Enough with the “ATG” or “GOAT” Discussions & Time to Put Things in Total Boxing Greatness Perspective!
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By Andrew “Drew The Picture” Hames
The retirement of boxing’s long-standing P4P Champion Floyd Mayweather, JR. has stirred up and resurrected several debates concerning both who fight fans regard as the greatest of all time, or the “GOAT” for those of us who’ve been forced to think in abbreviations and acronyms in today’s digital and social media culture. Equally pressing are the trials many fighters find their careers on to either be convicted of being “all-time greats”, or hung by the jury of the boxing public for being found innocent of immortal merit in boxing infamy, or falling short of the credentials to be considered “ATGs”. I opened with this topic only in hopes of preparing my readers for the nature of the mind frames my future articles will be spawned from, a sneak preview if you will, into a line of thought that strays past any gray areas, and down to the black and white of such issues.
Respectfully, I’ve long disagreed with the contention that any fighter could realistically be called the “GOAT”, and even the term “All-time great” should be taken with a grain of salt, in the sense that no fighter has or will ever been able to fight in every era in the sport to solidify his claim, and barring the unlikely discovery of a pugilistic time machine, chances are our rankings will remain, hypothetical, preferential, and in many cases, biased. Given that “All time has yet to be determined”, and the greatest superlative that can realistically be bestowed upon any great fighter is to be the “best we’ve ever seen”, and even that title will never be 100 percent unanimous or provable, leaving us to the same exact essential stand-still, with such items as perception, eras, and the many other barriers between us and universal acceptance of a “TBE”, “GOAT”, “ATG”, or any other combination of letters we assemble to assign these accolades of recognition.
In most major combat sport’s, the eras factor is bound to weigh heavily on the performance levels of its participants, especially if we were to envision intermingling athletes of different eras. For instance, athletic and modern factors in basketball would on the surface give considerable advantages to even average modern NBA team, as opposed to a dynasty from the earlier years of the sport, that weren’t yet privy to elementary abilities a novice would be familiar with today, such as dribbling with both hands, cross-overs, fast breaks, three-point, seven-footers, etc… Arguments in terms of ranking a “GOAT” or “ATG” in boxing can objectively be met with similar lines of questioning. After all, there’s quite a substantial difference between a fighter or athletes being ranked the best of all-time, or being ranked the best of his time. How would Sugar Ray Robinson have held up against today’s welterweight fighters, or Roy Jones, JR. against yesterday’s less athletically gifted Middleweight fighters? Some will blindly favor one era, or one resume over the other, but would still ultimately be neglecting the fact in doing so that these answers cannot feasibly be obtained through impossible fights, much less selective criteria. Most fight fans will reluctantly acknowledge Mayweather’s “TBE” claim to merely be acronyms for “the best of this era”, as opposed to his self-proclaimed “The Best Ever” moniker, and perhaps rightfully so.
At the same time, when we really think about it, how can any fighter realistically become anything more than the best of his era? It stands to reason that the great Ray Robinson was the best of his era, as was Leonard, Ali, Joe Louis, Roy Jones,JR, Pernell Whittaker, etc. In reality, that may be the most a fighter can ever definitively achieve without undue subjectivity being added to the assessment of his career standings. This and many similar topics to this will hopefully allow us to bond and congregate on establishing unanimously agreeable principles in our sport, or at least to strike up some very interesting conversations on boxing forums abroad. ‘re-evaluating our sport is the first step to reviving it, and this seems like a good starting point….
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