Sugar Ray Robinson vs Floyd Mayweather Jr.

[r.burgundy]

Abraham was measured 5'9 by Showtime. Don't you think he could hurt Mayweather? Not directly comparing Abraham and Levine but Levine was known as a hard hitter, fought up to light heavyweight, and Robinson took him as a "tune-up", which almost turned bad, but he overcame the troubles and came back to stop Levine.

off course but abraham is also a career 160 guy who has never weighed in less than 158.levine actually fought as low as 140's

[TheGreatA]

off course but abraham is also a career 160 guy who has never weighed in less than 158.levine actually fought as low as 140's

When he was 16-17 years old. Did Levine ever weigh less than 159-160 after his 21st birthday? Chris Byrd actually fought at light welterweight when he was 20 years old but he obviously got bigger since then. Same with Mayweather, Pacquiao, who were flyweights in their teens. Not the case now.

[r.burgundy]

When he was 16-17 years old. Did Levine ever weigh less than 159-160 after his 21st birthday? Chris Byrd actually fought at light welterweight when he was 20 years old but he obviously got bigger since then.

dude retired at 24 lol.i guess he was on the manny diet.

on a side note do you know of any foster fights where you could hear his in ring talk.he looked often to be talking **** of roger mayweather proportions

[TheGreatA]

dude retired at 24 lol.i guess he was on the manny diet

A lot of times when the fighters turn pro at an early age, they also go on the decline relatively early. Levine already had 72 fights at that point and his career was winding down. Benitez comes to mind, he was a champ at 17 and close to shot at 25.

[TheGreatA]

on a side note do you know of any foster fights where you could hear his in ring talk.he looked often to be talking **** of roger mayweather proportions

Foster admitted he could be a mean guy in the ring, though not as mean as his trainer who told him it didn't matter whether he killed his opponent or not (when Foster KO'd Quarry out cold).

“When I hit Mike Quarry, I thought he was dead. I was bending over looking at him and all the sudden the pupils rolled back in his head. I said, ‘Oh my God . . .’ My trainer had me by the arm and he was saying, ‘C’mon Bobby, Don’t look at him.’ I said, “Billy, the kid is dead . . .’ ’Eff him then, he ain’t got no business being in here’—that’s how cold my trainer was. He was mean.”

I haven't been able to hear any of his trash-talking on the films of his fights though.

This article is a pretty good read:

[BIGBOXINGFAN]

Sugar Ray Robinsin had a suspect defence. Floyd would land alot of shots.

[MACAQUEINBLACK]

Mayweather comes no where the class of Sugar Ray Leonard how can a few even consider trying to compare him to Robinson.

So if Floyd and Leonard are as remarkable as they are (and a lot of good analysts have Floyd competetive in a fantasy matchup with Leonard) - that must make Robinson a literal Superman then?

I refuse to subscribe to that unquestioningly.


I'm not taking anything away from the G.O.A.T. We aren't talking résum? because it's damn near impossible to directly compare the résumés of past greats to those of the latter era, due to the contrasting competitive conditions of the eras - measuring how the résumés of modern era names stack up against those of Robinson's era can't be done to exact parallels but more to respective/approximate equivalents, if it can be fairly done at all.

I'm just saying it's so easy to hail the pre 1960's names as unquestionable, unassailable Gods through the sanctity afforded by 50, 60+ years of faded newsprint, contemporaneous writeups and golden-agers' recollections, with the fact most of these fighters' primes weren't videotaped only making it easier to escape into that storied realm of myth and legend.


Some (not all) people will claim this or that about X old-school fighter without having seen more than 10 minutes of quality videotape of them performing, just because it's the partyline. Which, obviously, is ridiculous.

Again, would that past generations had been able to perfectly capture fights for all forseeable eternity and future generations like ours can - we still wouldn't know it all, but we'd know a lot more.

[r.burgundy]

Foster admitted he could be a mean guy in the ring, though not as mean as his trainer who told him it didn't matter whether he killed his opponent or not (when Foster KO'd Quarry out cold).

“When I hit Mike Quarry, I thought he was dead. I was bending over looking at him and all the sudden the pupils rolled back in his head. I said, ‘Oh my God . . .?My trainer had me by the arm and he was saying, ‘C’mon Bobby, Don’t look at him.?I said, “Billy, the kid is dead . . .?’Eff him then, he ain’t got no business being in here’—that’s how cold my trainer was. He was mean.?/i>

I haven't been able to hear any of his trash-talking on the films of his fights though.

This article is a pretty good read:

it looks like foster enjoys talking **** right before his man hits the canvas

[MACAQUEINBLACK]

Sugar Ray Robinsin had a suspect defence. Floyd would land alot of shots.

Robinson would knock Floyd cold with the first shot he threw, though.


Someone with the unassailable knowledge to back it up - is that bolded statement I just typed above actually true? Some talk as if it is definitive truth.

I've seen some Robinson, but I suspect not near enough - if the above bolded statement is indeed definitive, please give me the laundry list of filmic and written materials I need to educate myself to the point where I can realize its truth unequivocally for myself.

School me, seriously, I wanna know.



ps. FaustoGeraci is a great poster

[TheGreatA]

Robinson is not a god nor a saint, although I do personally appreciate how highly regarded he is even now by the modern boxing fan, after all it would be easy to dismiss him as a relic of the past. There are those who underrate him too, based on films they've seen of the man while he was past his prime. Among historians, there's growing support for Harry Greb as the greatest fighter of all time, even if there's no actual film on him. Robinson sometimes takes second place to Henry Armstrong, so his place as the greatest is not undisputed.

I agree he was not the defensive fighter that Mayweather is, but he was a smart boxer nonetheless. Not all his opponents were face first sluggers either.

From W.C. Heinz's article "What makes a good fighter?":

The greatest fighter of his time and one of the greatest of all time is Ray Robinson, the middleweight champion of the world. It is probable that in him, more than in any other fighter of today, are combined more of the qualities that go into the making of a great fighter.
Among the fighters of the present there is, for example, no more avid student of the sport. Robinson has been thus since the days when he started to box. As a four-round preliminary boy he made it a practice to sit at ringside in his ring clothes, before and after his own fights in order to study the others on the card.

One day we were talking in the Uptown Gym in Harlem. He was explaining how he had learned to fight by watching others and fighting others, and I asked him from whom, among those he had fought, he had learned the most.

“Fritzie Zivic taught me a lot,” he said, speaking of the former welterweight champion. “He was about the smartest I ever fought. Why, he showed me how you can make a man butt open his own eye.”

“How?” I said.

“He’d slip my lead, like this,” Robin¬son said, demonstrating. “Then he’d put his hand behind my neck and he’d bring my eye down on his head. Fritzie was smart.”

We were sitting one day in Robinson’s office on Seventh Avenue, just south of 124th Street. He had fought Kid Gavilan twice. The first time they had fought Gavilan had given him trouble. The second time, for the welterweight title in Philadelphia on July 11, 1949, he had handled the Cuban with ease, and I wanted him to tell me at least one of the things he had learned about Gavilan in their first fight.

“Well, I noticed one thing.” Robinson said. “I noticed that when he throws his hook he’s not in position, so he shifts his right shoulder forward maybe an inch or two. When he does that you know the right hand is dead, and you how the hook is coming.”
I was not amazed by this, because I had expected some such revelation. I was merely im¬pressed that of the many who have fought Gavilan and of the many more who have watched him closely, this is the only one to find this weakness.

I was not amazed, moreover, when Robin¬son told me that he knows fear. I have never known a really good creative artist, whether he be a writer, painter, or boxer, who has not confessed that he often doubts himself, experiences nervous¬ness when the big project is at hand.

“Accidents happen in a ring,” Robinson said. “You can never tell when you’re liable to be hit with a good punch.”

He remembered the night he fought Artie Levine in Cleveland in November of 1946. Levine had a dozen pounds on him and so Robinson was fighting it the way you should fight it, moving and throwing no more than combinations and piling up the points.

“In the ninth round,” he said, “he started a right hand and I reached over to catch it. When I opened my glove it wasn’t there and I heard the referee say: ‘Four.’ I thought to myself, Man, he’s startin’ awful high.”

Robinson got up at nine, and in the next round he knocked Levine out. He has never forgotten this, however, but the fear that Robinson knows is the limited fear that inspires a degree of caution and out of this gives birth to inspired performance.

Now this article hardly proves that he's a master-boxer on the level of Mayweather but with this among all the other writings and footage I've researched, I've come to the conclusion that he was a very smart boxer indeed. Not a fool who just throws his hands hoping to land a shot while walking into punches.