Post-Andre Ward retirement, Ring Magazine has jumped at the opportunity to place Gennady Golovkin atop their pound-for-pound list, moving him up from their no. 2 slot.
So what?
Bear with me a second as I ease into an important point built around an otherwise unimportant factoid.
First (and perhaps foremost), who the hell cares about Ring Magazine?
So, the nerds at that outdated dinosaur of a publication voted to move around some names on their fantasy world list based on their fantasy world criteria?
“Ironically,” Ring Magazine editor-in-chief Michael Rosenthal wrote in Tuesday’s rankings update announcement, “Golovkin proved his greatness — and removed any doubt that he is worthy of the No. 1 spot — in the only fight of his career he didn’t win, a draw with Canelo Alvarez on Sept. 16 in Las Vegas. The superfight was close but consensus was that Golovkin deserved the decision, which would’ve given him the defining victory he has coveted for so long…Recognition as the best active fighter, one presumes, will ease his disappointment to some degree.”
Oh yeah, I’m sure this really soothes Triple G’s troubled soul and silences all questioning as to who is the best all-around fighter in the sport.
But, again, none of this really matters. Regardless of their super serious, super self-important boxing worldview, the Golden Boy-owned and funded outfit is just what it is— a bunch of self-important posers, like most in the boxing media.
Poke around a bit and you’ll see for yourself that most of what they put out has no more expertise or authority than stuff you’d find on many one-man Wordpress blogs. Their rankings, especially, expose a lack of real acumen and a reliance on personal bias to power editorial decisions.
I mean, geez, it took poor Srisaket Sor Rungvisai TWO victories over media darling Roman “Chocolatito” Gonzalez to even get a token no. 10 placement on this most recent pound-for-pound update. Golovkin, on the other hand, broke the Top 4 in 2015 with his win over Willie Monroe Jr.
So, yeah, we can poke around some more and further prove my point that Ring Magazine, despite the name recognition and big money bossmen, is no better than any lot of random boxing fans-turned-writers who can string a few sentences together and yearn to be part of the sport without actually getting their hands dirty. This is not a knock, specifically, on the guys at Ring Magazine and RingTV, just a knock on the industry as a whole, and these guys are no better than their peers.
And that leads to the main point of this piece.
You are aware that the whole pound-for-pound nonsense is a bunch of crap, anyway, right?
How does any reasonable discussion about the sport's best fighters start by asking you to rate them based on the illogical premise of "what if they were all the same weight?" Some aspects of a boxer's game are very specific to their physical tools. Roman Gonzalez and Guillermo Rigondeaux couldn't really do what they do if they were much larger men; Andre Ward and Sergey Kovalev couldn't do what they do as smaller men. Vasyl Lomachenko as a heavyweight would be the greatest big man of all time; Wladimir Klitschko-- with his mindset and overall approach—would’ve made for one extra shitty lightweight.
The whole "assuming they were the same weight" criteria—which is supposedly the central logic behind assembling a pound-for-pound list-- should immediately let you know that nothing intelligent is going to come from this silliness. Why not assume that each has three fists instead of two or that they're covered in rocks like The Thing from the Fantastic Four? The pound-for-pound debate should set off alarms in the heads of smart fight fans in the same way the Flat Earth conspiracy theorists set off alarms in the heads of anyone with an appreciation of real science.
I've been asked to do pound-for-pound lists in the past and have found myself dragged into debates regarding so-and-so's placement on the imaginary list. I'll do it if you push me (or pay me), but there's always a feeling afterwards of "well, that was a total waste of time."
For the most part, it's harmless fluff. But there's a point where the fixation on fantasyland baloney takes away from thought that should be going into the realities of the sport.
There SHOULD be a real, objective way to rank fighters who are at the top of their profession and playing MVP roles as ambassadors to the game. And there has to be a better way to recognize the best of the best than by putting together popularity lists based on who comfortable middle class boxing nerds deem the most “bad-ass.”
Right now, nobody in the media seems all that interested in putting any energy behind real, objective rankings of any kind. That’s understandable considering who’s at the top of the media food chain and who’s putting up the money to keep them there.
But it sure would be nice to have some objectivity involved in some of this stuff—even if it starts with the silly pound-for-pound stuff. Maybe objectivity becomes a “thing” and it trickles down to divisional rankings, where the concept is much needed.
This is all a pipe dream, of course. But if my “colleagues” can put together fantasy rankings based on fantasy criteria, I can dream of a day when they’re not so full of shit.