I learned two things from my recent article about Floyd Mayweather?s nonsensical all-time greatest ranking at Boxrec.com.
One?Other writers who claim to never read me, who pretend I don?t exist, somehow manage to take ?inspiration? from my work and crank out shameless and ball-less copycat versions of my articles on a consistent basis.
And Two?Based on messages crammed into my various inboxes, everyone seems to have their own all-time great pound-for-pound list.
It?s not that I don?t want to hear where the late, great Jose Napoles ranks on your ATG list (actually, I really, really DON?T want to hear it), but this whole ATG debate is a big, turd-ridden road to nowhere.
I wrote the Mayweather/Boxrec piece because this particular Boxrec ranking was so ridiculously godawful. But, just to clarify things, I think all such lists?even the much-beloved active fighter pound-for-pound rankings?are pretty damn silly.
There are just so many variables and intangibles and era-by-era differences in the fight game that coming up with any definitive ranking is a work of pure fiction.
Take, for example, efforts to draw any real comparison between Boxrec?s no. 1 ATG Mayweather and most of the rest of the world?s no. 1 Sugar Ray Robinson.
Most boxing people comparing the two ask whether Mayweather would be able to thrive in the era of Sugar Ray Robinson? However, the equal and opposite question is never asked?Could Sugar Ray Robinson thrive in this modern era?
If a time machine existed, we could take both fighters in their primes and have them battle on some neutral Limbo-like plain with PPV camera access. And, to get some sort of definitive ?who wins? answer, it would have to literally be that?plucked from their primes and placed on a neutral ghost world.
If you took Robinson out of the past and placed him in the here and now, in the era of one or two fights a year and eight-figure paydays, where there is a dearth of old school quality trainers and a general atrophy that comes from more cautious, future payday-minded matchmaking, would he still be the same Sugar Ray?
If you took Mayweather into the past and kept him busy, hungry, and dependent on big, risky performances for his paychecks, plus, fortified his skills with some true tests from some grizzled, old school pros and environments where he and his dad weren?t always the smartest boxing minds in the room, would he be the same ?Money??
One could argue that Mayweather, with his instincts and raw ability, would be a significantly better fighter if he came up in the ?50s?probably not undefeated, but overall better. It could also be argued that Sugar Ray, if he came up in the present day boxing environment, despite his own built-in assets, would not be as sharp or as battle-wise as he was in his own day.
Fighters, like any other athlete (or any other human being, actually), are products of their times and there?s no way to prove that any particular time, filtered through any specific person, produces something better than any other era.
Hell, maybe Robinson would be even better as a present tense fighter and maybe Mayweather would fall to pieces fighting in Robinson?s day.
Who the hell knows and who the hell can say whether any boxer is better than any other boxer without them actually stepping into the ring against one another under absolutely neutral conditions?
Until the laws of physics and the space-time continuum can be bent to facilitate boxing fantasy matchups, this ATG ranking stuff is all message board fantasy talk.
