Great or very good?

Some Ricans I know think he's the Rican GOAT. Yeah, he's pretty overrated.

 

Cheers pal. Saying that Tszyu was a prodigy sums it up well, really. More of a natural like you say. You sort of beat me to it comparing Cotto to Torres. Torres was a better pressure fighter and more compact under fire I think. Probably a higher class of fighter peak for peak, but like George says, Cotto was a tidy boxer and better backing up than someone like Torres, though mostly against types who came at him in straight lines and couldn't put him under the cosh. I'll have to rewatch the Pac fight, I haven't seen it in its entirety since the live broadcast, but I recall Cotto having little spells of lateral movement where he outjabbed Manny and made him look a tad pedestrian. Trouble was that Pac would eventually trap and feint him onto blizzards of hard shots at which point Cotto would unravel and lose confidence. Prior to the first time Pacquiao really hurt him and put him down, I recall Cotto doing some good precise work on the front foot in the first round, but it went out of the window and didn't return once he tasted Pacquiao's speed and power. My memory is unreliable though.

 

Agreed 100% on Cotto and Torres.

Cotto accomplished more, but for pure peak, Cotto was never as good as Torres was on the night he stopped Pastrano.

 

Cotto and Torres even have similar weaknesses, too.

 

Torres, like Cotto, could do well against boxers. But if faced in a MM against a pressure fighter like Qawi or Saad, I think he would fall apart.

Torres was more explosive though. Cotto didn't have his handspeed and snap.

 

Yeah, he wasn't as explosive, but I'd wager he hit harder pound-for-pound. Torres wasn't a puncher.

 

I'll give Cotto credit - he went A LOT further than I thought he would.

He and Panchito Bojado turned pro at around the same time, and around here there was heavy debate on which prospect would turn out better. Probably like 70% of the forum said Bojado (including me). Not many believed in Cotto at the start.

I remember the turning point. He beat the crap outta Cesar Bazan on a TR undercard. That was when we started taking notice.

 

Bojado looked the goods initially, I thought he was going to be brilliant like most others. He's one of the main reasons I became cautious about overhyping active fighters.

 

Yeah, he must've really flopped coz I've never even heard of himAnd this is somebody who can recite the ENTIRE light-heavyweight lineage from start to finish, off the top of their head

 

Bojado craze was BIG! Very, very big.

He looked like a generational talent in his first few fights.

Hatton was also a prospect at the time, and the general feeling was that Bojado was already better than Hatton.

He became THE cautionary tale for waiting until a prospect truly gets tested before hyping him.

 

That's no exaggeration. Bojado is actually THE REASON why I try not to get excited about a guy's first 10 fights.

 

I just looked the guy up and I'm like Wtf

 

In fairness, his talent was legit.

He was a lazy cunt.

If he had Floyd-like dedication, I doubt he would have been a generational fighter, but he might have been the next Vargas.

 

I remember when Juan Diaz and Bojado were on the same cards.

If you had said at the time that Diaz would end up having a better career, nooooooooooo one would have believed you. We never even thought Diaz would win a belt.

 

The thing with Cotto is he was either on the offensive or completely covered up. Basically the whole inbetween/transitional phase was missing. I think the inability to do that is perhaps the defining line between a 'very good' and 'great fighter'.

 

Yupp. Great point. He was either one or the other.

He couldn't integrate offense and defense the way a Duran/Napoles/Sanchez could.

 

Worth noting: Oscar had the same problem. Couldn't integrate offense and defense. Oscar and Cotto were also both notorious faders. But... Oscar was a better talent than Cotto, so he went further.

 

Same here. It's madness imo to put Tszyu above Cotto

 

As for the question itself, it's a very hard one. I think that Norris was by far the most impressive, but resume wise, he doesnt have much. He probably wasn't as good as he looked (more flash than substance).

Personally, i'd have it this way.

Cotto, Hamed and Froch (Great)

Tszyu and Norris (very good)

 

Froch never unified a deep division, and lacks the level of dominance Tszyu had.

 

What level of dominance?

Tszyu lost to Phillips, who wasn't a a great fighter by any stretch of the imagination, struggled against Mitchell, Hurtado and Urkel. I'd admit that the Judah (early stoppage notwithstanding) and MAGO fights were impressive performance, but Froch has beaten better fighter than him, and was the best fighter at 168 for a stretch (unification, especially nowadays, doesnt means much imo)

 

He and Cotto were two high profile prospects in the early 00s, after competing in the 00’ Olympics.

As X said earlier, Bojado was generally the more highly regarded one early on. He seemed to have a certain explosiveness that Cotto didn’t have. I also thought Bojado would be the better of the 2.

He was lazy and basically disappeared after losing to old Leija.

Another underachiever from the 00’ Olympics was Ricardo Williams. He looked pretty talented. He lost a couple of early fights and got caught trying to push cocaine.

 

I never bought into the Ricardo Williams hype machine.

It was apparent even in his first few fights that he couldn't crack an egg. He had very fast hands though.

Bojado looked like an Oscar-Vargas hybrid in his first few fights.

 

Remember there was a Muhammad Abdullaev craze on this forum for awhile too.

He destroyed Philip Holiday on the Tszyu-Lejia undercard, and many of us thought he would be what Golovkin became years later.

 

Joel Julio - Lampley sucked his cock on air

 

He turned pro in the slipstream of De La Hoya’s success so he was being marketed heavily as another Latino crossover star. I remember The Ring doing a profile on him, which they did on young, up and coming pros and talking him up. But like X and Erratic say, he wasn’t prepared to work for it.

 

Switching it up, Hamed had one attribute that was great and that was his power. But he relied too heavily on it and didn’t work hard enough in other areas (and eventually just didn’t work hard enough full stop). He was a great talent who became simply a very good fighter, but not a great one.

 

Just wanted to comment that for me there are different levels

ATG-Ali
Greats-Jones Jr
Very Good- Cotto, Hatton

 

Hatton doesn't belong on the same level as Cotto IMO.

It's clear he should be right there, just above Ali.

 

LMAOOO!

Jones is a top 20 ATG. If that doesn't constitute "all time great," then I dunno what does.

Stop your low-key obsession with trying to diminish this man.

Anyone who doesn't consider Jones an ATG is on a different level of bias.