BoxRec

In the last 25 years Ketchel has gone from being a top 5 Middleweight to being written off as a clumsy swinger.

The Langford fight used to be listed on boxrec as a draw. Now a win for Sam. No shame in losing to Langford.

Is Ketchel's downgrading just a symptom of old boxing writers dying off and a new breed championing their own men?

I have a New York Times clipping that I found online one time that on reading suggests that Langford got the best of the action over the six rounds even though the bout was declared a draw. The fight sounds quite action packed with Ketchel pressing the action but the quality punches coming from Langford who it was reckoned had a 10 pound weight advantage over Stanley. No shame in losing in a six round sprint to a great fighter like Langford. A taster for what would have been a great rematch.

It is now over 100 years since the passing of Stanley and with the limited footage he is slowly being forgotten. The footage of him is not overly impressive in both fights I have seen. Though this may be a case of footage from the "bad day at the office" type of fights. Regarding the Billy Papke fight, I once heard that both fighters were fighting with badly damaged hands from early on. The supposedly fixed Johnson fight makes it hard to judge his skill. To me the knockdown of Johnson looks fake though the KO of Ketchel looks real enough.

Contemporary reports describe a hard hitting whirlwind and when you factor in what he acheived in the ring in such a short lifetime that legacy reverberates down through the ages. Boxing fans are still drawn to his story so there must have been something special there.

I think every generation rates its first set of champs higher than most. I'm certainly aware of my tendency to see Hagler, Leonard, Hearns etc as head and shoulders above most from other eras, and that I'm probably out of balance with that. Having attempted to watch Ketchel vs Papke though, it's not hard to see why someone judging merely on easily available footage wouldn't be impressed; it was an awful fight. I'd like to see the fighter the old-timers describe.

Langford is a p4p top 5 fighter. He has the 1st or 2nd best record in the sport. Ketchel was competitive with him.

ketchell is wrongly downgraded. for the reasons given about ie the Langford bout and the fact that he tussled with other top ring masters and often emerged victorious. i'm sure the other papke fights were not as bad as the one you saw.

this man was extremely tough and had a punch to deck more or less anyone

I'm absolutely not saying he should be judged on that one Papke fight, only that most likely in this age of internet video, he will be. I read about this human windmill, I see some of his results, and I recognise that he must have been great. I also recognise that later generations will have given more credence to their own champs, because that's what people do, see the "Roy Jones was the greatest of all times" movement of today. There is no other, and certainly no better way to judge him than on his record, and on that basis, he must surely be one of the top 5 middleweights of history, and perhaps higher. I just wish there were footage of some of his best performances, rather than a likely fix vs a much bigger man, and a horrible hugfest.