Originally posted by garfios
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At some point, you have to give credit where credit is due. You cannot, as Andre Ward once said, put an asterisk next to each and every win. This is what is referred to as having “boo birds”.
And I never liked Andre Ward a lot quite frankly because he was not the most entertaining fighter, but he was very good and there was always a vocal minority that would try to discredit him at every turn.
“You beat Kessler because of head butting!”
“You beat Dawson because he was weight-drained!”
“You beat Kovalev because he got robbed!”
“You beat Kovalev in the rematch because the ref stopped it prematurely!”
The same would apply to Canelo. You cannot be placing an asterisk to a bunch of his wins. It has to go both ways.
A lot of posters on here (not naming you specifically) cannot praise one fighter without downplaying another to the most extreme. It’s like that there can’t be an in between. If more people were honest and be willing to compromise, you have a much more balanced assessment of what a fighter’s position in the history/rankings/market is.
Also, you can’t hold it against Canelo for losing to Floyd. Everybody lost to Floyd (and badly I might add with the exception of maybe two or three fighters). Cotto got pieced up. Pacquiao got pieced up. Corrales got pieced up. Gatti, Judah, Baldomir, and Guerrero got pieced up.
There’s a tendency for most people also to constantly move the goalpost in order to discredit a fighter if the guy you’re raving against fights and beats your guy and beats him, you have a little room for **** talking at that point I hope that when the fight gets made if it gets made, I wonder if the same people that were saying he was afraid of Benavidez or that he would lose to him will finally have him credit.
To me, it’s sort of like the Benavidez situation with me about six to eight months ago. For the longest time I thought Benavidez would lose to Demetrious boo-boo Andrade. Lo and behold the fight got made, and I thought Demetrius was going to make Benavidez look absolutely foolish and then boo-boo crashed and burned and Benavidez shut me up.
At this point I had two choices, either flip flop, and say Demetrius wasn’t all that he was cut up to be OR…accept that Benavidez had just beaten a guy that most had pegged as being a puzzle that would give Benavidez fits…me included. I chose the latter. I still think Canelo beats him, but Benavidez proved me wrong and the least I could do is give him credit where credit is due.
Wearing my rose-colored glasses, I would hope optimistically that other boxing fans would follow suit but 85% of the accounts on this site just want want to make their point without the slightest willingness of being able to accept alternate viewpoints or reaching a happy medium (where often the truth lies).
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