Duran : In My Era, Mayweather Would Have Been Ordinary

[jehoshaphat]

I think Bread has a lot of bias, mostly sly, in his arguments that I have read. No sense in going into detail about that. You're entitled to your opinion and I respect that. He used Broner jumping up to take Malignaggi's title as an example of weakening this era. Everybody, including him, knows that was a cherry pick. You can't go by titles nowadays because they're plentiful and they're a joke. Ward is not even a titlist but he is the clear best at 168-175. Go by who is on your resume. Broner hasn't beaten a great of this era yet so don't use him as the example. But about his honest assessment he left out the Klitschkos What era would they have not been a factor Big George Foreman was the scariest man on the planet when he faced Ali. He came in measuring 6'3" and 220 lbs. Could you imagine Vitali and Wladimir showing up at 6'7" weighing in at 250 in those days? Does anyone in sound mind really think they wouldn't have been able to hold their own or 'give as good as they take?' That is not even debatable. Hate on the Klitschkos all you want but even the all timer Lennox underestimated a prime Vitali once(even getting him as a short notice fill in) and found out enough to retire instead of trying that again. And I strongly disagree when people make one era out to be much better than the next because what can they compare it to Each era can only fight themselves. Boxing isn't a measured sport like track or golf where you can easily see who is better by just comparing how they fared in the measurements/scores. Even football and basketball have some measuring comparison where they can time speed and drills of the now bigger athletes who can run just as fast and jump just as high as smaller guys from the old eras. Athletes are getting bigger, faster, stronger, and better. It didn't just skip boxing. From the 80s, the 5'7" Spud Webb's vertical was measured at 48" in the dunk contest and it was unheard of. In 2000 dunk contest the 6'4" Steve Francis and the 6'5" Ricky Davis both nearly equaled the vertical at 47" despite being nearly a foot taller. Paul Williams had the reach of any old timer in the heavyweight division and he was a freaking welterweight. At 165 lbs. Jeff Lacy's power measured at the Olympic Training facility measured on par with that of a super heavyweight. Also the MMA 170 lbs. fighters Johnny Hendricks and (fighting at 185 at the time)Robbie Lawlor punching power measured harder than some heavyweights. Even though heavyweights are hitting harder now on average. How do you gauge which era was actually better if you can never fight out of your era? Its opinionated guessing. If you have 5 level A fighters who are at the top of their era and they beat each other up it appears to be a much tougher era. But if you take those same fighters and move 1 of the guys to be comfortably better than the other 4 the era looks weaker when in fact it was actually tougher. The one guy just makes the era look weaker by standing out. What if Leonard would have chose to box the first Duran fight and won less controversially against Hagler then he would have been a stand out. Leonard would have looked more special while taking away from the seeming specialness of the era. This is what you have in Ward and Mayweather. Were not talking about the heavyweight division here where the Klitschkos are dominating an "alleged" weak class. If you take Mayweather and Ward out of their weight ranges then you will see a loaded 140-147 and 168-175 group. 140-147...Garcia, Matthysse, Thurman, Rios, Alvarado, Bradley, Pacquiao, Marquez, Alexander, Broner, etc. I can even make an "opinionated" bottom 10...Provodnikov, Brook, Khan, Peterson, Maidana, Malignaggi, Guerrero, Soto Karass, Judah, Ortiz, etc. All by taking out Mayweather you have seemingly more loaded 140-147. Old timers or those biased for the old eras won't point out that this era made guys that ooze athletic gifts like Andre Dirrell and Zab Judah 'ordinary.' We have a much bigger boxing pool than that of yesteryear because of the much bigger population and the ease of finding the foreign fighters and flying to and from so they can readily fight. Boxing was along with the fighters loved much more then. This is mainly why we will always have such a discrepancy, why its taboo to equate the new guys to the old timers, and why you can't say an old timer is overrated.