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In the age of social media, the acronym GOAT (greatest of all time) gets thrown around a lot. It makes sense. It’s a good feeling to know one might be watching something more than just greatness and it’s just plain fun to tell elders their idols have been replaced.
To paraphrase The Incredibles though, if everyone is a GOAT then no one is. In various sports, there are always new contenders to the standards of their game but there is rarely more than one who genuinely worth debating. Something like Lebron versus Michael or Brady versus Montana is a debate worth having.
Other contemporary GOATs really need not apply.
The idea comes to mind after this scribe was asked for his choice of the top five Mexican boxers of all time by Michael Rosenthal for an upcoming piece at USA Today. Number one was easy.
It’s Julio Cesar Chavez.
There are other candidates. Chavez is the strongest. Along with his place in boxing iconography, Chavez had arguably the most impressive title run in Jr. welterweight history, titles in three classes overall, and relative to his era Chavez toppled at least two dozen top contenders from Jr. lightweight to Jr. welterweight. It’s hard to find the same from any of the rest of his nation’s finest in any other collection of divisions in the last century or so. Volume isn’t everything, and Chavez’s overall win tally can look inflated because there were a lot of stay busy wins along the way, but there was significant quality on Chavez’s ledger.
Beyond Chavez, greats like Vicente Saldivar, Ruben Olivares, Salvador Sanchez, Baby Arizmendi, Carlos Zarate and others all have their place in the pantheon of Mexican greats. This Saturday in Texas, four-division titlist and former lineal middleweight king Saul Alvarez (55-1-2, 37 KO) will attempt to add the third of four major alphabet straps to his collection in the super middleweight division. Already the WBC and WBA champion, Alvarez faces WBO titlist Billy Joe Saunders (30-0, 14 KO) on DAZN in what should be a packed Texas stadium.
Win and ‘undisputed’ is one IBF titlist Caleb Plant (21-0, 12 KO) away.
Now 30 years old and a professional since 2005, Alvarez may be fighting the best he ever has. It hasn’t all been roses. Alvarez has had some close calls, a little controversy, a failed PED test, and one lopsided loss to boxing’s best of the 21st century so far. His successes and accomplishments outweigh the negatives.
It’s fair to already refer to Alvarez as a lock for the Hall of Fame so there isn’t really much debate about whether his career has been great. It has.
Still, when asked to name one corner’s choice for the greatest Mexico has ever produced, gut instinct said Alvarez isn’t quite there yet.
It’s important to keep in mind that sometimes gut instinct can really be indigestion.
Boxing isn’t like other sports. The proliferation of belts has made hopping around the scale less impressive. Before Thomas Hearns, no fighter had ever won belts in four weight classes. After Hearns, almost two dozen have done it and the number is growing.
Boxing doesn’t have the sort of concrete statistical benchmarks team sports do. Some time next year, Tom Brady will own just about every significant statistical record left for quarterbacks. Someday, a baseball player will break Barry Bonds home run record.
If there is a place we can compare, it’s in looking at how tough a schedule a boxer keeps relative to their era versus another. It’s a place where Alvarez is performing well.
Using the rankings of the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board and Ring Magazine as a rough gauge, since entering top ten discussions at Jr. middleweight around mid-2010, Alvarez is 12-1-1 against fighters rated in the top ten of their division when he faced them. It includes wins over Austin Trout, Erislandy Lara, Miguel Cotto, Gennady Golovkin, Daniel Jacobs, Sergey Kovalev, and Callum Smith when they were rated by those two bodies as high as champion and no lower than second in their division from Jr. middleweight to light heavyweight.
Trout, Lara, and Golovkin were all wins that received varying levels of debate. Close fights happen against excellent fighters. The narrow breaks matter.
Comparing the number of contenders defeated by Chavez using Ring’s old monthly ratings, Alvarez still lags well behind. The same can’t be said for many others. Olivares and Arizmendi capped out shy of twenty and still sit ahead of Alvarez in terms of sheer numbers of what could be called quality wins. It’s harder to track the early years at strawweight but Ricardo Lopez dominated his primary class like few others and added a couple more at Jr. flyweight. Saldivar beat around a dozen. Zarate didn’t go that deep, nor did a Sanchez whose career was cut tragically short just shy of that number.
How tough Alvarez’s field of competition is compared to any of them is debatable. For Alvarez, it’s a worthy debate. Athletes can only accomplish relative to their time and compete against the names regarded as the best then. The argument here is Alvarez belongs in the discussion and will even if Alvarez’s career takes a dramatic turn this weekend.
We might not be watching a GOAT, but in Alvarez we’re watching greatness of the sort that is carving a lasting place in a conversation with real teeth.
It’s not too early to say so.
Cliff Rold is the Managing Editor of BoxingScene, a founding member of the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board, a member of the International Boxing Research Organization, and a member of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be reached at [email protected]