Autobarn wrote:
i'd say domestic boxing was different back then. good business now = pure poop to watch, much of the time.
Your rose-tinted glasses need a wipe & you are once again conflating box-office appeal with world class talent & action, which you do whenever it suits you then turn it around & bemoan the same thing when that particular course of action appeals to you.
Good business? Good business back then was Eubank going on a fecking world tour for eleventy trillion quid fighting guys even the WBO hadn't heard of, on a TV network that helped to marginalise boxing & take it away from the grass-roots level, & Eamon Loughran fighting washed-up lightweights for the WBO bauble on ITV then getting done in a round the first time his brainstrust did their homework wrong.
Good business today is the second-most popular fighter in the country fighting an anonymous Eastern Euro for a paper title. Sounds about the same to me.
what i was getting at, is that how bloody good was it for the 2 biggest names in the country, who happened to be 2 of the best in the world, fighting each other?
It was lovely, but it was a British (maybe I'd give you European, but Kalambay fought out of Italy & would've done both of them) title fight, to decide the best in Britain. To say anything else is at best disingenuous, at worst an outright lie. Again, at the stage of Eubank-Benn 1, how did we know that Eubank & Benn were two of the best in the world?
We did not. With your rose-tinted hindsight you can laud the future courage of Benn based on the Mclellan fight, but at the time, he was a crowd-pleasing local attraction who'd been cleverly (cynically?) guided to a paper title.
Benn had gotten done by Watson at Commonwealth level (& Watson'd gone on to lose to a proper world champion) then come back & beaten two decent contenders in defence of a paper belt which he picked up from a journeyman; both those decent contenders were well below the elite elite best in the world.
Eubank of course had proved he was one "of the best in the world" because he had beaten... Um.... He'd beaten... Kid Milo? The first Eubank-Benn fight made them both superstars (in Blighty) but you are talking utter shite to claim that it had any claim to be the kind of titanic tussle that hyperbole & nostalgia made it as. It caused barely a ripple across the world & was only remarkable because it made a change from the usual insular, "get any old warhorse over here so he can be beat up in front of a home crowd for a tinpot title" attitude that makes following boxing so frustrating & sad today, & which is indeed something I've seen you yourself moan about on these very boards.
i would say the benn and eubank fights were world class fights, as were the eubank and watson (well, the 2nd one was).
yank v yank = world class
brit v brit = domestic class
No, Fighter A who's beaten top opponent vs Fighter B who's beaten top opponents = world class.
Fighter C who has not vs Fighter D who has not = not world class.
Unless you're talking aesthetically & in terms of bravery, because then Chris Saunders vs Kev Lueshing was world class. I think that'd be a stretch even for you. That fight was wonderful, great even; but not world class. How could it be? Eubank-Benn was a world-class tussle, but you talk like they had cleaned out the division & were gunning for undisputed bragging rights, when really it was quite a little dust-up magnified by the glare of clever promotional work (which again when it suits you, you claim to hate, along with tassles on boots) to Earth-shaking proportion. But it wasn't. Sorry.
yank v yank - anonymous event or undercard material
brit v brit - great event, top of bill
steve little v mike nunn - who cares?
eubank v benn - major international event (at least rematch was)
i would call arthur v foster jr a glorified domestic fight. benn v eubank, to me, is leagues above.
& here once again you float away from the discussion into fantasy land, fueled by your own prejudices, five pints & particularly amusing brand of self-justifying logic-defying "reasoning". Where did I say "Yank vs Yank = world class"? Nowhere. You have invented it, invented my opinion, invented an entire conversation which has taken place only in the confines of your own head.
If we're talking about who was top dog at the time of Benn-Eubank 1 -- which is the only thing germane to the discussion -- then Nunn had beaten Kalambay, who'd beaten McCallum & also Herol Graham.
If you're talking of the Nunn-Little fight -- which I did not & you only pulled out of your arse because of your inability to get your head around a simple argument without recourse to going off on a tangent -- my obvious rejoinder would be that it is irrelevant to the discussion at hand, because at the time of the first Benn-Eubank fight Nunn was unbeaten & whacking out Kalambay in what should have been a unification fight; he passed the mantle of being an elite middleweight over to Toney, who solidified his claim to be the bossman around that weight by meeting McCallum twice. By the time Nunn fought Little he was done as an elite-elite fighter, in a different weight division (& probably on the nose candy).
Anything else you need straightening out on? Like which way is up, for instance?
