Shields had solid fundamentals from an extensive amateur background. He also had a good chin and was very game, very tough. The main weakness was his power, he was not a puncher. Primera can only really be based on The Hearns fight, not the Venezuelan security guards that make up the rest of his record. He showed nothing in that fight other than a smattering of courage for managing to stick around for 6 rounds. Shields was far more skilled, and I think he would easily decision this bum behind his good jab. Easy win
This pretty much sums it up. Shields was a higher class of fighter than Primera and would win with room to spare.
You can wonder all you want, but Cuevas was a legit world class fighter and he PROVED it (no "what ifs??" needed) by fighting regularly against good opposition. Primera, on the other hand, did nothing in his career except get beaten up by Hearns. You don't have to wonder about Cuevas, because he was legit. What's funny is seeing folks like you and mikE trying to build a case for Primera (just to be different) for being something other than he really was...barely a blip on the boxing radar. Who do you think would win this fight? Are you now on the Primera bandwagon? Good luck with that.
Would he still have 11 title defenses prior to fighting Hearns? Or would he have a 16-0 record against guys from his neighborhood with 2-9 records? Surely, you can't be this fucking stupid.
It really is a retarded comparison. kneeL obviously has the same limited brain power as mikE, it's why him and mikE and boyS.
ive seen primera fight once. i dont know if he was good or bad. obviously he was unproven. the point is, it is possible he was a decent fighter who was over matched and ruined by hearns. wouldnt be the first guy hearns ruined. he basically ended cuevas career. reminds me of some unproven argentine guy mosley fought at lightweight. built up record and all, but he didnt look like a terrible fighter. he was over matched and perhaps ruined. but he did manage to hit mosley harder and rattle him more than anyone else did at lightweight im not taking anything away from shields and his staunch fanatics here. he was a durable gringo. silly match up though, this. you dont have much to base it on.
cuevas would have had exactly zero defenses if he had the misfortune of running into hearns 5 years prior.
:l2: what kind of retard logic is this? Five years prior, Hearns was a 130 pound amateur with no power Hey Kneel, did you know that if Wladimir Klitschko had run into Mike Tyson in 1986, he would have had zero defenses? Yeah, its true! He was 10 at the time
if he had the misfortune of the hearns fight taking place 5 years prior with the same result. same hearns, same cuevas, same result. just him in the ring with the same hearns instead of cholo espada. there is no title reign for cuevas, no breaking of bones. he would just have been another also ran like primera.
again, the retarded nature of this "point" can not be overstated. Once you have had to revert to defying space/time in order to try and argue, you have fallen off of a cliff.
Not at all. You are a simpleton, which is why you believe your "point" to be analogous to trying to guess is Larry Holmes could have beaten George Foreman (as an example of a MM) It's not remotely analogous, kneel.
my point is the truth. and the only way what i said is not true is if you do not believe hearns ruined cuevas.
It's amazing how far Neil is willing to go and how much of an ass he is willing to make of himself just to play the opposite game. You can play The Land of Make Believe all you want with Primera, but the reality is he accomplished nothing BEFORE or AFTRR the Hearns fight. His rightful status as undeserving challenger is not remotely changed by your bullshit posts here. "Coulda, woulda, shoulda" is not truth or proof of anything. The REALITY is that Cuevas was a champion and a world class fighter, Shields was a legit contender in a really tough time to be a Welter, and Primera was an astoundingly unqualified manadatory contender, who, as expected, failed miserably in his undeserved title shot and subsequently went straight back to obscurity.
Impossibly stupid comment (and from you, that is saying a lot). There are no Shields fanatics here, just folks who actually have a handle on both fighters and that Shields, by any measure (except the impossibly retarded one of rating fighters based on W-L records) was the better and more accomplished fighter. One mikE around here is plenty...we don't need another.
im not disputing anything you chaps are saying (other than that you" have a handle" on the guy based on seeing him for a few rounds, once, versus one of the greatest welterweights ever). no need to re-type your same posts over and over again. there have been unproven guys in the past who have come from obscurity to win titles/fights. was this clown one of those guys? maybe or maybe not.
There is no "maybe" involved. He wasn't one of those fighters. That is a fact. He came from obscurity. He didn't win any significant fights or titles. He faded back into obscurity. This is what actually happened. No "what if's" are required.
what happened was he faced a prime thomas hearns and got his ass whipped. who knows what he could have done if he ran into a less formidable foe
Your point is arguing a hypothetical (Primera possibly being decent, which has no precedent other than as a theory based on nothing) with a hypothetical that involves erasing what Pipino Cuevas actually did (which is part of why Hearns victory over him is one of his defining career achievements) and taking Hearns in 1980 and magically breaking through the constraints of time in order to place him in exactly the same state in 1976. Using this "logic" you could argue that virtually every fighter with a championship reign who might have lost to a future champion in a vacuum was in fact no more proven then Luis Primera. In the real world, there is nothing to support Primera being anything special pre-Hearns or post-Hearns. There is nothing to even suggest he was a deserving top 20 ranked welterweight, never mind a number one contender. If Shane Mosley had the misfortune of fighting Roberto Duran before he fought Phillip Holiday, he would never have had any lightweight reign and would be regarded as no better than Lou Bizzarro, according to your "truthful" point
More "coulda, woulda, shoulda". I'll stick with what actually happened. If he had even ONE win over a legit opponent, or even a good performance in a loss against one, then maybe your Devil's Advocate theory might hold water. But he didn't...so it doesn't. To be honest, I can't see any particular reason for you taking up the Primera banner outside of you just HAVE to take the opposite side of a discussion when either cdogg and/or I are involved in it.
do you regard him as better than lou bizzarro? the way you talk. he was not as good or brave as bizzarro.
you are attempting to actually alter history in order to prove a point. Nothing like that goes on here. History, as it happened, is an important part of the discussions here. Why do I think Alexis Arguello can't beat Floyd Mayweather at 130? Because Alexis Arguello HAD trouble with guys who could really move (Marcel, Vilomar Fernandez, Pryor when Pryor chose to fight that way) and fast handed guys did give him grief because he liked a measured pace where he could parry shots with his gloves and forearms and counter with his singular, accurate bombs. I think Floyd would make that too difficult for him to do. I am basing that on what both guys have actually done in their careers, I am basing it on how they fought and whom they fought. I'm not coulda/woulda/shoulda-ing anything. While no one quite envisioned a mismatch, plenty of folks picked Hearns to KO Cuevas at some point before they fought and they based it on Hearns' height, his speed, Cuevas's expected trouble against that jab... Others thought that maybe Cuevas could get inside and start winging hooks. Perhaps if he had been able to, he might have been able to stem the tide. That didn't happen of course and Hearns killed him. MMs are no different except you don't get to see the fight come to fruition. Hence, they are "mythical". That's different than coulda/woulda/shoulda. Hearns KOing Cuevas doesn't erase the dominant 11 defense reign the guy enjoyed. Because it HAPPENED.
There is no basis in fact to stick up for Primera the way you have been. Sure, the results of MM's are hypothetical, but the match ups are discussed using the facts of each fighter's career. There is a difference between that and what you are doing. You are trying to build a case for Primera not sucking, but there is no substance to it...because it is entirely based on "Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda".
