Rank these Lightheavyweights in terms of who beats who!

Unfortunately his chin wasn't even though most of his opponents were welterweights

 

Disagree. Graziano used to fight every week and train by running barefoot on hard rocks. Guys like GGG, Hopkins and Jones wouldn't have stood a chance. The game has changed baby, they don't make'em like they used to.....

 

There's film of these people, you know

Graziano wasn't a particularly good fighter

 

Yeah i dont see bhop as a great 175. He had great performance against tarver and that kazakh bum, got a lucky draw and a close win against pascal , an unlucky lose against calz, and comfortably beaten twice by downsyndrome and kovy. Not exactly the stuff of legend

 

I would agree that Hopkins isn't accomplished at 175...but based on his early performances against Tarver, Pavlik and to a lesser extent Calzaghe, and given his ring IQ and natural talent I think he's a handful for many fighters in history.

 

There IS Though, Bro...

There's ALWAYS a "But" when Discussing Current Day Fighters...And That "But" Is ALWAYS Accompanied by a Reference to Some Ol' School Fighter and How He'd have Done _____ to _____ and Moidered Him Half to Death, on his Worst Day in _____ Rounds or Less...

That's VERY Common Around Here...REED Doesn't Even Mind it, but it's Undeniably There....





REED

 

But not this ramonza/sugar bullshit

This notion that my position is "good old days" is bullshit and I've articulated it in great fucking detail 100 fucking times in the past 10 years

Ramonza thought Jess Willard could fight, for fuck's sake ... Bert Sugar had Rocky Graziano on his top 50 p4p list

I literally just said that Rocky Graziano wasn't one of the 20 best Middleweights of the 1940s, let alone all time

In my opinion the film (most importantly) followed distantly by other factors which again I have articulated an uncountable number of times in great fucking detail and am sick to death of having to repeat shows a the sport having a period of primitive mediocrity, a sudden surge in quality starting in the late teens, early 1920s rising steadily and rapidly to a peak of excellence in terms of depth and broad technical quality at various levels of competition from the 1940s through the 1970s and 80s with a subtle decline beginning in that decade, increasing in rapidity in the 1990s, falling sharply in the 2000s and early part of this decade with encouraging signs of a possible reversal of the trend in the last few years

Right now is 100s of times better than when Jack Johnson fought and when Jack Dempsey fought but it's nowhere near as good as when Ezzard Charles fought or when Emile Griffith fought or Roberto Duran or Ray Leonard or Pernell Whitaker

I'm not Rose-coloring an era unless people think a period of 40 plus years constitutes "an era", which is frankly crazy

 

To be honest, seeing how most here cant pick a fight correctly to save their life, even the film argument is a bit flimsy

 

I think this part is the point of contention:

"with a subtle decline beginning in that decade, increasing in rapidity in the 1990s, falling sharply in the 2000s and early part of this decade with encouraging signs of a possible reversal of the trend in the last few years"

This is a judgement of yours but far from being a generally accepted truth

 

I'm hardly the only person who has pointed this out and as I plainly stated, I have in excruciating detail defended the observation over and over again only to have others apparently forget everything I said and accuse me of being Ramonza which is lazy and fucking dumb

I don't care about being disagreed with but I do care about my POV on this being cartoonishly distorted time and time again because people are lazy or have poor memories/comprehension

 

The two have zip to do with one another, first of all and secondly, I'll happily have somebody look over my predictions of contemporary matchups and see if they've done any better

 

This is laughable coming from you. The irony. You are constantly distorting, cartoonishly, the POV of myself and many others on this board. You’re no where near as bad as that degenerate xplosive of course but you are pretty bad

 

The ability to judge the capacities of a contemporary fighter by looking at his videos is uncorrelated to the ability to judge the capacity of an old fighter by looking at his videos???

That's an interesting theory

 

I don't distort your POV... you really do think Floyd is the goat

 

Again... let's hear about all these totally wrong predictions I've apparently made

Judging the contemporary fighter against a guy that fought 30 years ago has utterly fuck all to do with predicting a matchup involving the contemporary fighter against another contemporary fighter ... it's lunacy to suggest otherwise

 

I'm sure you have a solid rationale for your opinions. But you also have a fondness for old time fighters that is unmistakable. Does this fondness cloud your judgement? I don't know.

 

Why? It's actually a very good point. Picking matchups between contemporaries should be an even easier task than picking between current and past fighters. And yet, we make wrong picks all the time. It's definitely something to consider for anyone who can't abide for a second the possibility they might be wrong about something.

 

It's not an "old time" thing... if it was I'd be picking Tony Canzoneri to beat top modern lightweight fighters... but I'm not ... how can one have a "fondness for old time fighters" yet say that Bruce Seldon would absolutely kill Jack Dempsey in a fight?

How can "old time fighters" sum up a 4 decade plus period of time? How can it exclude the previous 20 plus years of filmed fights?

 

I'm not personally singling you out. I have no clue what your prediction record is. But claiming that the 2 are uncorellated is beyond nonsensical.

 

See my response above... these two things are not alike

Secondly, everyone here thinks they are right. You think you are right even after you get objectively stomped in topic after topic

 

The only correlation is contemporary picks for contemporary fighters

But comparing skills between two guys that can never meet is a different can of worms altogether especially if my premise is already that in general one fighter's time is of a superior technical quality to the other's ... it's a lot more challenging for Emile Griffith to deal with Luis Rodriguez than it is for Floyd Mayweather to deal with Robert Guerrero

 

Of course the correlation is not perfect, but saying that there is none is simply false imo

 

How about you blow me???!

 

This is the very same thing that bothers me, although I am used to it by now.

I get called a contrarian or devil's advocate whenever I even suggest that Muhammad Ali wasn't quite as good as his highlight reel. I don't think I have even praised this era all that much, the point that I am parroting is that the standard of how we rate fighters of different eras is unfair.

 

MTF

 

Wanna throw shade at me yet doesn't have the balls to take his hoof and unblock me. Afraid of the embarrassment.

 

I can't pretend there's an even playing field when I don't see any evidence of one... my eyes tell me the average fighter was a good deal better in 1988 or 1968 for example than the same level fighter in 2018

But on the flip side I feel like I'm seeing more good fighters right now than I was 10 years ago