Mickey Walker vs...

[Goodnight, Irene]

At 147...

Wilfred Benitez

Curtis Cokes

Oscar De La Hoya

Jose Napoles

Felix Trinidad

At 160...

Carmen Basilio

Gene Fullmer

Bernard Hopkins

Jake LaMotta

Tony Zale

"The Toy Bulldog," was great. How great? Enough to win these? They're fifteen-rounders...

[SaadOffTheDeck]

I'll tell you one thing, 15 rds and Oscar wouldn't work out well for Goldylocks.

Some tough matchups, I would slightly favor Benitez & napoles at 47.

Basilio & Fullmer are even wars at Middleweight that are too close for me to call. Mickey beats Lamotta & Zale, loses close to Hopkins.

[gambler49]

He beats them all.

[Ambling Alp]

Mickey Walker was a great middleweight. He was not a great welterweight.

At welterweight, he certainly loses to Napoles. He would also lose to Benitez. If the fight goes 15 rounds he pulls it out against Trinidad and DeLa Hoya. Cokes is 50-50.

At middleweight-He beats Basilio and Zale in a 15-round war. Fullmer and LaMotta are 50-50. All would be great fights.
He does enough to beat Hopkins as well.

[Mr E]

He beats them all.

Agree.

IMO, the closest fight is against Napoles @ welterweight, as I think Walker hit his pound-for-pound peak @ 160, but I think the Toy Bulldog manages to win that one too.

[enrique]

He would beat them all. His toughest opponents would be Napoles -who cut easily- and Basilio.

[Ambling Alp]

Mickey Walkerwas a great middleweight and pound for pound one of the ATG's. However, he wasn't nearly as good at welterweight as when he moved up.

At welterweight, he won the title from a way past it Jack Britton. Britton had even won a No-Decision against him a year earlier. He lost the welterweight title to Pete Latzo who was not an impressive welterweight champion.

He never beat anyone at welterweight as good as anyone listed. It's more likely that would have lost to all of these guys than beat them all.

[raylawpc]

Jack Britton was a great fighter. Six months before losing the title to Walker, he defeated the Great Benny Leonard. (Yes, it was a DQ, but I believe Britton was leading on all cards at the time of the foul.) Britton wasn't completely washed up. And losing even a newspaper decision to Jack Britton as an up-and-comer is no disgrace. (I thought these comparisons were "prime v. prime" anyway. . .).

Regarding Latzo, as I recall, Walker said that he was worried about making the weight, and overtrained for that fight. I could be wrong. I'm going by memory. But Walker had defeated Latzo pretty handledly a couple of years before.

[Ambling Alp]

Britton certainly was a great fighter. However, Britton was well past his prime when he fought Walker. He was 37 and had hundreds of fights. (He was lucky to keep his weltwerweight title from Leonard who was a lightweight.)

Ni it's not a disgrace to lopse a newspaper decision to Britton. However, if you are going to say that Walker is going to beat all of these other good/great welterweights, you would think he would not have lost to a 35 year old Britton who was way past his best.
Walker was already an experienced fighter when he beat Britton. He was much closer to his prime than Britton was.

That's Walker's fault if he overtrained for the Latzo fight that he lost. You can almost always come with a weak excuse like that for the loser of a fight.

[raylawpc]

I'm not going to say he's going to beat or not beat any of these guys. I don't do these cross-generational hypotheticals. Too speculative for me.

Regarding Britton, according to the news accounts I've read, Britton was ahead on points when Leonard fouled him. I don't see how he was lucky to keep his title against Leonard when he was ahead on points. I think Britton still had some good fights in him when Mickey beat him.

Regarding Latzo, yeah, excuses are like noses - every boxer has one. But there is some circumstantial evidence to support Walker's assertion. In his next fight, he tried to stay at welterweight and took a whipping from Joe Dundee. But then, when he moved to middleweight, he ran off something like 16-20 straight wins and picked up the middleweight title, before losing a split decision to Tommy Loughran.

So in Mickey's case, the excuse may actually have been a reason.

[Ambling Alp]

What I meant about Britton being lucky was that he got knocked down by Leonard and then for whatever reason Leonard hit him while he was down which is why Leonard was disqualified. He may have been knocked out if Leonard had not hit him while he was down.

I don't think Britton was completely shot when he fought Walker, but he clearly was slipping. He had 3 draws in a row before their first fight. His showings after the 2nd fight with Walker is not impressive at all.

What I am getting at is that I think a lot of people see that Walker won the title over Britton, think its a much bigger win than it actually was and factor that in when they rate Walker so high at welterweight. (I suspect other people know he was a great middleweight and just assume that the was a great welterweight)

I think the winning streak Walker had after went up to middleweight is a strong indication that he was a much better middleweight than welterweight.

[raylawpc]

I think the winning streak Walker had after went up to middleweight is a strong indication that he was a much better middleweight than welterweight.

Or that he had outgrown welterweight. A lot of the guys on that streak were better than Lasko and Dundee.

But I do agree his best weight was middleweight.