Giving Boxing a second Chance!

[quote]LBramble wrote:
…anything with Duran at 135 lbs.

either the 2nd or 3rd Esteban DeJesus fight. In the first fight, a non-title fight, DeJesus got Duran’s attention and payed for it badly in the 2nd and 3rd go, and DeJesus could go.

Its really sad that Duran is know for Leonard and Hagler and Barkley. And yes its unreal that he dropped Barkley, given that Barkley was a 200 lb man who dropped weight to make 160.

But Duran was pure hell at his natural weight of 135. He moved up cause he beat everybody and there was no money to make anymore.

He beat Leonard with 12 lbs of excess baggage.

People will say he had to move up cause he couldn’t make weight. But if Leonard was 130 lbs Duran would have gone down and made the weight no problem if the dollars were there. Go find video of Duran at 135.

The man was pure hell at 135.

LB[/quote]

He was the greatest lightweight of all time. No doubt.

Gonna watch these fights, all the recommendations above made me pumped up about boxing again, guess i’m an easy guy to convince.

Always willing to accept a Futurama quote Robert.

The issue of who was the best is a huge can of worms. Almost everyone that follows boxing has a favourite that should have never lost if it weren’t for something or other, and an object of loathing who just happened to be lucky that he was in the right place at the right time.

I think that Duran was the pound-for-pound greatest. As has already been mentioned, he was coming into the first Leonard fight well above his best weight and with seventy-two notches on his belt.

Hagler was my favourite. Great range of tools and a rock-solid chin. What happens when an unstoppable force meets an imovable object? It breaks its hand.

Hearns grows on me all the time. Not the brightest of the bunch by a long shot, but a hell of a nice guy and a tremendous boxer. Aside from his absolute monster of a right hand, he possessed one of the best jabs in the sport (just ask Sugar Ray). I think he was the most unlucky. He got the wrong end of the stick in a razor-close loss to Leonard (should it have been stopped?) and became intimately aquainted with the anti-Hearns in Marvellous. I think he is the most dangerous opponent of the bunch for the vast majority of Welterweights in history.

I didn’t like Leonard. He took the second Duran fight as quickly as possible knowing that the Panamanian would be off bloating up and partying. He refused to fight Hagler (A reporter once said to Leonard “Tommy Hearns is thinking about going up to challenge Marvin Hagler”. Response? “He can have him”) until he saw Marvin look dire against the limited Mugabe (During that fight Leonard, ringside, started to get tremendously excited, saying “I can beat him. I can beat this guy”).

All of that said I would have to rate the latter three equally. My personal venom does nothing to change the fact that Leonard was a great great boxer. There. I said it.

The most talented of the four was the fifth - Wilfred Benitez. Possessed of some of the most jaw dropping defensive skill ever seen, Benitez was undone in many of his major fights by a total lack of motivation to train.