Ranking fighters across different eras is always a rather tricky business, but it can also be a lot of fun, and hopefully that has been the case with this ongoing rankings experiment where we attempt to rank the best boxers from each weight class across different decades. Today’s division of emphasis is the welterweight division.
In Part 1 of the new “Top 10 by Decade” series, we first explored the heavyweight division with a new scoring experiment designed to try and objectively identify the Top 10 heavyweights from each decade. Then we examined the cruiserweights, the light heavyweights, the super middleweight, the junior middleweights, and today we continue our journey south. Here in Part 7, our attention is this time directed towards the welterweight division.
For the welterweight division, Ring Magazine began doing divisional rankings way back in 1924, so for our purposes here in this scoring experiment, we are going to begin with the first complete decade with a full data set, which is the 1930s. Note that in a future installment we will explore the partial data set we have for the 1920s, but we’re going to skip that in our analysis of the original 8 weight classes for the time being.
The welterweight division has a long rich history, and has been one of the most popular attractions in professional prizefighting, and it has seen a lot of all time great talents compete here. Some of the more highly regarded boxers to have officially competed in the welterweight division include Sugar Ray Robinson, Sugar Ray Leonard, Thomas Hearns, Kid Gavilan, Jose Napoles, Emile Griffith, Felix Trinidad, Pernell Whitaker, Oscar De La Hoya, Floyd Mayweather Jr, and Manny Pacquiao just to name a few.
The main idea here in these ranking experiments is to try and eliminate personal bias and individual preferences, while also excluding all head-to-head considerations, both real and hypothetical. It is more a measurement of tracking the boxers who had the most prolonged success in a given weight class during very specific time intervals. This edition of Rummy’s Corner is the seventh episode in a series of “Top 10 by Decade” videos that will be released over the course of the coming weeks. Please watch and enjoy this, the seventh installment in this new series of videos – the welterweight division!
