Kory Kitchen is back at Bad Left Hook today for part one of what will be a three-part series. In part one, Kory looks back at the 2001 year-end pound-for-pound top ten from RING Magazine.
One of the constant remarks heard within boxing circles is “they don’t make ?em like they used to”. Typically, this may be the old crotchety guy down the street that claims to have seen Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis, and Willie Pep perform their trade when they were in their respective primes. You know the type. The kind of guy that tells anyone who will listen that Marciano would have walked right through the Klitschko brothers like Patton through Africa. If Beau Jack were around today he would whip Juan Manuel Marquez and Manny Pacquiao on the same night. Then he would knock out Floyd Mayweather on the next night. That kind of guy.
However, to a certain degree these people are right. As a whole, boxing is inhabited by fighters that do not have quite the same level of skill and experience that their counterparts from yester-year had. This is not argument or debate. It is fact. If one looks at records of fighters from decades past, he will notice that it was not uncommon for a man to have over 100 professional bouts, and some to have well over that. If one were to watch film of high-level fights from the past several decades, it would become apparent that the overall skill level of the “average” fighter has eroded a bit.
This is not to say that all of today’s boxers are bad, and that all of the older ones were better. We are fortunate enough today to have some men with special enough talent and skills to have likely competed with any era of prizefighting. Names like Mayweather, Pacquiao, Marquez, and Bernard Hopkins are frequently brought up when discussing “all-time great” status. However, I do get the feeling that we are at a time in the sport when perhaps we have the fewest active fighters that one could nominate to be a truly great fighter in the whole history of boxing.
We all like to use the term pound-for-pound when debating who we feel are the best fighters in the sport. Some people are of the opinion that the term is overrated, and they have a valid point. Why bother getting upset and heated over a list of fighters that is completely hypothetical? If they will never meet in the ring due the size differences then why bother with even making a list and debating about it? Well, for lack of a better term, it is because we are human. We like lists and we like to argue. As long as people don’t get too insane about it, it’s a fun topic to discuss with people that actually have a clue about what they are talking about.
If we gaze at our pound-for-pound list in boxing right now something becomes readily apparent, and it has been constant for the past couple of years. There is Floyd and Manny (or Manny and Floyd if that’s how you prefer), and then there is everyone else. Maybe you have dropped Pacquiao after the Marquez fight, or maybe you think Mayweather is overrated. Either way, clearly the two most common names atop the pound-for-pound charts over the past few years have been Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao.
After them would be men like Sergio Martinez and Juan Manuel Marquez. These are two Hispanic fighters that are supremely talented, but don’t have the fanbase that some of their peers have enjoyed. Marquez, ever the consummate professional, just lost a razor-thin decision to Pacquiao that many felt should have gone his way. Martinez, the undisputed middleweight champion, knocked out Darren Barker in a fight that may have been his worst performance of the past five years. After his fight with Barker, Martinez received some stern criticism not being up to his usual high standards. When referencing Martinez being generally considered the third best fighter in the world, Steve Kim of maxboxing.com wrote on Twitter that we were a long way from when Marco Antonio Barrera was tabbed the third best fighter in the world (I assume behind Roy Jones and Bernard Hopkins circa 2003).
