Two Questions

[marbleheadmaui]

First thank you very much for the thinking and the work.

DAMN! Great work. FWIW there is good footage on Loughran, Walker, Villa, Ambers, Gans and McLarnin.

Seriously that is an amazingly excellent list (in that I agree with much of it ) A question. Were guys like Barbados Joe Walcott, Pascual Perez, Johnny Dundee, and Sam Langford oversights (understandable on a list this long) or judgements against?

Poor non-pareil Jack Demspey, reduced to "the other one."

I'm not sold on Orlando Canizales or Shane or Azumah (that hurts) or Oscar or Carpentier or Bud Taylor or Tony Zale being quite good enough, but it is certainly debatable.

The WWII middles are just a tough bunch to figure. None of Zale or Cerdan or Graziano or LaMotta ever faced Holman Williams or Archie Moore or Ezzard or Burley. Just an era that never clarified and so I look at those guys a little skeptically. Largely WWII's fault, but the guys just never did what I want to see fighters do.

Langford was definitely an oversight, as were Ezzard Charles & Charley Burley, but the others I knew far too little about to justify putting them in. I didn't feel I could include Johnny Dundee off having read his wikipedia page about 2 days ago

A lot of the ones you're not sold on are ones I was unsure of. Carpentier had a real influence on boxing & Taylor was largely off the basis of beating both Canzoneri & Villa. I know what you mean about the MWs of the 40s/50s. I think it was a great era & one of the oldies fights I love to watch, but I felt that the era deserved something more than SRR in there. I feel LaMotta deserves to be there more than LaMotta, but I also excluded Barrera & Morales for a similar reason so I could've been harsher there.

I feel looking at the list that I was far more stringent with the HWs & LHWs than at the lower end. On my criteria for the HWs, Canizales & perhaps Galaxy would've got dropped.

Azumah is for me the 3rd best 130lber there's been & I want him to be included, but again that might be my heart ruling my head. Oscar & Shane weren't easy choices, but their accomplishments are what swayed me, but I can't say I was that comfortable with either. In all honesty, the only active fighters I'm confident in calling ATGs are Hopkins, Mayweather & Pacquiao & that's because they've accomplished things that very few in boxing history have as you showed in your putting B-Hop in perspective thread

getting this kind of stuff settled is impossible of course, just fun to kick around. I could make a case, a good case, for every fighter you named being included. I just think I can make a slightly (slight-leee) better case to exclude a handful.

On Azumah, who I just loved and admired and held up as what a fighter oughtta be and if asked nicely I might have bore a child by him, if you include him, doesn't Flash Elorde have to come along? That's the real issue. I'm not sure you can really rank fighters other than in some sort of ragged, loosey-goosey groups. If I'm right about that (and I could be full of it) that means one guy in or out often drags 5-6 more with him.

But again, I think your initial list is one of the better ones I've encountered. Thanks again.