shoutout2u wrote:Axe wrote:
As to Del Valle, Im getting disappointed with you now, shoutout2u. Sure, Griffin was more significant, but Telesco? 40 year old McCallum? No chance.
Teleco was a pretender, Lou was a contender. Telesco lost a trilogy to Ernest "M-16" Mateen ffs!
And McCallum wasnt quite done at 40, but very close.
Lou would rank far ahead of most of Jones' opposition
at 175. He would be ahead of R Johnson as well, because Johnson after all was just a fat middleweight who was past his best days. I would think you would be able to tell the American conteders apart at least! Comon now mate.
you are arguing with the wrong guy on his one, homie!! i wrote for flash/boxing udate magazine from 1993-2005, specifically on prospects, so i saw most of these guys we are talking about
coming up from novices to top 10ers...
i originally said del valle was below reggie johnson & ON PAR with telesco!! since it has been awhile, i re-examined all their respective records (wish my memory was good enuf to prevent me from having to do that...) and am changing my take slightly...NOT ONLY WAS DEL VALLE FAR BELOW REGGIE JOHNSON, but actually slightly below telesco as well!!
COMPARATIVE RECORDS:
1. REGGIE JOHNSON=stayed too long at MW & after losing twice to jorge castro, he jumped directly to LH, where he won IBF title in 2nd fight...HIS ONLY LOSSES AT 175 WERE RJJ & TARVER (by split decision!!)
BIGGEST WINS:
william guthrie (unbeaten 24-0 ibf champ, tko for reggie)
ole klemetsen (33-2 euro champ, easy dec for reggie)
chris johnson (26-1-1 ex-olympian, top 10 LH when lost to reggie)
willie taylor (19-3 altho he was reggie's weakest title challenger, he is better than all but one of lou's victims)
2. DAVID TELESCO=early losses were 2 decisions to ernest mateen, unbeaten hot prospect who was NEVER THE SAME after he had his 22-bout unbeaten streak by KO from ex-champ prince charles williams. in fact telesco TKOd him later on & even then he turned out better than ALL BUT ONE of del valle's victims!
BIGGEST WINS:
frank tate (41-4 two weight world champ--160 & 175, had lost title before telesco beat him but even then much better than smulders)
julian letterlough (17-2-1 future world title challenger at 190 who barely lost title eliminator (fight of year) to julio gonzalez--fight that earned julio shot vs RJJ)
willie taylor (15-2 tough philly fighter who lost to reggie in his eventual world title challenge)
ernest mateen (23-6-1 i'll even add him since he was better than ALL BUT ONE OF DEL VALLE's VICTIMS)
3. LOU DEL VALLE=won wba title from smulders then immediately lost it in unification bout with RJJ...beat only total scrubs after that but did manage to lose & draw with bruno girard in battle for vacant wba
BIGGEST WINS:
eddy smulders (34-1 was euro champ & lost to lou in fight for vacant wba, his only world shot, then career went downhill fast)
DARREN ZENNER!! 
(10-0-2 ...yes, lou's 2ND BIGGEST WIN WAS OVER a fellow unbeaten NOVICE who had drawn with 2 scrubs, but was also an east coast prospect like lou!!
thanks for taking the argument onto my home turf...i scrutinized all these guys from early days on up & i had ACTUALLY FORGOTTEN how shallow del valle's 2nd-rate resume was!! obviously you didnt follow the usa LH scene TOO CLOSELY during the 90s to be making such outrageous claims on behalf of del valle to begin with!!
so i would now actually put del valle SLIGHTLY BELOW the telesco i had him on par with...DONT TAKE MY WORD ON ALL THE ABOVE...check the records for yourself, hopefully next time BEFORE you take the argument into the realm of americans who were prospects from the early 1990s on!!
Bro, you can cut out the bold font next time, it makes for a better read.
Alright, before I get to the great Telesco, allow me to say this.
All youve done is highlited each man's accomplishments, on paper. This has nothing to do with what kind of wins they were for Roy Jones. In Telesco's and Del Valle's cases, they were relatively in their primes (Telesco may have been getting up there a bit, and Del Valle had a bit of a layoff, but for arguments sake they were in close to prime form).
Reggie Johnson had seen far better days. Need I remind you of the Reggie Johnson who
legitimately put a prime James Toney on his ass (something Roy couldnt do), and (in the eyes of many) should have won a decision over him? Yeah, that guy. He wasnt anywhere near ring against Jones. It was an older, slower, and much fatter shadow of that man. Therefore, not a career defining win at 175, sorry.
A win over a fighter like that would be like Chad Dawson right now KOing Fabrice Tiozzo...people would simply say, so what?
True, on paper, he had a far better resume than guys like Telesco and Del Valle, but that matters nothing when he wasnt close to his best, and the others were. (True, he was still a champ, so he wasnt quite shot yet, per se. Now it becomes a subjective issue of "how far past it was he really", which you can't always back up with hard, cold facts. But the facts are that he was both beyond his natural weight class and past his best, so thats where it stands.)
Now, as to the Telesco-Del Valle debate. My eyes hurt even just looking at Telesco's "resume", but Ill try to break things down for you.
Again, youre simply looking at names, without considering their relative forms coming into the fights.
Take Frank Tate for example. He was done when he fought Telesco. His pro debut was in 1984, and he fought Telesco 14 years later, and retired after that fight. Tate had not proved that he had anything left at all, in fact after he lost to Virgil Hill for the second time, he took 16 months off from boxing, and fought exclusively scrubs (well, one decent fighter in Carter, who was also considered a journeyman by then) for the remaining 3 years before meeting Telesco. Thats the sign of a shot fighter, and a man only looking for his last payday.
Now Mateen, he was always a bum. He never even beat a shadow of a nearly half decent fighter in his entire career, and yet beat the 2-0 Telesco in his pro debut and won a trilogy against him. Mateen's only decent
looking win was against Billy Lewis, who was very far from decent, as he never beat anyone in the top 100 of any division, and lost to bums such as the 18-15 Troy Watson on a regular basis. And as you said, by the time Telsco finally won one against Mateen, Mateen was far past his best, having already been repeatedly stopped.
Losing 2/3 to Mateen before he even met Jones showed Telesco's true colours right off the bat; theres no way around that. And even after the loss to Jones, and tuning up, etc, he gets multiple shots, such as against Derrick Harmon, who had just been consecutively brutalized by Michalczewski and Oneil Bell (that'll beat the prime right out of you!), and still comes up short.
Who else did Telesco beat? Letterlough? Decent fighter, but also past it. He was already fluctuating around in weight and was coming directly off a brutal stoppage loss to Jirov. Not a win I would want on my record.
Willie Whoylor? Cmon man. Dido to what I said about Mateen.
Were
ANY of Teleco's wins over guys who were rated in the top ten
when they fought him?
No. Not by a long shot.
Del Valle beat: Eddie Smulders. 34 years old, so not prime anymore, but clearly still a top LHW, beating guys like Christophe Girard (30-1, very good win), Wallyn (23-1-1) etc just before fighting Lou and defending his EBU belt right up until vacating it to fight against Lou for DM's former title. Unlike Tate, who was 34 and in the game for 14 years--and adding to that an extensive amateur background--Smulders was only a pro for 8 years, and was still beating decent fighters up to his fight with Lou.
Now, unlike any of Telesco's victims, Smulders was a
top ten LHW. That right there takes precedence over
anything on Telesco's resume. But you may have msised it, as it occured outside of the USA.
The win over Darren Zenner was good, Zenner actually had 2 more fights than Del Valle and was an unbeaten contender as well. The problem with Zenner of course was that he was only 21 years old and still frequently making supermiddlweight, unlike when he fought Michalczewski at 26 and was a full blown LHW. But still, a decent win.
So who beat the better fighters? Well, neither man really lit up the boxing world, but it was Del Valle, by virtue of his win over Smulders. He beat a top ten guy, Telesco never did, end of story.
Now, basing it all on one win is a little shallow, so we'll go a bit further. Del Valle scored (yes, scored) a draw against another solid guy in Bruno Girard (Christophe's younger bro), a former and future world champion, in Girard's home town. That is yet another accomlishment that
overshadows anything David Telesco ever did. Girard would reign for several defences after "beating" Del Valle in the rematch by a SD (again, in Girard's hometown).
Still not convinced? Consider this: Lou Del Valle was a world champion, Telesco never was.
Thats yet another very clear line seperating Davie boy from Lou.
Lastly, lets see how each fighter fared in defeat, as this also has an effect on boxing rankings.
Telesco wasnt just shut out on all the cards against Jones, he actually lost 120-106 on one of them.
Del Valle lost by margins of 109-118 109-119 109-118. He managed to win a round, and far more importantly, put a prime Roy Jones on his ass. Big difference there.
In defeat, against other fighters: havent seen Telesco's losses to Mateen, but they speak for themselves. Other than that, he drew with 19-9-1 Ray Berry
and got his ears outboxed by Harmon. Now he only lost an SD to Harmon, but if you saw the fight, you'd remember Teddy Atlas' take on the situation; Atlas was about to kick up a storm when they announced Telesco's name on one of the scorecards. That was a UD win for Harmon if Ive ever seen one. Remember, this was a shot Harmon we're talking about here, too...furthermore, Telesco was then stopped by Julio Gonzalez (not a puncher!) and comprehensively outboxed by Eric Harding in Harding's first fight back from a 2 year layoff!
In comparison, Del Valle lost a shady looking SD to Girard in the Frenchman's hometown, and lost a SD to a prime Virgil Hill.
In that fight against Hill, he dropped the champion and made it a very close, almost controversial, affair. Again, this was yet another thing that Telesco was never able to do against a world class fighter anywhere near his best. So Del Valle has the upper hand again, for the fourth time.
Now, I respect the opinions of anyone who was following the sport for as long as you have, but you may have remembered the hype that Telesco received and the (non-existent) hype that Del Valle received, and mistakenly converted this into a measure of their competence. While its occasionally a good guideline, boxing is full of circumstances where hype falls short in the face of substance, and Telesco's status when he fought Jones, as well as his career, is certainly just hype when stacked up against Lou's respective credentials.
Johnson was the IBF Champion in a title unification fight with a “peak” Jones;