Being Undisputed Champ and holding all 4 titles? Being the Cash Cow/PPV King? Breaking PPV Records? Breaking Boxing records?
What do you think is the greatest/highest accomplishment you can achieve in the Sport of Boxing?
Cleaning out your division(s) against all credible challengers means the most to me. Doing so with a minimum of tuneups, rehydration clauses, and other A-side games also really helps. Just taking on the best competition as often as you can, and beating them all, good night or bad night.
That's why I rate Inoue so highly. He's fought the best available competition his entire career. Fully 50% of his career against champions, most rated top 4. Over 80% title fights. There's no realistic arguments that he's ever ducked anyone, and the biggest fights he didn't make were because other people ducked him. He's the cash cow in those divisions, and he's not using it to cherry pick weak opponents (Canelo/Fury) or get special contractual advantages (Tank Davis). He's using it to get the best possible opponents by paying them career high purses. Tapales only made 40K vs MJ. He likely got 10 times that from Inoue.
Closer to 100x than 10x if anything. Not sure how accurate, but a recent Japanese news report said that the final amount Tapales took home from the fight was close to 3.5 million USD.
By the way there was a facebook post that that showed Tapales donating about 3 tons of rice to his hometown. He didn't post it himself but the community facebook wanted to show their thanks. Good gesture by Tapales, even when considering he basically earned like 250 years worth of average PI annual salary in one fight.
Being Undisputed Champ and holding all 4 titles? Being the Cash Cow/PPV King? Breaking PPV Records? Breaking Boxing records?
What do you think is the greatest/highest accomplishment you can achieve in the Sport of Boxing?
Retiring as undefeated and unified lineal champion without any controversial calls and facing at least ten highly ranked contenders during the process. That has never been done.
Cleaning out your division(s) against all credible challengers means the most to me. Doing so with a minimum of tuneups, rehydration clauses, and other A-side games also really helps. Just taking on the best competition as often as you can, and beating them all, good night or bad night.
That's why I rate Inoue so highly. He's fought the best available competition his entire career. Fully 50% of his career against champions, most rated top 4. Over 80% title fights. There's no realistic arguments that he's ever ducked anyone, and the biggest fights he didn't make were because other people ducked him. He's the cash cow in those divisions, and he's not using it to cherry pick weak opponents (Canelo/Fury) or get special contractual advantages (Tank Davis). He's using it to get the best possible opponents by paying them career high purses. Tapales only made 40K vs MJ. He likely got 10 times that from Inoue.
It depends on what is important to a fighter and the quality of opposition being fought. You can be undisputed but if you fought B-rate opponents to achieve it, undisputed doesn’t mean as much. Jermell Charlo comes to mind.
You can retire undefeated but if you never fight an elite level fighter at their best it’s not that great an accomplishment. Champion in multiple weight classes also doesn’t mean as much if you beat the weakest link from each division.
Just being undisputed isn't an automatic ATG factor, but it is a solid start to build a career with. Breaking boxing records is also an achievement by a boxer, granted varying in levels. Records that stood for years being broken is more impressive than getting sidebar "records" for the sake of putting self in history books. Stuff like undefeated and win-loss ratio is extra gravy for a boxer but not much more because you can easily adjust those numbers if they want to.
Breaking PPV and crazy money is the greatest accomplishment a businessman can strive in boxing, but not an achievement of a boxer. I don't think anyone is willing to claim that Ryan Garcia and his SNS popularity makes him a top tier boxer in this era.