De La Hoya: Floyd Mayweather Is Not TBE; I Beat Him

By Boxing News - 09/21/2015 - Comments

de la hoya56By Allan Fox: Former six division world champion Oscar De La Hoya (39-6, 30 KOs) doesn’t believe that Floyd “Money” Mayweather Jr. (49-0, 26 KOs) is “The Best Ever” [TBE] as he likes to say about himself. De La Hoya says there are a lot of better fighters in the past that were superior fighters to Mayweather, who he felt could be TBE.

De La Hoya says he beat Mayweather in their first fight in May 2007. However, Mayweather technically was given the victory by a 12 round split decision by the scores of 116-112, 115-113 for Mayweather, and 115-113 for De La Hoya.

De La Hoya thinks that the following fighters were guys that he could potentially rate as TBE: Sugar Ray Robinson, Muhammad Ali and Julio Cesar Chavez.

“When he [Mayweather] says he’s ‘The Best Ever’ [TBE], it’s not true. It’s just not true,” De La Hoya said about Mayweather to esnewsreporting. “I’m just speaking the facts. For me, the best ever, and for a lot of people, is Sugar Ray Robinson and Muhammad Ali, and Julio Cesar Chavez. There’s tons and tons of fighters out there. My fight with him [Mayweather]. I beat him. I beat him. So you want to say you’re the best ever. I’m going to say that you’re not. A lot of people are saying you’re not. It’s the truth. I’m not bringing him down. Don’t be telling people you’re ‘The Best Ever,’” De La Hoya said.

De La Hoya deserved at least a draw if not a win over Mayweather, because he appeared to win the first six rounds of the contest. Mayweather came back in the second half of the fight to dominate, but De La Hoya still did enough to win possibly one of the last six rounds. For me, De La Hoya deserved a win over Mayweather, but he found himself getting shafted by the scores by two of the judges.

It’s hard to see Mayweather as TBE, because his fights so frequently were less than entertaining to watch. For a fighter to be TBE, you have to ask whether they were exciting fighters and whether they gave the fans their money’s worth. I’m not sure that you can say that about Mayweather. He clearly wasn’t exciting like Sugar Ray Robinson, Ali, Tommy Hearns, Sugar Ray Leaonard, Jack Johnson, Chavez or Dempsey.

You can’t say that Mayweather was exciting as fighters like Julian Jackson, Nigel Benn and Gerald McClellan, and few boxing fans would ever attempt to make the argument that those fighters deserved to be seen as TBE. For a fighter to be ‘The Best Ever,’ they should have been an exciting fighter that entertained the masses.

Mayweather’s defensively focused fighting style made him someone who avoided exchanging with his opponents. And thus it made many of his fights quite boring to watch. Mayweather’s fights against Andre Berto, Manny Pacquiao, Robert Guerrero and Saul “Canelo” Alvarez were typical examples of how dull Mayweather could be when focusing on his defense.

De La Hoya is perhaps right about Mayweather not being TBE. The guys that came before him like Sugar Ray Robinson, Henry Armstrong, Jack Johnson, Chavez, Ali, and Jack Dempsey were all great fighters. When judging who the best fighter is of all-time, it’s an impossible task to get any real consensus on because there are so many different fighters that have fought through the history of the sport, and the boxing fans simply can’t be aware of all of them. Whatever pick that is done by fans would be a subjective one, and not someone that all the fans would rally around in picking as TBE.



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