BoxRec

The phrase is used so casually, but it's pretty inaccurate. Arguably to be true it would have to include consideration of all the ancient boxers which no one does. Most people seem to rank about as far back as 1890, the likes Sullivan and Peter Jackson being fairly commonly included or excluded, Callis ranked Mitchell but most don't, so the criteria seems to be gloved boxing. But then what about Jem Mace? I don't think there is much of a case that he wouldn't have been good at boxing with gloves, hell even when beyond ancient at 58 he still could briefly hold his own against Charlie Mitchell, and he taught a load of the best early gloved fighters, but I never see him included. I've seen people argue bareknuckle is a different sport, but it's just wrong, yes it is if you compare it to modern boxing, but actually looking at fight accounts of early gloved and late bareknuckle, the manuels (especially later ones), as well as the counter example of Jem Mace, and that they'd been training with some form of gloves since Broughton, there's fairly clear continuity.

When I was doing a middleweight tournament I decided to throw in a few bareknucklw fighters, the earliest being Mendoza, to make it a bit more "all time", though even that is a well into modern boxing.

Bare knuckle is a different sport... Not as different as Boxing and MMA, but it's vastly different from Queensberry.

Then you have the problem of lack of interest... Nobody has even heard of most of the bare knuckle fighters... They're very obscure and nobody has seen them fight... You'd be making up their performance out of whole cloth... Queensberry has a deep enough history to where there's a vast number of fighters you can watch in action on YouTube.