BoxRec

yid14 wrote:

exittored wrote:

yid14 wrote:and Barrerra was better than him.

Ridiculous...

As much as i'm a fan of Barrerra he was KTFO and beaten twice by Junior Jones yet no one would say Jones is better then Barrerra nowadays even though in both fights Jones clearly showed he was in a different class.

Do you think that the schooling of Naz was just a right place right time for Barrerra, I guess it could be seen as a little lucky. By Ray Charles.

carlbcfc wrote:

exittored wrote:

yid14 wrote:I got caught up in the hype, paid to see him a couple of times in England and was giving odds of 3-1 against Barrerra - doh.
I wonder if Naz was still boxing he would have been in the biggest T1T in British boxing thread?

That's not very nice.

You do realise that without Naz this very site wouldn't have been created!

How's that then?

Boxrec.com: Boxing’s Indispensable Website

By Thomas Hauser

The prime mover of the above-referenced adoration is a 44-year-old Englishman named John Sheppard, who was born in London and moved with his family to Doncaster when he was two years old.

Doncaster was once a coal mining town. Sheppard’s grandfather, uncles, father, mother, brother, and sister all worked in the coal industry. In the mid-1990s, John was a computer systems analyst for the National Coal Board. He was also friendly with Riath and Nabeel Hamed (Naseem’s older brothers).

“To be honest,” Sheppard acknowledges, “I didn’t know who Naseem was. But Riath and Nabeel talked me into going with them to see Naseem fight Enrique Angeles [on May 6, 1995]. It was the first time I’d been to a fight, and my reaction to it was that the entire spectacle was barbaric and degrading. I sat there watching people punch each other in the head, wondering why they were doing it. It went on and on interminably for hours. I was sprayed with blood, getting more and more miserable, telling myself, ‘I don’t want to be here.’ And then, during Naseem’s fight, something clicked in my head. The subtlety of what he was doing, the genius of it all, became obvious to me. It wasn’t a disgusting spectacle anymore. It was art, and I found myself cheering.”

In 1999, Hamed broke with promoter allegedly and launched his own promotional company. Sheppard went to work for him and soon became the lynch-pin of Prince Promotions and a related company that was formed to promote fights on Sky-TV with Barry Hearn.

“We had a matchmaker who I didn’t fully trust,” John remembers. “I started a little data base to track all the British boxers for myself as a way of keeping tabs on him. The Internet was taking off at the time. And I asked myself, ‘Why not put the data up on the Internet so everyone can use it?’

In May 2000, Sheppard rented space on a server. “It was a hobby more than anything else,” he explains. “I paid for it out of my own pocket. Then I got an email from someone in America saying that he was a record-collector and wanted to help, so I gave him the password. After that, there were more emails from more collectors. Pretty soon, the people who owned the server complained that I was getting more traffic than the other six hundred sites on the server combined and that my traffic was overwhelming the server and they gave me the hook. So I bought a server and installed it at a data center in Manchester; but a year later, that was overloaded.

Boxrec.com has grown organically and exponentially since then. It’s now the most heavily-trafficked boxing website in the world. On a typical day, it has 50,000 visitors who view 700,000 pages. Forty percent of its traffic comes from the United States and twelve percent from the United Kingdom.

Sheppard has worked on the site fulltime since 2005 (“eight hours on some days; twenty hours on others”). “But it’s hard to describe it as a job,” he says, “because I love what I’m doing.”

wesley05 wrote:Thee most entertaining British boxer EVER period !!!! If not world wide !!!!

mimmy123 wrote:Best thing about Naz was his wife, what was she called?? cant recall her name but was not bad looking. Went to see Naz fight paul Ingle, thought Ingle had the fight until he was stopped. Just another Chris Eubank really.

yid14 wrote:

THE MESSIAH wrote:NAZ WAS A ONE OFF FOR THESE SHORES.

INCREDIBLE IMPACT ON THE SCENE AT THE TIME.

But like David Haye couldn't back it up on the big stage after all the talk. Let's face it looked a mug in the end, and now he looks like an umpa lumpa.

yid14 wrote:

fasteddie wrote:

yid14 wrote: But like David Haye couldn't back it up on the big stage after all the talk. Let's face it looked a mug in the end, and now he looks like an umpa lumpa.

looked a mug in the end? he got beat by barrera thats no shame and then had a 12 round decision win against some spainsh guy then retired. naz backed it up imo he beat every champion at the time in his division now to me thats backing it up
cause whatelse could he of done to back it up, please tell?

He didn't just get beat by Barrerra He got hammered, after all the talk of being the greatest ever, and then your right he beat some spanish guy and then disappeared - Legend. Maybe he should have came back, showed some heart, left a legacy. Maybe he should become a racing car driver.

observer1 wrote:
have you even watched the fight? it was actually a close fight. It's also well documented that Naz was a loss waiting to happen, with so much neglect into training and preparation, its a wonder he didnt lose sooner. Had he actually had half the desire like so many other boxers, many feel Naz would have taken Barrera easily. And this is coming from a Barrera fan.

No wonder british boxing is such a joke, with guys like you

Its precisely because of Boxing fans like you that guys like Naz couldn't be arsed with it in the end.

He played the villain act, got seats filled, and made loads of money. But boxing suffers from a large number of meat-heads in its fan base. They were unable to differentiate between Naseem, and "Prince Naseem the villain".

He just invested his money into property and probably makes more annually that most of the people here do in their lifetime.

yid14 wrote:

THE MESSIAH wrote:NAZ WAS A ONE OFF FOR THESE SHORES.

INCREDIBLE IMPACT ON THE SCENE AT THE TIME.

But like David Haye couldn't back it up on the big stage after all the talk. Let's face it looked a mug in the end, and now he looks like an umpa lumpa.

mkirkhope wrote:

observer1 wrote:
have you even watched the fight? it was actually a close fight. It's also well documented that Naz was a loss waiting to happen, with so much neglect into training and preparation, its a wonder he didnt lose sooner. Had he actually had half the desire like so many other boxers, many feel Naz would have taken Barrera easily. And this is coming from a Barrera fan.

No wonder british boxing is such a joke, with guys like you

Its precisely because of Boxing fans like you that guys like Naz couldn't be arsed with it in the end.

He played the villain act, got seats filled, and made loads of money. But boxing suffers from a large number of meat-heads in its fan base. They were unable to differentiate between Naseem, and "Prince Naseem the villain".

He just invested his money into property and probably makes more annually that most of the people here do in their lifetime.

I don't agree with a lot of this - whilst some comments on here are too down on Hamed this is too far the other way. I don't think he would ever have beaten Barrera "easily" even if he had a perfect camp.

And I never agree when people say "if only so-and-so had more desire, motivation and dedication then they would have been amazing". A) You can never tell for sure they would be amazing if they haven't shown it and B) those qualities are part of being a top sportsman. If you aren't dedicated then you wont be remembered as one of the best. There are examples in every sport of people with outrageous talent that don't have the other mental attributes to make it at the top.

I think overall Hamed is made out to be better than he was. There were loads of other top guys he could have tested himself against outwith Barrera but he didn't. He stuck to the extremely well-matched and promoted career that many British fighters seem to cruise through until they eventually have to face someone elite.

I'd actually fancy a prime Scott Harrison to give a prime Hamed a real run for his money (if not beat him).

crusader wrote:Without the deduction (which occured in Barrera's best round) Hamed lost 8-4, 8-4, 9-3 on the cards. It wasn't a thrashing, but a very clear win, and I definitely don't agree with anyone who says the fight itself was close.

And lol at the comment suggesting that it's "ridiculous" to say that Barrera was better than Hamed. Is that based on Hamed's career best win over Kevin Kelly in which Naz went down 3 times in 4 rounds? Ya, let's only focus on Barrera's losses and ignore his clear win over Hamed and his wins over the legendary Morales and loads of other top fighters. Manny Pacquiao was knocked out and dropped multiple times by fighters who were undeniably worse than Junior Jones, so I guess Hamed was better than Pac as well.