One thing I've noticed about boxing fans compared to other sports

The thing that hurts modern fighters and their case for greatness is the lack of fights compared to fighters of the past.

How can you compare a guy who has 30 fights with a guy who had 300 or someone like Sugar Ray Robinson who was fighting really tough competition in his first year to 18 months as a pro and amassed 200 fights at that level?

The only guy with under 50 fights who consistently is ranked inside the top 20 all-time is Sugar Ray Leonard and that’s only because his top level wins are so outstanding. Fighters today have neither those truly standout top level wins or enough depth in their resumé.

Sorry, but that’s the standard that has been set in boxing history - that’s what their up against and it’s why they fall short in fight fans’ and historians’ estimations and I’m not sure why we should drop those standards.

 

There's a plausible logic there, but also a problem.

There have been plans to change the World Cup so that it is played every second year, instead of every fourth. If that happens, we might soon have 5x world champions there. Thus by the same logic they become greater than the stars of now. Same happens if we add more major tournaments to tennis. Yet obviously that doesn't make the players better

 

Yep, it would effect the overall impact a World Cup win had on a player’s career but it also is about the impact a player has on the tournament not just winning it. Johan Cruyff was a huge influence on the 1974 World Cup without winning it - his place in the history of the tournament was secured by his own performances. So, it’s not just about winning it, otherwise Frank LeBeouf would be considered a better player than Cruyff. And no-one thinks that.

 

Cruyff was as good as he was smoking countless cigarettes a day.

 

yeah, I dont see how we can penalize current fighters cause the commisions are much stricter than in the past. It's literraly impossible for a modern boxer to fight as much as a SRR or a Moore, To judge a fighter historically, we have to compare him relatively to what his peers accomplished in the same era

 

But I believe boxing works the same way. "Lesser" amount of achievement can surpass a longer reign because of the influence that you mention.

Sonny Liston was a greater champion compared to Tommy Burns even though he had merely one successful defense. Same way a modern fighter can be greater than a past star who had five times more bouts on championship level

 

I know absolutely nothing about cricket. Given that, my first question would be what were the batting averages of the top 5 players from the same era?

 

Perhaps top 3 in undefeated fighters.

 

Well, Bradman had a long career (1928-1948), but the top 5 batting averages of players who were contemporaries of his at some or a large amount of his time playing are as follows (batting average is at the end of each entry):

1. George Headley (4th on the all-time batting average list): 60.83
2. Herbert Sutcliffe (5th on the all-time list): 60.73
3. Edward Paynter (7th on the all-time list): 59.23
4. Wally Hammond (10th on the all-time list): 58.55
5. Len Hutton (17th on the all-time list): 56.67

The batsmen who are 2nd and 3rd on the all-time list were not from Bradman’s era:
-Adam Voges, who is second all-time, only played test cricket for two years and his average probably benefits from that - he averaged 61.87.
-Graham Pollock, an unquestionably great batsman, is third all-time with an average of 60.97.

 

That's what I also find outstanding about Bradman, his contemporaries got nowhere near his career average either so you can't just say it was down to the time period he played in. You look at Dixie Dean scoring 60 goals in one season for example, and it's obviously incredible, but I believe there was another player in the same season who got up to the high 50s as well I think.

 

yeh but aren't there legit recent all time greats in alot of other sports?

 

There aren't many in boxing.

Jones, Pacquiao, Mayweather, B-Hop, Toney.

Who else in the last 30 years?

 

I like toney a lot but im not sure i would call him a legit atg

 

Yeah, I'd "definitely" rank Lennox over Toney in that regard.

I believe boxing is the lone sport where you can make a legit case that nobody whose peak has been in the 90s or later deserves to be top-10 in all-time rankings. Not everyone agrees, but a large portion of fight fans, especially older ones, would claim so.

Sports such as track-and-field, baseball etc have existed as long as modern boxing, tennis is an old sport too, but in them such take would be bizarre. Their popularity also has similarities with boxing.

Thus, I still maintain my take that this phenomenon is more about how we view boxing than about expertise and indisputable facts.

 

Oh shit, yeah I completely forgot about Lewis.

 

Roy would have been remembered as a top 10 great if he had retired after Tarver 1.

 

I think a big thing with this is boxing being separated by weight. The talent pool and exposure is less than it used to be/the dangers are better understood.

No doubt the majority of fighters from 70s-90s were better than they are now. Due to size and strength differences though heavyweight is nearly impossible to tell. Also worth noting that PEDs were rampant in professional sports starting in the 70s and there was essentially no regulations until the late 80s early 90s.

 

Doubtfully. Hardly anyone has him top ten and basically nobody who's serious admonishes him for not retiring.

 

One loss and Taylor's career is already in TATTERS

 

Yeah, my thoughts as well.

Post-Tarver 1, Roy was generally thought of as better than Leonard, or at least every bit the level of Leonard.

It's hard to fathom that all these years later, but the Tarver rematch drastically changed boxing perception.

Had Roy walked away after Tarver 1, his haters would have given him flack for not fighting a rematch, but it generally would have been forgotten. What would be remembered is that he was weight drained and still managed to eek out a win on Tarver.

That, coupled with his overall dominance and body of work, and 21 years later, he'd be thought of as a top 10 great.

 

It's hard to say if he would have been a consensus top 10 ( that pretty much doesn't exist even among hard core fans) but there is zero question he would have been regarded much much higher. The heights he fell from are one of the most dramatic in the sport's history and staying around too long made it even worse.

 

Jones Jr's historical standing dropped when Tarver K0d him and all the subsequent fights, in the eyes of most

To argue otherwise is silly. He's still the greatest boxer I've seen live or live on television

 

Well, they don’t need to fight 200 times to be worthy of comparison. I realise times have changed and that there are different ways to greatness. Even a relative old timer like Henry Armstrong isn’t considered to be one of the very greatest of all time because he fought 200 times. Most of his best work took place in a relatively small window of 4 years.

Nonetheless, a fighter today who fights a 25-30 fight career, unless a significant number of those is a proper career defining fight just doesn’t have much for us to go on. Sugar Ray Leonard managed it in a bit over 30 fights so it is possible but his wins are absolute top tier.

 

I always get kick out of when Floyd fanboy casuals shit on Roy like he was some joke.

It's comically apparent that they only watched boxing once a year, and that being, when Floyd fought.

So many Floydasexuals don't seem to understand that Floyd's physical prime and the latter stages of Roy's prime overlapped. And that pre-Tarver, if you even CONSIDERED Floyd to on Roy's level, you'd be laughed off as a non-serious person. I've told them that before (Kellerman once said it on ESPN as well), but it's like talking to a brick wall. Floyd is all they know.

 

Roy Jones probably dropped 15 or more places in most people’s all-time p4p lists from the Tarver KO onwards. Before that, he was certainly being considered as the best anyone had seen, Leonard and Duran included, since Sugar Ray Robinson. Floyd, for example, in his prime wasn’t seen as being on the same level as Roy because Roy was utterly dominating fights - Floyd actually had a fragility about him because of the hand troubles - winning most and sometimes all rounds in his title fights.

There wasn’t a sense that he was chinny or vulnerable. His two worst performances prior to the Tarver KO were the DQ against Griffin, which he so thoroughly avenged it wasn’t brought up anymore as a weakness, and the first Tarver fight, which as X says, could and probably would have been explained away as a result of the weight drain after the Ruiz fight. That Roy, had he retired then and there and never come back, would have made a lot of people’s all-time top 10.

 

Exactly. It's hard to put into perspective now how invincible Roy was viewed at the time, because it hasn't been seen since.

But yes, he was most certainly in SERIOUS GOAT debates before the Tarver rematch. On here, on every other major boxing forum (and there were better quality forums back then) and in the boxing media.

 

Jones ever making a top ten list based off his achievements is ridiculous IMO. Regardless of whenever he chose to retire. The losses don't even have anything to do with it, his resume just isn't good enough.

 

His resume is deeper than Floyd's, and you see the pedestal many put Floyd on today. Times that by 3 for Roy. That's how he was viewed before Tarver II.

It's very ironic, because his detractors at the time called him a pussy. If he truly was a pussy, he would have walked away after Tarver 1, and his legacy would be legendary. But Roy wasn't a pussy, and he wanted to put things right in the rematch. And his legacy was ruined.