Only as good as your competition

[sanj16]

I think that sometime modern fighters get a rough deal when compared to past greats. Don't get me wrong I love the old time fighters and believe that they had quality, but ultimately you can only be judged by the competition.
It works both ways, take Tyson for example. Many think him a great, but look at the level of competition that he fought. He did all you could ask of him and he cleared them out impressively, but most of them were not of a great standard. In my eyes he was never tested while at his peak by other great heavies.
Ali was lucky because he had Fraizer, Liston, Foreman to prove his greatness.
The main jist is that now fighters like Hatton, Cotto, Mosley, PBF etc are fortunate because there are a lot of great fighters around their weight for them to create a legacy if they want to. It is frustrating that its all about the managers, promoters and TV execs, and the fighters are to spoiled and are business men first.
If you want to see real boxing look at Hagler, Hearns, Leonard and Duran. These guys all fought each other a few times and have all gone down as legends.

[babyboNe]

look at pac mab em jmm they all fought eachther, those are our true greats of our time. these are legendary fighters already.

it use to be oscar mosley tito and vargas, but they broke eachther apart, but mosley is coming and turning back time to bring terror back into the welterweights. they too are legendary gave us great fights.

in the mean time there was jones toney and bhop, they fought eachother but it was all prime jones.again these three also are legendary.

these days we have hatton cotto and pbf, notice all three are undefeated, that alone shows thier either still green(cotto) or just plain career filled with handpicking(hatton pbf)we prolly won't see either of them fight, maybe the old veterans(mosley oscar) would force them into risking losing their virginity, actually pbf and oscar is set to fight. thats one good props for pbf, but to gain real credit, he'd have to atleast knock out oscar(which bhop already did)but it was a oscar going up in weight now its a pbf going up in weight so if pbf k.os oscar then thats a huge gain for his legacy. but pbf needs more then a win over an old defeated oscar he needs wins over young game fighters(a cotto maybe), someone hype in his division(a hatton maybe). someone fans want to see in with him(a margarito maybe).

[Kev]

To be fair Hatton, Floyd and Cotto are all under 30 so still have time to get the big fights.

It's unfair to judge their careers thus far considering that they are all hopefully far from over.

I'm sure if Floyd beats De La Hoya he will want to go on and cement his legacy against Cotto and Mosely now matter how he talks about retiring.

And if he does get those 3 fights in his career, that would be enough to be able to judge his greatness.

Cotto is still young, only 26 he's got bags of time.

And Hatton will no doubt make the Hall Of the Fame anyway. If they judge him by the standards they judged Barry McGuigan he's already virtually there.

Beating Tyszu was his equivalent of Eusebio Pedroza.

All he needs is for Castillo to be his Steve Cruz and he will be there