Meh. It's overrated. Sit down and properly analyze the heavyweight and cruiserweight divisions in the last 20 years and you'll see a bunch of guys who were basically light heavyweights (or even smaller) who found success: Toney, Adamek, Byrd, Moorer, Tarver, Bellew, Danny Green, Shumenov, Erdei, etc. Most light heavyweights don't bother with cruiser because there's no money there outside of Europe. Has nothing to do with the difficulty involved with fighting the likes of BJ Flores.
Those names you picked out, are over a stretch of about 25 years. Those are exceptions that prove the rule, nothing more. There's a few guys who moved from LH to Cruiser, and some of those did it back when the limit was 190. Not many have done it with any success since.[/quote]
Huck didnt have success argueably beating a top 5 heavy. Cunningham was competive with a top 5 guy being outweight considerably and Adamek
beat a top 10 guy at heavyweight also. These are recent move and like a most said Bellew & Mckenzie and Shumenov have done these moves as well sound like an excuse to make mediocre opponents.
jamesmcdonnell wrote:Adamek was unbelievably durable though, can't think of another light heavyweight since Holyfield/Qawi with the ability to take a punch like that.
There's a lot of really tough guys who passed through cruiserweight recently; Mormeck, Lebedev, Nelson...all guys who could really take a shot and there's little doubt about. Even some of the others like O'Neil Bell are a bit underrated in that department.
I said light heavyweight though, - to be frank though, Adamek was really just a small cruiserweight to begin with.
Nelson was fairly tough, but mainly very hard to nail with a decent shot.
You do get a lot of cruiserweights who are quite short and bull necked, it's why they are not at heavyweights.
Somebody needs to tell Bernard Hopkins he needs to retire,the guy is 51 years old,what top fighter at 175,can he actually beat.He can barely throw a punch,even Kovalev told him retire.
jamesmcdonnell wrote:Adamek was unbelievably durable though, can't think of another light heavyweight since Holyfield/Qawi with the ability to take a punch like that.
There's a lot of really tough guys who passed through cruiserweight recently; Mormeck, Lebedev, Nelson...all guys who could really take a shot and there's little doubt about. Even some of the others like O'Neil Bell are a bit underrated in that department.
I said light heavyweight though, - to be frank though, Adamek was really just a small cruiserweight to begin with.
Nelson was fairly tough, but mainly very hard to nail with a decent shot.
You do get a lot of cruiserweights who are quite short and bull necked, it's why they are not at heavyweights.
We can pick light heavyweights all day too - Glen Johnson and Bernard Hopkins came to mind and they started at Middleweight.
Lemme break this down further - anyone here look at cruiserweight and think "Sergei Kovalev can't compete with these guys"? Huck is fun to watch, but no way in hell he has an easier time with Kovalev than he did with 42 year old Firat Arslan.
Only Sergey can beat himself at this point. He seems like a guy obsessed on improvement. I think we've still yet to see the best Sergey, even though the current version is already the best LHW in the world.
