great" or when I dispute that word being used to describe a fighter, but I've always thought it's been used way too much and on fighters/fights that don't deserve it.

I guess I am in the minority here, but I don't think it's an insult to refer to a fighter/fight as "good" or "very good." Nor is it an insult to say that a good fighter who had a good career isn't a HOF fighter.

Every fighter with a title belt or two is not "great". And every fight with some back and forth slugging is not a "great" fight. I think overuse cheapens the word for those fighters/fights that actually deserve it.

Right now I am looking at my watch waiting for Ugo to pop in and play Devil's advocate and say something like "yes, but who gets to decide who is great and who isn't, etc...::.

Don't be mad, Ugo...someone has to take a stand...and I'm doing it!

 

Cory Spinks' uncle vs. Alvaro Yaqui Lopez

 

All that you say is true but...

Floyd is great! :kidcool:

 

Marquez is great though.

 

But he is an ATG??

it shows you how befuddled the area can become.

And if we somehow decide that he can't beat Sal Sanchez, Willie Pep and Sandy Saddler, do we still decide he is great??? Maybe yes and maybe no. Pep lost 3 out of 4 to Saddler, but the fact that he was competitive each time, had won at least one of them, had dominated his division prior to Saddler, and had done so with some serious injuries, more than opens the books for him.

Again, for me, "Great" or "Greatness" should only exist where the fighter in question dominates, or has dominated at some point, his preferred division and where that fighter would have been more than competitive and more than combative against fighters from yester-year, from his preferred division/weight.

Example: Wlad will never be great, but Vitali might be great. Rationale: the manner of their respective losses, the disparity in the toughness of their respective characters, mentalities and physical makeup.

Example: Freddie Norwood would never be great but Marquez might be great. Rationale: Norwood beat Marquez at 126 but did very little else. Marquez at 130 would have destroyed him, Marquez severely disciplined Pacquaio and survived the best fighter of his era, in Floyd, at a weight that was grossly disadvantageous to Marquez. Survival in extreme circumstances. Domination in preferred circumstances. A nemesis to a perceived great fighter {Pac}

Example: Barrera might be great, but Junior Jones would never be great. Rationale: much the same as above. Barrera was going the wrong way when he met Jones- he improved and went on to great things at 122, 126, 130. Jones, for his part, lost to Paul Ingle and Kennedy McKinney.

The converse or inverse is also true. Take a fighter whom the books regard as a Great or ATG fighter. Marciano. Louis. Dempsey. Terrible Terry McGovern. Sam Langford. Do you see them dominate left and right through the decades? Me neither. But they are greats, no? Of course.

Thus illustrated is the lee-way which must be given to their contemporaries. All fighters have losses, blips, anomalies, call them what you will, none of them should deny them greatness.

As for the fights themselves, for me, a great fight must involve some degree of skill. A fight cannot be great where the fighters simply have no idea how to defend themselves. But you must be careful in your application of this. How capable was Joe Frazier of defending himself when he fought Ali in Manila? We know surely he was blind in at least one eye by the latter stages, and fought off instinct alone. This is boxing. We call fights "great fights" because they are great from within the confines of the sport of boxing.
If they move outside of that confine, it becomes a matter of personal preference.

Boxing is not the sport of fighting off instinct. It is the sport of seeing punches, predicting punches, anticipating punches and acting accordingly, with counters, defensive maneuvers etc. Is a fight still a great fight where the instinct, the flinching response to a blurred figment is now the dominant defense mechanism of one of the fighters, for an extended period of the fight? Is it even boxing, by then???

That is a matter for the individual.

 

I think Marquez is highly overrated, frankly... he's outstanding, maybe even sort of great, but I think he gets way more credit than he deserves because he's Pac-Man's Ken Norton

 

He's much more than pacman's Ken Norton. Now you're being utterly ridiculous. ::

Don't mention Norton's name in the same sentence as Marquez ever again!! :kick:


Marquez beat up Barrera, Diaz, Casamayor, Katsidis, Medina and consumed an entire bottle of Johnny Walker Scotch Whiskey in just one round in 2001.

 

Wow!!!

 

marquez's main problem is that guys werent interested in facing him in his prime at featherweight.

 

Except Freddie Norwood, who beat him, and therefore Freddie is a "Great", despite a loss to Gainer and some real ATG stuff with Cermeno.

 

agree, but you can't make a guy retroactively great based on that alone

Nobody wanted to defend the Bantamweight title against Jesus Pimentel in the mid 60s, that doesn't make him an all-time great at the weight

Bear in mind, I think Marquez is outstanding, I'm not bashing the man

 

he beat up a faded Barrera

what good featherweight DIDN'T beat up Medina?

Diaz was no great shakes as a fighter to begin with

Casamayor:giggle:

Katsidis, LOL, good one man

seriously, take ALI out of the equation and you can do the pretty much the same thing to Ken Norton's resume: Quarry, Young, Cobb... OOOOOOOOOO!

Seriously, Marquez is a little better than Norton

But when you compare Marquez's resume to REALLY great fighters like Duran/Robinson/Whitaker/Armstrong/Chavez/Mayweather/Charles/Louis/Ali, etc. -- he falls pathetically short, he is very clearly not anywhere near that class

If you go down to the next level where you have undeniably great fighters who were not quite consistent enough or outlandishly accomplished enough or in the case of Louis did not have long enough dominant championship reigns to be in the above class but at their best rival them, you have your Olivares/Tiger/Griffith/Gavilan/Ortiz etc... he's clearly not at that level either

He definitely doesn't fit the Foster/Hopkins/Jones/Gomez mold of a great fighter dominating a relatively barren division for a long period... I wouldn't even consider ranking him near any of those guys

To me, you would have an incredibly difficult time making a really convincing argument that Marquez is a top 75-80 p4p fighter all-time... he's good enough to win individual bouts against guys who are clearly historically greater overall (as evidenced by his tremendous showings against Pac) but that isn't "great" the way all of the above guys are great...

He's better than Norton, greater than Norton, but he's basically one level up, in Esteban DeJesus territory in my opinion

 

bear in mind, being that good is still pretty friggin impressive

though I'm sure people will act as if I called the guy a bum by comparing him to an equally tremendous fighter in DeJesus

 

i base things on what i have seen. talent counts in my book. if you base things strictly on accomplishment then plenty of talented guys get shorted.

 

Anyway fellas, surely a handful of Saad Muhammad fights fall into this discussion

 

who said I was basing it on that alone?

you base it on both combined

 

but people do talk about those fights

It's what makes Saad Saad

 

Exaggeration? How about flat-out fabrication?

 

This has hurt me deeply.

 

I'm sorry, my friend

But it's closer to the truth than saying JMM is an all-time great

Like I said, I definitely concede that JMM is superior to Norton, but he's the next level up if you want to get into the ranking game... there's still a couple of levels above that

 

It may be closer to the truth than saying Marquez is one of the very best fighters ever, but neither is close at all, I say, to actually being true.

 

Comparing him to Norton, in the first place, is flat-out ridiculous though Cdogg.

 

not really, especially in this context

For a guy who loves Ali, you sure denigrate the hell out of his biggest rivals who gave him his most difficult fights

I never said he isn't betetr than Ken Norton... he IS

HOWEVER, he's not Julio Cesar Chavez either... not by a long shot