Leo Gamez

[Autobarn]

how good was leo gamez, a world champ at strawweight, jr flyweight, flyweight and super flyweight. also he was beaten in a close fight for a version of a bantamweight title (by johnny bredahl of denmark).

i know he had 2 very tough fights (defeats both, one controversial enough to earn him a rematch) with potential future hall of famer myung woo-yuh.

seen a small amount of footage of gamez, and he looked exceptional.

also, he won and lost a number of title fights away from home - was he a "road warrior" who perhaps should be celebrated above fighters like daniel zaragoza and glen johnson?

gamez had superb boxing skills from what i've seen, and his achievements are considerable. was he ever in the "pound for pound" debates, and does he deserve an eventual place in the hall of fame.

[Datsue]

Dude, this is going to be one of those topics where ninety per cent of the replies are gonna be you, replying to yourself.

Gamez was a road warrior, true, but he wasn't that good. He was just an illustration of the modern era, i.e. what can happen if you're a world class puncher, your opposition isn't generally top-notch & a willing sanctioning body that just so happens to be based in your home country will give you fifty consecutive title shots at any weight you like: you're going to end up winning a significant number of world title fights, even if you only win 50% of them, you'll be a multi-division champion! Whyber fvcking Garcia could be a three-weight champion if his opposition was at the same level as Gamez, as well, it's just he's been unfortunate enough to face some very good fighters in his 217 or so title bouts.

Zaragoza beat guys who were twice as good as those Gamez beat. Not even in the same sentence. He had twice the skills & twice the talent, & twice the results, even lost to guys who were twice as good as those Gamez lost to.

Gamez is a footnote who was never #1 in any of the many many many divisions that the WBA chose to give him a title shot in, & stands more of a testament to the splintering of titles, the general meaninglessness of weight-jumping in the lower divisions & the utter corruption of said sanctioning body than any amount of talent or worth. Losing twice to Myung Woo-Yuh does not a Hall of Fame career make, unless we're talking "Boxing anoraks who like to pick out unfashionable or just decidedly obscure fighters & champion them to prove that they're real boxing fans Hall of Fame". In which case yes, yes he is! All hail Gamez!

There. Do I win £5?

[Autobarn]

here we go. aren't you the guy who said omar narvaez would lose almost certainly to cazares?

nice productive thread - gamez on the same level of whyber garcia. if i'm one extreme (which you';re suggesting) then aren't you the other extreme?

gamez pushed an outstanding, maybe even a great fighter - yuh - very close. maybe even deserved to win one of those fights. did zaragoza ever do that? gamez received many shots, but so did zaragoza with the mexican biased WBC. it's hard to judge gamez's blemishes, as he's been beaten in korea, thailand and japan. i would be interested in information on these fights.

i'm trying to find out about a fighter who sounds interesting, but this post makes it hard to distinguish gamez's strengths/weaknesses, from your own disillusionment with the game, datsue. we know boxing is a wide open wild west that can be exploited by promoters and sanctioning bodies. but fighters still can be excellent in this kind of context and there are still nuggests worth digging out.

[Datsue]

here we go. aren't you the guy who said omar narvaez would lose almost certainly to cazares?

Yes. Yes I am. Aren't you the guy who insists that had he not had to make bantamweight, Hasegawa's jaw wouldn't have been broken by Montiel's left hook?

nice productive thread - gamez on the same level of whyber garcia.

Hyperbole employed to make a point, not a direct comparison. But another Venezuelan who gets his fair share of chances.

if i'm one extreme (which you';re suggesting) then aren't you the other extreme?

Yes.

did zaragoza ever do that?

Daniel Zaragoza 121¾ lbs beat Carlos Zarate 121½ lbs by TKO at 2:54 in round 10 of 12.

Zarate at the end, obviously, but still a better fighter than Yuh ever was. & that is a better result, no?

i'm trying to find out about a fighter who sounds interesting, but this post makes it hard to distinguish gamez's strengths/weaknesses, from your own disillusionment with the game, datsue. we know boxing is a wide open wild west that can be exploited by promoters and sanctioning bodies. but fighters still can be excellent in this kind of context and there are still nuggests worth digging out.

Yes, I'm sure there are. But I've seen a few fights of his, & he never struck me as a guy who was worth watching unless you have some sort of compulsion to watch every WBA titlist ever or are in fact Venezuelan. Also, he got done by Sornpichai Kratingdaenggym a year before the Thai lost near enough every round to Eric Morel. Morel's a tidy enough boxer (when he wasn't being a kinderfucker) but I think that just illustrates my point, unless you want to talk Sornichipai up as some sort of destroyer, he was just a heavy-handed, raw & quite limited slugger who nonetheless put Gamez's lights out.

I rate Gamez as about the same level as, say, Carlos Murillo. I accept that your intentions are honourable, in recognising a fighter who doesn't receive much attention. He is notable for his stick-to-it-iveness, but then again so is superglue & I don't feel a need to make a thread to the glory of that.

I think it best if I avoid your threads & stuff, mate. We've done this before. Our senses of humour tend to negate each other, anyway.

All the best, & apologies for darkening your door.

PS: FWIW, this bloke agrees with you:- http://ringsidereport.com/?p=2775

[Autobarn]

you've sort of given me a thread-killing response when i was looking to open, not close, debate is all. i'm looking for fresh angles, and i'm looking for old(ish) fights that i may have ignored. i've had a lot of fun watching, say, the fights of chang and yuh. most of the arguments regarding chang's greatness are that he beat guys who went on to win titles, some of them fierce rivalries. now, yuh probably didn't beat as many future champs as chang did (chitalada, ohashi 2x, german torres 3x, zapata, etc). but he did beat a guy, gamez, who won belts in 4 seperate weights, and this to me is of interest. in 1993 a media poll apparently voted yuh, not chang, as the greatest korean fighter. from the footage i've seen, yuh was an exceptional fighter. so i wonder how well regarded gamez was in korea and other asian countries, even if he may have been a footnote to western boxing fans (certainly he featured in no PPV megafights). yuh's contemporaries carbajal and gonzalez had their big rivalry, and my point of interest was to see if yuh himself had a "great rival" in gamez. like i say, i'm looking to find out stuff, not hail these guys as super legends (yuh will probably follow chang in the IBHOF but that's down to the media guys who vote).

good point vs sornpichai kratingdaenggym - but it might be worth bringing up that gamez was quite high up in weight by this stage, given that he started off as a strawweight champ. also, gamez, then around 36, had been a world class boxer for about 11 years. road warriors, like zaragoza, like gamez, don't have the promoters, the matchmakers, on their side. sometimes things do go all wrong and obviously zaragoza had some poor nights to go with the more successful ones (loss to thierry jacob, rematch beatings by patterson and banke, etc). it's an interesting point of comparison that both men kept getting the results, against the odds and at an advanced age. obviously zaragoza, a veteran of the fiercely competitive super bantamweight class, faced the overall tougher competition.

for me, it's immaterial whether hasegawa would have beaten montiel if not for the weight making. he'd outgrown 118 and no longer belonged there, making a compelling case for himself at 126 pounds in his very next fight, with that nice win over juan carlos burgos. hasegawa still has some proving to do - it was a very convenient opportunity, that vacant belt - and i'd like to see him beat the WBC title's last owner, elio rojas. i do think a fresher hasegawa, the one who waged war with veeraphol, could have beaten montiel, a very hot-and-cold fighter, yes. but montiel had his big night, deserved it, and i believe hasegawa will have his - at the weight he belongs at, maybe vs someone like chris john.

[Arbachakov]

Gamez was a good fighter at junior Fly in the late 80s, afterwards he became rather ordinary and undersized.

His winning titles at multiple weights is comparable to someone like Duke McKenzie, another decent fighter who was never the best in his weightclass, or really all that close in talent to the best of his generation at the weights he fought at.

[King Carlos]

Daniel Zaragoza 121¾ lbs beat Carlos Zarate 121½ lbs by TKO at 2:54 in round 10 of 12.

Zarate at the end, obviously, but still a better fighter than Yuh ever was. & that is a better result, no?

While I agree with your general sentiments (although not as strongly) I disagree with this. Zarate had been out of the game for almost 7 years, had a few tune-up bouts against no-hopers, and was soundly trounced in 4 rounds by Fenech just a few months earlier. Zarate was no longer even world class at this stage, whereas Yuh was one of the best little men on the planet (regardless of what your personal views are regarding his ability).