snap_the_jab

ruthless yes but that was not mayweather that was Ray Olivera.. .. .lol Exactly... Hatton is a great fighter and I think that he'll push Mayweather, but Hatton's fairly hittable as he comes straight in - just as we saw in the clip above - and a guy as unbelievably fast and accurate as Mayweather is going to exploit that more than anyone else that Hatton has ever faced. I'm predicting that Mayweather will win by a pretty lopsided decision victory, or possibly via a late stoppage due to a cut or something... the only way that I can see Mayweather losing is if he loses his nerve or something and gets rolled over by Hatton's furious assault, but given that he's been through that with Castillo and (in their second fight, at least) managed to adapt and overcome, I think that he'll keep his cool and pick Hatton apart. It'll be a challenge for him, just like the De La Hoya fight, but in the end he'll win again. In my opinion the only person who could beat Mayweather is Manny Pacquiao, or maybe De La Hoya if he threw 50 jabs per round, every round.

If Floyd is able to withstand a whole lot more pressure and alot more punishment then he's used to, then yes, he'll win decisively by outboxing Hatton.

VK should be stripped of the title, and Rahman and the number one contender should fight for it. Then, once VK gets healthy, he should come back as the number one contender and fight the new champion. I believe that VK actually has been hurt all of these times - boxing is a rough sport, and he's getting pretty old (for an athelete, at least). But he can't be the champion if he can't physically defend his title...

he's a good fighter but he hasn't fought any top-10 guys, yet... my guess is that he's probably just too big to be the dominant heavyweight - a medium-sized guy with some speed could probably make him look like Foreman did after Holyfield finished with him.

Yeah - way too early to tell if he'll be a top heavyweight. See how he does as he climbs the ranks and gets tested a bit more.

I voted for Lamon Brewster - James Toney is a vastly superior boxer but he's too old and small to dominate the heavies. If Wladimir had his brother's chin and heart, he'd easily dominate the heavyweight division. The way that that 6'7" guy moves is simply amazing. But you can't be the dominant heavyweight if you fall down every time someone hits you hard...

I'm probably just massively naive, but I don't understand why Hatton and Mayweather wouldn't be DYING to fight each other, because whoever won that fight would be considered the undisputed dominant 140-pounder of the era... don't they both want to try to achieve that status, as opposed to never fighting and always having a giant question mark associated with their carrears?

I think that there is no one his size who can possibly beat him. The guy is unstoppable, at this point, and probably won't loose unless he gets old and hangs around too long.

If you wanna do the boxing workouts to get in shape, then go for it - run, rope, hit the heavy bag and speedbag, spar, etc. - but as for making a carrear out of it I'd say no, unless you've got a ton of natural talent and not alot of other options... I wanted to box when I was a teenager but my parents convinced me not to do it - said that I'd probably never make any money at it and would just get hit in the head a whole lot and get who knows what kind of brain damage... so even though I love boxing and I really wanted to do it, I didn't - just studied hard and got a good job and now I watch other people knock the crap out each other for money.

Imagine how amazing our sport would be if it had just one major league, like the NBA. Then all the best guys would have to fight each other, because there would only be one world title! A dream fight every 6 months or so...

I think that although Vitali will probably win, the outcome is less obvious than alot of people think... 1. VK is gonna come in rusty, after his long layoff 2. Rahman has been on a roll lately, and must realize that this is his last big shot, and so will be on 110 percent 3. Rahman is not as good as VK but he is a solid, world-class fighter with 1 punch ko power. should be a very interesting fight

I've heard people say that boxing should be banned because it's violent and causes brain damage, sometimes severe brain damage, and if we really are civilized people then we shouldn't allow such barbarity to take place. Of course, that's all just a giant steaming pile of donkey crap.

Not a chance. He's an amazing boxer and he stayed potent for much much longer than most other boxers, but he's just too old. That "age is just a number" stuff is nonsense - the body breaks down as you get older, that's just the way it is, and even Larry Holmes' skill can't make up for that at the age of 56, fighting guys in their prime...

Like the other guys were moving in slow motion - the only other footage I've seen of SRR is some hilights from his fights with LaMotta, and those are equally impressive (although he had to work alot harder to win those...)

I say no, blah-blah, who cares, and go bugger yourself to this entire thread because: 1.) In terms of biology, race almost doesn't exist. We are all members of the same species, we all do it with each other and have been doing it with each other since the beginning, which means that genes have always been moving back and forth between Africa, Europe, Asia, et cetera. So even if some genes that resulted in great atheletic performance emerged in one group of people, they would eventually circulate around to all the other populations because PEOPLE LIKE TO HAVE LOTS OF SEX WITH EACH OTHER! 2.) It is almost impossible, unless you have a team of scientists and lots of money, to tell whether a racial pattern in athletics is based on genetics or simply on cultural, historical, or economic factors. For example: blacks are about 10 percent of the U.S. population, but probably represent 90 percent of the NBA, I guess. It is tempting to explain this by saying that blacks are just naturally better at basketball than whites. An easy answer, but reality is more complex than that. If it is the case that young black males see the NBA as one of only two or three ways that they can become wealthy, if half of their role models are NBA basketball players, and if almost all young black men grow up playing basketball, then you're going to end up with a huge pool of young black men trying to get into the NBA. Compare this to young white men who feel that they have a wider range of options as far as ways that they can become successful... the pool of black competitors is larger than the pool of white competitors, and therefore you get more elite black basketball players than elite white ones, without ever bringing genetics into the equation. I'm not saying that this is the only explanation, but I hope I've made my point that it is more complex than just "blacks are naturally better"... 3.) Even if there are some small general differences between the races in terms of athletic ability, it's gonna be totally irrellevant in a couple hundred years because by then we'll all have interbred into one kinda light-brown mix, thanks to all those black dudes dating white women and all those white guys with jungle fever and also the fact that everyone likes asian women and...

People always argue about whether he ducked fighters or whether he's overrated or not, but all you have to do is watch any of his fights from his prime years and then you realize that he's obviously one of the best fighters in the history of boxing. He made James Toney and Bernard Hopkins look like amateurs, so... case closed.

Fuck giving the fighter a mouthpiece, if he deliberately spits the mouthpiece he either fights with no mouth piece or the ref calls the fight after 1 warning. I agree completely - spitting out the mouthpiece is cheating. Corrales got a ton of rest during that last round by spitting out the mouthpiece, twice - I bet that he would have gotten tkoed if he hadn't done that.

I'm always amazed when these guys make tons of money and then blow it... unless Don King just screwed him, in which case I feel sorry for the guy. I think Klitschko - Rahman is gonna be alot more competetive than alot of people on here seem to think - Rahman probably isn't on Klitschko's level but he's still one of the best heavyweights in the world, and can hit hard, and seems motivated lately... AND: VK is gonna come in rusty.

Because Holyfield has an incredible mental toughness and focus, and is cool under pressure, and Tyson doesn't have any of those things.

Peter by tko somewhere in the middle rounds. Although otherwise by far the best heavyweight boxer in the world, WK's achilles heel of bad chin / loosing focus when in trouble is gonna make him loose - Peter will just keep coming forward, continually pressuring WK until he lands something big and knocks the big Ukranian down, and once that happens the tko is inevitable... WK was able to recover against Williamson but Peter is just too strong and aggressive and I think that WK will break once the trouble starts. It's too bad because if WK had his brother's chin and heart he'd easily be the dominant heavyweight star that boxing desperately needs but hasn't had since Lennox Lewis retired.

Will a guy as big as Valuev ever be able to beat the top heavyweights, or is it the case that once you get to that size you're just too slow and cumbersome and are inevitably gonna just be a big target? In football you never see effective players over about 6'6" - maybe in boxing we'll just never see top guys bigger than 6'8"...

It's just over for Jones - his great asset was his speed, which is definitely still there but has decreased enough with age that he just can't fight the way that he used to, and so unless he's gonna adopt a much more orthodox style and drop back down to middleweight I think he's gotta retire for good, now... Doesn't decrease his legacy at all, I don't think - he's still a boxing phenomenon who will be talked about forever. In his prime he would have easily demolished that a-hole Tarver.

If it doesn't happen it will be a fucking tragedy. When I become dictator of the world I'm going to consolidate all of these retarded boxing organizations into one global boxing organization with one world champion and one number one contender for each weight class. Then instead of having fights between the 2 best guys in a weight class once every mf-ing decade, we could have fights like that every few months...

I don't know about a good chin, but he proved (just like in the first fight with Tarver when he was fighting through exhaustion) that he's tough and has heart.

Hmmm... in that case I'd better stop calling Antonio Tarver an a-hole... he is, but he could also beat my ass pretty bad.

Hatton is too easy to hit to have any chance of beating Floyd Mayweather I've only seen Hatton fight twice, once against Kostya Tszyu and now against Luis Collazo. There's so much buzz around this guy due to his toughness, his crazy pressure-fighting style, and his demolition of Tszyu that I've often wondered if he would be someone who could actually defeat that little superman known as Floyd Mayweather. After watching the Collazo fight, however, I think that Hatton has no chance of beating someone who punches as amazingly quickly and accurately as does Floyd Mayweather. Hatton is simply too damn easy to hit, and a puncher like Floyd would take him apart and almost certainly TKO him in the late rounds. Straight in, head-up, hands fairly low - Hatton has a reckless attack-posture, and Floyd would hit him again and again as he came in, making him pay hugely for any damage he did once he finally made it inside. There is no way that Hatton could win against Mayweather unless he does some serious work on these defensive flaws.

I wonder if even Ring magazine would be corrupted, though, if they had that much power... you know that they would be getting bribe offers and other financial lures / pressures from all around the world, constantly, if they had the power to designate champs and rankings. I think that you almost just need a heavyweight champion who has enough popularity combined with enough boxing dominance that he can bully the sanctioning bodies around a bit, forcing them to cooperate in setting up a temporary World Heavyweight Title for him to inhabit, along with rankings that all 4 main bodies agree upon that will determine his challengers; this temporary World Heavyweight Title could be a stepping-stone, perhaps, toward permanent World Titles in each division, and hopefully also to a single world-wide sanctioning body. Imagine if the two best fighters in each weight class were constantly fighting for a single, undisputed world title. Mayweather fights Hatton, Wlad Klitschko fights Rahman... we'd have super-bout after super-bout, and boxing would flourish.

1. James Toney is a dick, we all knew that way before this press conference took place, so we shouldn't be surprised when he acts like one. 2. To the handful of white guys who are starting to gloat just because a bunch of Europeans have risen to the top of the weakest heavyweight division in decades: stop acting like fourth graders. I thought that as hardcore boxing fans we were supposed to be operating on a level where we didn't care about a fighter's race, but instead evaluated him based on his SKILL AS A FIGHTER. Also, consider this: if you lower yourself to the level of racializing everything then you can't credibly call out the black guys (ex. James Toney) when they get a little race-crazy.

God I can't stand James Toney... Fucking amazing fighter though - I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if that loudmouth s.o.b. pulled it off.

I'm 210-220 when i'm lean and mean (right now i'm about 240), 6 foot 2, really big frame, and also very slow - so i'd be one of those smaller heavyweights who gets hammered on by the Lewises and Klitschkos. If I was a boxer, would it be a better idea for me to cut it down to an unnatrually light 199, and fight as a cruiser, given my lack of speed and my "small heavyweight" size? Anyway, on the thread topic - it's interesting how the Klitschkos, for all their massive power and raw atheletic talent, are really not the most durable guys. Wlad goes down these days when you tap him, and Vitali is always tearing muscles... I might be being too hard on Vitali, at least - everyone gets injured, especially at this level of competition. Still, at 33 he doesn't have much time left - better not fuck around, once he's recovered.