What makes someone a genuine candidate for “greatest boxer of all time”?
Is it the quality of opposition? The number of world titles? The range of weight divisions conquered? Or a combination of all that — plus the intangibles they showed in the ring?
Ryan Garcia offered his own thoughts, and his personal pick for the G.O.A.T, during another appearance on Inside The Ring.
The opinion of an active professional can often influence or reinforce public choices. Yet Garcia’s selection didn’t look to the traditional names such as Sugar Ray Robinson or Muhammad Ali. Instead, he chose someone far closer to his own era — a fighter he grew up watching — Floyd Mayweather Jr.
“When you look at it from the eye test, boxing knowledge as a boxer, you gotta go with Floyd [Mayweather]. Floyd has everything: inside, outside, can get rugged, can dig deep.
“He has a long range of what’s in his bag, you know what I mean? It’s hard to read him.”
With a 50-0 (27 KOs) record and 26 world title wins across five weight classes, Mayweather is certainly a compelling pick for the greatest fighter of the 21st century so far. At the turn of the millennium, the American was only two years into his reign as WBC super-featherweight champion before going on to dominate the sport for the next 17 years.
His ringcraft made him almost untouchable at times. José Luis Castillo and Marcos Maidana, in their first attempts to dethrone him, enjoyed pockets of success, but Mayweather had a habit of making even elite fighters look ordinary with his defensive mastery and precision counterpunching.
Next year, Mayweather — who has spent recent years on the exhibition circuit — could lace up the gloves one more time for a full professional comeback in a rematch with Manny Pacquiao, whom he defeated in 2015.
