barry wrote:This is my last post in this thread as it has pretty much turned into a complete waste of time and I would rather try to focus my energy toward something that may be helped.
As I have said many, many times in the past...looking at a fighters record alone is worthless in trying to evaluate a fighters career and based on the sources that you mentioned using, the only source you could be using is they're records as the other sources you mentioned just simply do not go into any fighters career in any kind of depth, and being that they were what you mentioned then it's highly likely that they were your main sources and relying mainly on record stats and little thumbnail sketch-bio's in some book written forty years after the fighter fought is about the worst way that a person can go about researching a fighter, plain and simple. Like a fighters record alone, you just simply cannot learn anything from empty numbers except what the decision of a bout was, a win, loss, or draw, but you don't know whether it was a bad decision, or a close fight, or a decisive decision...you don't know any of that from records alone all records do is give you the result and that alone is about the weakest method of trying of evaluate a fighter, but for some reason a few people feel like that learn all they need to from records alone, but it's pretty obvious what a person does and doesn't know by weak claims that cannot really be backed up by anything at all.
As I stated earlier, maybe in another thread...every thing of this nature is entirely opinion, but a person can put together a very, very solid opinion based on good factual research and as such they can put forth a real good argument, but when someone just half-asses something with little actual research...it becomes very clear really fast for those that have done really good research
For example...someone doing really good research would put together newspaper fight reports for every single fight that they can find for a fighter and then add to that all the articles that one can find from various publications of the year, or years that the certain fighter fought...and off course films are great, but for older fighters there just is not a great number of films to go by and as such a person should put together as much material as possible!
As for Armstrong...up until around four years ago I had not really done a lot of research on his career. I had mainly just read the repetitive thumbnail sketches in books like the Boxing Register, Nat Fleischer’s Black Dynamite series and others of that nature and up to that point I rated Armstrong high at featherweight, around number 5, but over the past four years I have really dug into newspaper articles and reports as well as films of his fights and all the articles from magazines and other publications of the day that I can find and have put it all together into a giant scrapbook for Armstrong, which is around 400, or 500 pages of newspaper clips and reports from nearly all of his 182 career fights and now I not only rate Armstrong number one at featherweight, but I also rank him number one P4P of all-time…tied with “Sugar” Ray Robinson! Which I came to that conclusion after reading through literally 1000s and 1000s of newspaper and magazine clips and articles!
Does that make me the God of Henry Armstrong knowledge…no, not at all…far from it, but as a result of all the material that I have gone through, saved and put together for Armstrong I can say with confidence that I know more about his career than most!
Now if you want to read something in book form then the best thing you could do is get his autobiography instead of relying on those boxing books that repeat the same thing over and over, but the best thing you can do for Armstrong, or any other fighter for that matter is go to primary source material for research. You might even find it fun to go through all the various newspaper articles…I know it really hit me when I started and now I have scrapbooks for a slew of fighters, such as Armstrong, Sam Langford, Terry McGovern, “Barbados” Joe Walcott, Kid McPartland, Oscar Gardner, Peter Maher, Joe Grim, Bob Satterfield and many others. I also keep information for various other fighters, various era’s and just various other subjects on boxing in those big yellow envelopes, which I do for those that I do not at the moment want to put together a scrapbook for, but it’s a great way to keep material organized for fast reference if needed!
As I have said many times in the past I am not just looking at the fighter's win/loss record. Through the books and Boxrec database I look at every result they have, every result of their opponent's and the results of their opponent's opponents. I take into consideration the stage of their careers when they fought as well.
I also use other books, and film as well.
I agree that newspaper articles covering a fight can be informative. "KO8" or "W10" in a record book certainly doesn't tell the whole story of the fight.
However there are problems with newspaper articles as well.
1.Often you are relying on the opinion of someone that you know little or nothing about.
A. They may have a bias for one fighter, against the other fighter or both.
B. They simply may not be that knowledgeable.
At least with a book you can read about a fight and have several hundreds of pages from the rest of the book to get an idea of the writer's biases and knowledge.
2. The farther you go back the less a reporter has something to compare the fight and the fighters that he is covering.
A reporter covering Jim Corbett in a fight in the 1890's may be awed by his boxing ability write in depth about it. He may not write that if he saw Tunney but of course he hadn't.
A reporter covering a Tunney fight in the 1920's might be impressed by his speed and go on and on about it. If he saw Ali he might not be so impressed,but of course he never saw Ali.
3. You simply can't reserach the newspaper articles of every fight that ever occurred. If you do it for one fighter (say Armstrong), then you will know more about that particular fighter. However, naturally you proabalby will have a bias toward Armstrong when comparing him to another fighter.
General boxing books, biographies, record books, the Boxrec Database, film all have their weaknesses. They all do some good things as well. Like wise researching newspaper articles can be informative but has it's weaknesses as well.
What is most disappointing is your attitude that boils down to I know more than you, so I don't need to answer your point.
Either counter my point or acknowledge that there is some merit to it.
I have asked several times why you have Armstrong #1 on your all time Top 20 featherweight list (even though he didn't beat anyone else on your own list) and Sanchez #9 when your own list indicates that Sanchez should be higher than Armstrong. It doesn't appear that you realized that Sanchez had beaten 3 guys on your own list.
I suspect that you didn't respond to my repeated questioning about this because you realized how illogical your list is.
I have explained why it's not necessary to know the fighting styles of fighter with mediocre records that Armstrong beat and you keep ignoring it. (Of course you don't mention doing that for the other top featherweights and their opponents that had mediocre records. No, once again it's all about Armstrong).
You shouldn't expect me to think Armstrong is better than those I listed above him if you won't even talk about those fighters.
Once again, read the original thread. It's not the Henry Armstrong Story. It's a list ranking the top 50 featherweights of all time. Since you are comparing fighters, you have to think about the other top featherweights as well.
I know that you won't find two people to have the exact same rankings.
One of the reason that I made this list is to see what opinions other people think. Sometimes they have make good points explaining why they think fighter A is better than fighter B, using information form more than one fighter. I wish you would use your knowledge to do the same.
