Crease, EVERYONE complained at your choices of opposition in the free for all title weeksCrease wrote:How many times are you going to bring this old chestnut up? You are repeating yourself incessantly here.JDC wrote:I'll take fights against anyone and you defend a title against crap fighters and try and claim some form of superiority.
If you're going to comment on Joe Louiis chosen title defences, then look at ALL OF THEM or don't look at all...
Regarding The Open Weeks... Louis conformed to the rules of the spirit of Open Weeks exactly... To give guys a title shot - guys who had never been given a title shot before... And Joe did that three weeks in a row. It was in the right spirit of things, and now you complain about it?
If you are saying that The Open Weeks are a bad idea in general, I would tend to agree with you, but don't complain about Joe fighting lower ranked fighters in Open Weeks, it's not Joe Louis fault that the Open weeks were there.
Now, alognside the open weeks, Joe defended his titles against tought opposition:
Joe chose to defend his title against Jack Johnson (I assume that you would agree that this is a hard fight?)
Joe chose to defend his title against Peter Jackson (when he could have easily got away with nopt defending it all - like BoxBuzz and Ben K did)
Joe defended his title against Joe Jeanette
Joe chose to defend his title against Gene Tunney (another good fighter)
3 out of 4 of those challengers made it to the super six shortlist, now can you see that Joe was fighting a good calibre of opponent without the open weeks...But they can't claim to have reached the top of their profession can they? When most young boxers start out, their aim is to become a World Champion...JDC wrote:Many fighters in the IBHOF never fought for a World Titl
Max Schmeling never did this and yet you claim his credentials for a top 6 place?
Schmeling has been ranked by organisations since the middle of the season and only got a shot when he became #1 contender (mandatory against Ali). When the titlists are all fighting the easiest possible contenders he had to plug away with the WBU. His only other title fight since week six was to unify all original belt lines against Wills. Before each of these fights he beat Marciano.
That's a 4 week period where he beat the #1 in the sim twice, he lost to the guy who replaced Marciano as his mandatory and was involved in the completion of the Lonsdale unification. All this and he wasn't even ranked in the top 30 by week 12.
He's had a terrific second half of the season as shown by where the sanctioning bodies have him pegged despite recent losses.