Archie Moore's record
Archie Moore-Top-fifteen all-time fighter. Agreed?
That said, my question: Does anyone else feel that Archie
Moore usually lost when faced with another great fighter?
posted by Mike Ezra @ 7:53 PM
20 comments
20 Comments:
In his prime, Moore couldn't handle Ezzard Charles or Charley Burley. That's like Mickey Walker not being able to beat Harry Greb, or Jake LaMotta and Henry Armstrong finding Ray Robinson a little much for them. You can't penalize them for it. Besides, Archie beat lots of all-timers along the way.
And can't we agree that Moore's losing to Marciano, Patterson, and Ali is a relatively meaningless statistic?
Obviously the heavyweight stuff doesn't count; they were too big and Moore was way past it by then.
But what of the losses to Hogue, Chase, Booker? They were terrific, of course, but it corroborates the thesis.
What great fighters did Moore beat?
Let me separate the Murderers' Row a little bit to begin. Of the great black middleweights and light heavyweights who fought on the West Coast in the 1930's and 1940's, Eddie Booker was the best of the bunch (assuming you don't take Burley to be a West Coast fighter.) Booker was a little too good for Moore at that stage of Archie's development. But Moore got the better of Jack Chase, Bob Satterfield, Ted Lowry, the Cocoa Kid, Oakland Billy Smith, both Hogue brothers, Bert Lytell, Nate Bolden, Curtis Sheppard, and (here we go) Lloyd Marshall and Jimmy Bivins, and Harold Johnson. This doesn't mean that he necessary went undefeated against them, but he had the advantage over every one of them. Times were different back then. Aside from Johnson, none of these guys even fought for a title. That makes calling them all-timers a little tricky, I suppose. But they were great, great fighters. And the last three on that least were inarguably all-timers (as was Booker.)
This raises a recurring question for me: how important are generally recognized great fights in determining how great a fighter was? I think the answer is: not very important. Okay, so Moore is down four times against Durelle in 1958 and comes back to put him down four times and win the fight. Everybody says it's one of the greatest fights of all time, and to watch is to feel better about being human being. And Moore was over 40 at the time, which makes the whole thing more astonishing. On the other hand, Durelle is not an all-time great, and what makes the fight great is in part that he got Moore in trouble in ways that Moore shouldn't have allowed himself to get in trouble. Moore showed greatness by coming back, but that kind of greatness doesn't really elevate him once he's already in elite company, since the thinking is that a better fighter than Durelle would have finished him and a greater fighter than Moore was (at that point in his career, anyway) wouldn't have gotten so beat up by Durelle in the first place. But is that right? Moore's a tremendously distinguished fighter, an all-timer among all-timers, and we can agree that losing to heavies when he did doesn't matter much. But how do we value a great win over a less-than-great opponent?
Carlo, in my opinion, you don't
give much value to a fight like
this except to give Moore credit
for resiliency and resourcefulness.
A guy has to get hit in order
for you to say he has a good chin,
and fighters that dominate every
second of every round for years
a la Roy Jones often turn out
overrated. It's not like we
are asking fighters to be perfect,
and very often it is when fighters
are at less than their best that
they prove their mettle.
Nevertheless, the premise that
Moore should never have been
put into that spot by Durelle
is the key one, in my opinion.
I come to a similar conclusion. The thing that's worth underscoring here is that a fight can be an astonishing event and great drama without being a significant plus-item on a fighter's all-time resume. That's a nuance that often gets lost. The very idea of a Hall of Fame already muddles the distinction, since a great fight makes you famous even if it doesn't necessarily raise your ranking in relation to fellow all-timers. But one thing I think Moore really deserves all-time credit for in this case, one thing that does make the first Durelle fight a plus-item on his resume, is getting up four times at the age of 41 (at least) and putting the guy away. You have to see the fight as a post-peak performance for Moore, and that does give it at least a little more weight.
Maybe what the Durelle fight does is verify some of the things people thought about Moore already. Or, maybe it corrects any mistaken belief that Moore lacked resiliency. But it does not set the standard itself by which to judge Moore.
I think we can all agree that post-prime performances are often where we truly measure a fighter. Things we weren't sure about in their prime become evident post-prime in ways that further validate the prime performances. Example: Ali-Liston I. It became much harder to see Ali-Liston I as a fix/fake once Ali beat Foreman. The post-prime win over Foreman verified the brilliance of the prime win over Liston.
That is, if you believe Ali-Liston I was on the level.
Similarly, post-prime fights can also explode some of the validity of prime fights. Once Roy Jones got KOed by the likes of Tarver and Johnson, it forced many people to reassess Jones's entire body of work.
When you've had twenty hundred twenty plus professional fights, you're going to have an occasional off-night. And when you've been taught to "put on a good show" in order to make money, you're going to get caught cold once in a while. And if you eventually wind up defending your world title past the age of forty-five, you may have a little more trouble with someone who's not an all-time great than you would have a decade earlier. That Moore could come back to win the first Durelle fight seems miraculous to me. To then take Durelle on again and basically destroy him completes the picture.
Lacked resiliency? The motherfucker had over two hundred twenty pro fights, during which time he fought (among others) Ezzard Charles, Charley Burley, Muhammad Ali, Rocky Marciano, Floyd Patterson, Harold Johnson, Joey Maxim, Eddie Booker, Lloyd Marshall, Jimmy Bivins, and the Cocoa Kid. He remained lucid well into his eighties. How much more resilient can a guy be? Christ, I have a slight headache just from writing those names.
Your last point, Charles, raises an interesting question about all-time reputation. Take two guys who, if this were possible, have identical all-time credentials. After retirement one deteriorates rapidly until he's a drooling mess who can't tie his own shoes, and dies early and pathetically. The other remains fit, trim, witty, and energetic to a ripe old age, does well in his post-fight life, and dies in bed in a house he owns, surrounded by adoring grandchildren. Will the second guy be regarded as the greater all-timer? Or, with the usual perversity that attends any calculation of authenticity, will fight people regard the first guy as more sincerely committed to leaving everything he had in the ring? Or can people see past the filter of post-retirement condition? I think it helps Holmes, for instance, that he's got his money and his wits about him, mostly because it tends to reinforce the recognition that he was a great defensive fighter who didn't take unnecessary punches but didn't have the reputation of a runner. It was understood that his jab was the key to his defense as well as his offense. I would imagine that until he got old he threw a lot more punches than most of his opponents. Put that together with the record, the money, and the alertness, plus the boost to his reputation that had to come as time went on and people realized that he fought in a heavyweight golden age that isn't showing any sign of coming back (I still think Lyle, Shavers, or Roy Williams could be unified heavyweight champ these days), and you can see why his all-time stock would tend to go up as he ages.
The question of deterioration is too tough for me. Did Archie Moore retain most of his mental acuity because he was a great defensive fighter and rolled his head with the punches (in much the same way that Duran--another fighter who was seldom caught flush-- retains his senses) or was it because he was a gregarious free-thinker who was largely raised in an orphanage and so had a thirst for knowledge? Did Ray Robinson (whose career mirrored Moore's in many ways) become paranoid and brain addled as the collateral damage of too many tough fights? Or was being an uneducated, brilliant black man who negotiated his own contracts in a hostile business enough to send him looking under radiators for people plotting against him? What if Larry Holmes hadn't been such an assertive guy? What if he'd done everything else the same way but had been completely robbed of his money? Would he be okay today?
Archie Moore was not raised in an orphanage, so I'd say it was his mental acuity because he was a great defensive fighter and rolled his head with the punches as well as having a natural thirst for knowledge, always seeking to better himself.
On Moore VS Durelle:
A lot of you have no idea what went on behind the scenes of the match. From the negoiation, weigh-in, actual match--BOTH of them.
It might be a very good idea to really know what happened before making comments such as "Nevertheless, the premise that
Moore should never have been
put into that spot by Durelle
is the key one, in my opinion" ...but as always...everyone is entitled to their "opinion."
Do you care to enlighten us as to what happened, j'marie, or are you content merely with telling us that we know so little?
J'Marie, I would hope from our comments that it's clear that everyone who posts to The Boxing Standard has nothing but the greatest admiration for your father. If, for any reason, you feel that we've indicated anything to the contrary, I personally apologize. I probably should have been less euphemistic your father's background: when I said that he was "largely raised in an orphanage," I meant that he'd spent time in a reformatory, and was trying to imply that he made good use of his time there. Further, I don't think any of us suggested that we knew any of the behind-the-scenes particulars surrounding either of your father's fights with Yvon Durelle.
A gentlemanly note, Charles, and I agree that anybody who's ever read anything that any of us has written about Archie Moore would have no trouble seeing that he's one of our favorite fighters. I understood that to be the whole point of Mike's bringing him up in the first place. We all agree that Moore's an all-time great, and in fact might be the only guy who ever fought at heavyweight to make our all-time pound-for-pound lists, and we all admire how he carried himself in the ring and out, and we all like a smart fighter (especially when he's also a smart man out of the ring). I took Mike to be using the example of Moore to say that this all-time ranking game is a tricky business in which the record of even the most obvious all-timer can be read in different ways. l And I think Mike's recent post is right in asking for more than taking offense where none was given and hinting darkly at behind the scenes dealings. Like him, I'm happy to learn about the first Moore-Durelle fight. So tell us more.
One other guy who fought at heavyweight makes the list (and even ranks higher up on it than Moore): Ezzard Charles
Sam Langford fought heavyweight also, if you count him as an all-time top-twenty.
Sam Langford fought heavyweight also, if you count him as an all-time top-twenty.
I can't imagine any top twenty (or top ten) all-time list that didn't have Sam Langford in it. I never think of him as a heavyweight, but his record lists him as having weighed as much as two hundred pounds.
Fair enough on Charles and Langford. The former has it over Moore head to head but not in body of work, the latter is one of the few whose body of work measures up. I was being hyperbolic and imprecise when I said he was the only one. Point taken.
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