Thread: Are we too quick to call fighters over the hill?

thinking about the froch and pac fights over the weekend and the comments about them made me think about this topic. i think that we see a good or great fighter have trouble in one or two fights and call them done rather than them having a bad fight or two.

everybody was saying that pac was done and that he just wasnt as good as he once was. the rios fight showed me that he is pretty much the exact same. he didnt lose to bradley even though it didnt look his pacs best performance but bradley has good speed which i think somewhat bothered him so he won handily but wasnt as dominant as he had been previously. then he gets KO'd by marquez after he was on his way to stopping marquez than most people call him over the hill. in all honesty, if you just look at his opposition, you can see the styles that he dominates and the styles that he has trouble with. he just fought two guys in a row that gave him some problems. fighting rios is the style he does well against.

same as froch. some people are saying that he is just getting old and out of his prime when in reality, he hasnt really changed. groves countered with hard punches because froch has always been easy to hit. people forget that taylor was clearly beating froch before the 12th round KO. dirrell easily beat froch but got a gift decision. he had trouble with kessler and lost. then he beat abraham and johnson who he could just use his jab against to keep them away. he got destroyed by ward and beat a weak chinned bute. now that he had trouble with groves, he is all of the sudden over the hill? i dont believe it. he just had a hard time with the style. he looked the same as he always did. if he comes back and fights another fighter that isnt groves or ward, he will probably look the exact same and dominate his opponent.

these are two recent example but you hear a lot about fighters being done when in reality, they just fight tougher opponents or at least opponents with tougher styles.

Froch isn't over the hill. I didn't think he was any different than before. I was picking Groves to win because I knew how good he was, not because of Froch being on the slide. That being said, there are only so many flush shots a fighter can take before he crumbles, no matter how good his chin is so I suspect it'll catch up with Froch at some point.

We're too quick to judge full stop, over the hill, never any good to begin with. I read one comment that Froch had been exposed

30 odd fights in, all that blood and guts along the way fighting the best available for years. Groves makes him look like the plodder he is and always has been and now he's finished, never was any good, been exposed.

Its laughable.

Honestly I kinda got bored of watching Pac bounce punches off of Rios's head so tuned out a little bit but he looked good from what I saw. He looked great against Marquez before geting flattend. He was taking Marquez apart.

As a general rule, boxing fans are too quick to call fighters ANYTHING. It's a brutal sport. What a boxer may have spent years building up, can all be written off by the boxing public after one moment of weakness.

I've seen some real idiotic logic used over the years by boxing fans to justify their opinons on certain boxers. Pac still looks fantastic to me. He looked great before taking the big knockout blow from JMM.

It's the exact opposite. Boxing fans ignore all the obvious signs and cling desperately to the idea guys can be great again in the face of hundreds of years of history. Look at Tyson/Lewis, people believed that was a real fight. Um, no, Tyson had been done for years. Or Tysons next fight or next or next. Look at Cotto just recently. Many people suggest he is reborn, the old Cotto again, all sorts of other nonsense as if all the damage has magically disappeared.

If a fighter is old and repeatedly looks worse than they looked when they were young it's not unreasonable to suggest they are old. In fact to suggest otherwise is lunacy.

Edit- When I say done I mean the best of them is gone. Froch is still a hell of a fighter, Pac is still a hell of a fighter. But people get old. Pop in Floyd vs Corrales and try to say he's just as fast. Things change.

The majority of boxing nerds are like Creationists - their opinion never changes about a fighter regardless of the evidence. All you ever hear in boxing is excuses, excuses, excuses. Every ref and judge and promoter is corrupt - unless their man wins of course, then you don't hear a pin drop.

Froch is now shit because a young unbeaten fighter stepped up to world-class and passed the test.

Pac looked like the old Pac which is the same Pac that got ironed out by Marquez. Awesome.

I think the real problem is that with boxing fans and media the language tends to be to the extreme. It's all or nothing, black or white, the best in the world or over the hill. There's no allowance for the continuum of truth. Just because a fighter is aging doesn't mean it's over - I think both Pac and Mayweather are prime examples of this. Both are slower than they once were, but both are still fast enough to get the job done.

Originally Posted by bcollins

I think the real problem is that with boxing fans and media the language tends to be to the extreme. It's all or nothing, black or white, the best in the world or over the hill. There's no allowance for the continuum of truth. Just because a fighter is aging doesn't mean it's over - I think both Pac and Mayweather are prime examples of this. Both are slower than they once were, but both are still fast enough to get the job done.

Preach on!
People get old, they diminish. Why can't you say they diminish? People take it like you're saying they aren't good, there's too much damn inference. Froch is one of my favorite fighters, even though I think he's a cunt, because he's hard as a coffin nail. But I'm not going to be blind to the fact he is getting old. And acknowledging that fact doesn't mean I think he's crap. But people always infer. I said GGG should try to get a froch fight right now because there are diminishing returns on the value of a win against him. People take that as an insult to Froch. I didn't even say GGG would win but somehow I've insulted Froch. Inference is a dangerous thing.