Why is this mythical prime so important?

[Arka]

You're acting like I'm disagreeing with you.

When judging someones career you need to take into account their whole career as well as their best bits. Note that I'm not saying that you take into account their whole career INSTEAD OF their best bits. But if you're going to take their prime, then you need to look at their fighting out of their prime, and how long their prime lasted and what they did after it and to who. Its not as simple a matter as saying "Prime for Prime, so and so would've won" because that is completely unmeasurable and all it does is stagnate debates. I dont see WHY its a greater measure of someone's career than their results and performances over their entire career. I dont know why 'prime' gets held up as a shining beacon when the overall record gets cast aside. To me the hardest thing about boxing is getting to the top, then when you get there you realise that in actuality the hardest thing about boxing is staying at the top.

Dont look at the concept of 'legacy' then if thats giving you trouble. Look at the concept of 'career', because that doesnt just involve the parts you want it to involve.

The point I'm trying to make is that the notion of "legacy" is just as artificial or natural as the notion of "prime".How can we say that a legacy,which ,superficially being a list of names on a sheet of paper,is more objective than "prime",which may possibly be correlated with physical states,which we simply don't and can't measure,such as speed of reflexes,aerobic fitness,chemical imbalances in the brain etc etc.

I'd say it is difficult to agree upon a definition of the above terms.But from the standard usage,I would think that "prime" and "legacy" are functions of each other.