Outside of Fury-Klitschko (who was also old), both their resumes are ****. In fact, outside of Loma, Pacquiao, Usyk, the resumes of 99% of the top boxers in the sport are complete ****. That's what the Floyd Mayweather blueprint, and Al Haymon boxing have wrought (whether the HBO days, the Showtime days, or the PBC on Showtime days). Mikey Garcia, Deontay Wilder, Tyson Fury, Anthony Joshua, Artur Beterbiev, Adonis Stevenson, Oleksandr Gvozdyk, all the 168 champions except maybe Callum Smith, middleweight I'm going to skip because I dont want to get into an argument with people that distracts from this most important point when it comes to the future of the sport, and many other at the lower weights as well, all these boxers are either over 30 years old or close to it, already only a year or two at best away from the end of their athletic primes, and yet none have faced a single top opponent who wasn't old or way smaller than them.
That's what the Floyd Mayweather era has wrought. If it keeps up, soon, there will be no proven boxers anymore, just dozens and dozens of undefeated boxers who look good to the eye test vs poor opposition. In fact, that's already kind of started. That's why even in this era, when people said, "GGG looks great, but who has he beaten," it's actually very unfair because who is there to beat? No one fights each other anymore, so no one is proven, and therefore it is very hard to find anyone to beat who is proven.
I mean, in GGG's prime, there were a FEW around his weight class, but they simply chose not to fight him. As big a problem as that is, it pales in comparison to the problem that is developing now, where there are simply no proven opponents left to even duck you in many of the weight classes, let alone fight you. Hopefully promoters realize this soon because this Al Haymon era of boxing has already basically destroyed the true lineages of most divisions going back decades if not a century in some cases, and if it keeps up, the next step will be destroying the idea of proven opponents period because once there is no one proven from the prior era to beat, then prospects coming up will not have anyone to prove themselves against so it will be very hard for them to be proven themselves, which means the next generation after them will have no one to prove themselves against. Once you destroy it in one generation of the sport, it carries on to the next generation. Obviously, the sport had to start sometime from scratch, and whoever was the best at that point, they were considered proven just by default, and that's sort of how it will have to happen again, but it's just not the same as actually proving it vs other prime proven opponents maybe three years older than you, but still in their prime, who had beaten the previous proven elite prime opponent who was three years older than him, but still in both their prime, all the way back to the early days of the sport.
And that is what this era of cherry picking has wrought, the "Floyd Mayweather blueprint" as people call it, always taking easy low paying fights hoping a high paying but easy fight eventually comes along, but never betting on yourself to win fights that would be hard, but that if you won, would propel you to much bigger fights in the future.
it's alllll true