On Pound-for-Pound
By Gabriel Montoya (May 16, 2007) Doghouse Boxing
In mainstream sports, there is always a way to tell immediately who is the best at any given moment. Rankings, win-loss columns, the playoff race and so on. Ultimately the winner is decided in a championship setting that is arrived at in an organized, universally agreed-upon fashion. To further honor the best in each sport, All Star teams are assembled for exhibition, and awards are also bestowed to honor individual achievement. The ultimate of these honors is the MVP award. In boxing, we have three ways to determine who is the best, and we regularly exercise two of them.

First off, we have sanctioned title bouts. You would think that rankings would be first, but since it doesn’t really work that way, I figure I’ll get to that later. (Hey, it works for the sanctioning bodies.) Title fights and rankings really seem to function almost independently of one another.

But I digress. Title fights: Title fights occur generally when it is economically feasible and advantageous to the parties promoting the fighters and those sanctioning the fights. Those parties include networks, promoters, managers, superstar fighters and promoter/fighters. Fighters are moved to these bouts any number of ways. Once a fighter is positioned to get a title fight, he has three major titles (WBC, WBA, IBF) to choose from, and one minor one (WBO). There are also regional titles, state titles, and intercontinental titles. And once you get a title, there is something called a mandatory defense, but more often than not it’s nothing more than an obstacle or a bargaining chip, in some cases merely a figure of speech. With such a wide (diluted?) field of opportunity, titles do not necessarily the best fighter make. The best that you hope for is that the fighter makes the title; this is true of present-day boxing more than ever.

The second (and some say more important way) is something known as the pound-for-pound list. In that list lie the best fighters in the sport today. Boxing’s All Star Team. In essence, if all things were equal, these fighters could beat any one in any division. Except for the guy above him on the list. I think.

The phrase ‘pound-for-pound’ was created to describe Sugar Ray Robinson, widely regarded the greatest fighter of all time. It captured perfectly the quantum leap forward in terms of style, attributes, genius and grace he represented in the ring Robinson brought to us in his style both in and out of the ring. He came from an era when a fighter tested himself, sometimes weekly or monthly, against the best of his era, not just out of financial need, but something deeper: a need to prove himself in the ring time and again. It was a novel paradigm at the time that allowed for recognition of an extraordinary fighter regardless of his physical size. But that fighter and his era have passed, and will never return.

To me, calling anyone else after Robinson ‘pound-for-pound’ is like anointing a new Elvis or Brando. It is merely from our human need to replace what is gone forever that we crown new pound-for-pound titlists. In my opinion, it has as much merit as many of the sanctioning bodies' titlists, interim titlists, and champions emeritus. Not much at all. Hell, my doctor told me to reduce stress in my life, so I recently went cold-turkey on looking at alphabelt rankings. I’m mad approximately 75% less of the time than I was last month.

Depending on which writer or fan is compiling the pound for pound list, the top spot and order is determined any number of ways. For example, some go on the basis of the fighter’s last three fights and give or take away points for level of competition. Others base it on title wins, divisions successfully campaigned in, and/or title defenses. Some take into account the level of difficulty of the title matches. Some are just concerned with the title win, no matter if the match-up was even or not. Or others judge pound-for-pound in a vacuum, simply choosing the order of the list according to skill-set against all of the other elite fighters. And still others conflate the salary a fighter commands or the amount of pay-per-views he sells with fighting ability.

You can even fill the spot above you on the lists if some poor P4Per loses. However, beating the ‘P4P #1’ doesn’t necessarily give the victorious fighter that title. Just ask Vernon Forrest or Mike McCallum who defeated respective P4P #1 fighters in Shane Mosley and Donald Curry.

At the bottom of it all, it doesn’t matter who is P4P #1, because that title has zero responsibility to it. There are no mandatory defenses. You can fight tune-ups and mis-mandatory title bouts after hitting the top, collecting huge paydays and calling out retired fighters to fill the resume. Until you lose, you keep the spot. And even then you might be able to hold onto it a little longer. Pound-for-pound these days begs the question: If the best fighter or fighters don’t fight the best opponents, then what does that ‘title’ really mean?

In reality, pound-for-pound has become nothing more than a marketing slogan that clouds the issue of who is the best fighter in the world. That question is rarely answered in the ring anymore.

The idea of pound-for-pound was never intended to encompass a list. The existence of such a list serves little purpose except to recognize ten (sometimes 20) fighters who we already know are the most skilled fighters in the world. Being the top fighters, if all things were equal, shouldn’t they be capable of beating anyone else on the list on any given day? So what’s the point of having an order or a number one? There isn’t one.

Pound-for-pound talk is meaningless, because it leads essentially nowhere nowadays. Whoever is at the top of that list is looking everywhere else but the list for an opponent. Pound-for-pound is also dangerous, in that it eliminates the possibility of a Douglas vs. Tyson simply because theoretically, one fighter should beat another. If pound-for-pound truly mattered, we wouldn’t need the phrase ‘that’s why they fight the fights’.

The third way to greatness, and really the only question that should be asked or that matters to the future of the sport, is ‘which two fighters, at any given time, can make the best fight?’ Not which fighters can specifically generate the most buzz and money, but which fighters can generate the most action, the most excitement. As long as boxing keeps answering that question correctly, the money and buzz will follow. The future and the salvation of our sport lie not in blown up events like ‘The World Awaits’ that fail to deliver on the promise of ‘toe-to-toe action’ but do deliver monster numbers. Boxing won’t win over the casual fan that way. How many times can you invite John Q. Casualfan over for a party, and when he gets there, HBO-PPV basically pisses in his beer? How many times do you think John Q will forgive that? At 55 bucks a pop, not too many more.

Boxing fans and media alike have a choice: continue to put stock in the myth of pound-for-pound and encourage fighters like the current consensus #1 to keep moving on a path of least resistance towards unknown riches; OR we can hold our sport and it’s fighters to a higher standard that requires them to challenge themselves all the way through their careers, fight after fight, while those same riches roll in. As the UFC has done in recent years, boxing needs its best to put it all on the line against each other often. It cannot survive; much less thrive, any other way.

Greatness is fleeting by nature. It is exists only in an arbitrary length of time, sometimes over a long career, sometimes in a brief flash as a hook lands at the most improbably perfect moment. Once achieved, the moment is imprinted on history forever, but should not be measured against the future. Those moments should only exist to be savored for what they are in relation to the time in which they were created. Not as a looking glass into the future.


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Gabriel at: Coyotefeather@gmail.com
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