Top 10 Greatest Middleweights of the 1980s

[BennyST]

4. Roberto Duran (103-16 with 70 KOs)

Ironically, Duran's legacy at middleweight is is arguably stronger than that of his welterweight period. At 154, he was beaten by Wilfred Benitez and crushed by Thomas Hearns. However, his fight with Marvin Hagler was a classic. Duran lost, but was the first fighter to last the distance with the awesome Hagler in years. Then in 1989, he pulled off his huge upset victory by outpointing Iran Barkley, winning the WBC Middleweight Title in the process.

I could agree with most of it until this one. I'm not sure Duran should be on the list at all. As fir his legacy compared to 147, I don't think you can compare them.

At 147, his legacy is actually brilliant. At 160 it is both good and bad.

147: He beat top contenders and very good fighters in their own right, unfortunately in an era of too many greats, such as Monroe Brooks, Jimmy Heair, Emiliano Villa and Adolfo Viruet (lesser boxer of brother Edwin) along with HOF'ers Carlos Palomino and Ray Leonard.

He went something like 11-1 from memory at 147 including winning the WBC title and beating two welterweight greats, one of those being a top three WW great and only had the one loss to that same fighter.

Compare that to his 160 record: Minor win over Jimmy Batten, major win over Iran Barkley and losses to Robbie Simms, Ray Leonard, Marvin Hagler and much later William Joppy. In fact, the majority of his career apart from Hagler, Hearns, Barkley and Leonard III were at 168 and 175. He had, apart from winning the title, better wins at 168 than he did at 160. He beat top contenders or champions like Jorge Castro, Juan Carlos Gimenez, Ricky Stackhouse, Tony Menefee etc etc. Nothing spectacular, though considering the circumstances, the Castro win was pretty spectacular at 45 years of age.

Anyway, the point being that I really don't think he should be on this list at all. He had only a few fights there and while there were some great performances for an old, little guy against Hagler and Barkley the majority he looked flat, tired, washed up and unmotivated.

Guys like Nunn, Kalambay, Graham etc should either be on there or much higher. Even Leonard's single great win at 160 over Hagler would put him higher. Nobody else could beat him, and whether it was controversial or not doesn't really matter. It wasn't a 'robbery' just a close fight that could have gone either way but due to Hagler's idiotic, ego driven tactics for the first few rounds he lost that fight himself.

[GJC]

foreman being the only puncher that he did step in the ring with and believe it or not,foreman was regarded as a joke at the time.....so no surprise why frazier fought him.frazier cherry picked opponents that he knew wouldn't seriously test his fragile chin.

Being around and following boxing as an adult at that time I have to say that Foreman was not regarded as a joke.
Yes a lot of the fighters Foreman had bowled over were not top notch and Frazier was heavily fancied to win but amongst those who followed boxing Foreman was definately a live contender.

[aristotlemoses]

What a pile of ****.Middleweight is 160 and nothing else.Mugabi doesn't belong anywhere near that list.If they are going to try and discredit Leonard's obvious win over Miss Marvis Hagler,then they better deny Duran's gift decision over Iran Barkley.They also neglect to mention Miss Marvis avoiding fighting a number of middleweights while he was champion,even vacating two thirds of his title to sit out a year and come back to lose to a washed up,inactive welterweight.

Duran ducked McCallum,not Leonard.

Hamsho and Barkley should be rated ahead of Hearns,Duran and Leonard.



This list was done by a Hagler apologist.

I thought dummies like this stayed in NSB