The Biggest Flaw of 10 All-Time Great Boxers

All-time great boxers have few serious flaws. If they did, they wouldn’t be all-time greats.

No fighter is perfect, but a great fighter can usually hide his imperfections. Most of the time, it takes another great fighter to fully reveal them.

All the fighters on this list are all-time greats and most of them appear on at least some people’s all-time, pound-for-pound top 10.

They were involved in some of the greatest fights of all time, and in many cases exposed each other’s flaws to the world.

Thomas Hearns

I consider Floyd Mayweather Jr. an all-time great fighter and think the level of hate he encounters from many fans is unjustified. But he loses me when he boasts that he is the greatest of all time, and a big part of the reason for that is because I grew up watching Thomas Hearns.

I would rate Hearns the greatest junior middleweight of all time, and at welterweight the only two men who could hope to beat him at his best were both named Sugar Ray.

No fighter that weight in the sport’s history ever punched as hard at the Hitman.

But even though Hearns was a big-time slugger, he was vulnerable to the big punch himself. His inability to weather a late-fight rally by Ray Leonard cost him his first loss in 1981.

He was knocked out by Marvin Hagler in one of the most exciting three-round shootouts in boxing history in 1985 and shocked by a Round 3 TKO against Iran Barkley in 1988.  

Roberto Duran

I’ve included the video above of Roberto Duran getting poleaxed by Thomas Hearns more for dramatic effect than to suggest that it vividly demonstrates Duran’s flaws.

When Hearns stopped Duran by Round 2 TKO in 1984 it was shocking, but in retrospect pretty easy to make sense of. Hearns was simply a terrible matchup for Duran, both in terms of style and size.

They were both 154 pounds at the weigh in for this fight, but it was essentially a battle between a former lightweight and a guy who would end up winning titles all the way up to cruiserweight. And Duran simply didn’t have the style to overcome a 12-inch reach advantage.

Duran’s biggest flaw as a boxer was his commitment to the good life. After the Spartan rigors of training camp, it’s not unusual for professional fighters to indulge in a lot of good food and drink.

But Duran took revelry to a whole different level, and at times it cost him fights. According to George Kimball in Four Kings, after Duran suffered the first loss of his career to Esteban De Jesus, his manager Carlos Eleta told him, “You didn’t lose that fight in the ring. You lost it in training.”    

After Duran defeated Ray Leonard in June of 1980, Leonard negotiated an immediate rematch for the following November. In that time Duran ate and partied his weight all the way up to nearly 200 pounds.

Leonard fought a much more tactically smart fight in the rematch. But Duran had created less than ideal circumstances for himself in a showdown with one of the best boxers of all time.

Marvin Hagler

Marvin Hagler dropped decisions to Willie Monroe and Bobby Watts in 1976, but that was when he was still a developing fighter and the loss to Watts was a robbery.

Over the next 12 years he was untouchable, although he did have a draw against Vito Antuofermo in his first title attempt, which was another robbery.

In his final defeat in 1987 Hagler lost his title to Ray Leonard by split decision. The verdict is still hotly debated to this day, but even people who think Hagler should have won usually concede that he made a tactical error in the first four rounds when he largely abandoned his southpaw stance and attempted to outbox Leonard as an orthodox fighter.

Excessive pride has brought down many great men, and it did it to Marvelous Marvin in this case. Hagler wanted to prove he could beat Leonard at his own game, and on two of the three judges’ cards it put him in a four-round hole he couldn’t climb out of, even as he clearly won the last two-thirds of the fight.

Ray Leonard

Sugar Ray Leonard might be the best pound-for-pound fighter of the past 40 years. He had blazing speed and two-fisted power. He could press the action or fight backing up.

Like many great athletes he attempted to push his career past its natural expiration date and lost his final two fights to Terry Norris and Hector Camacho. These were two very good fighters, but neither would have been able to hang with Leonard in his prime.

At his best, Sugar Ray was nearly unbeatable. He lost his first fight with Roberto Duran due to youthful pride and machismo, which led him to engage Hands of Stone in a slugfest.

He didn’t make the same mistake again. In the rematch he used movement to frustrate Duran, until the Panamanian famously quit during Round 8.

The fighter who gave Leonard more trouble than any other was Tommy Hearns. The Motor City Cobra had the technique and timing to negate Leonard’s speed and exploit defensive holes that Leonard was normally able to protect with his athleticism.

In their first meeting in 1981, Hearns outboxed Leonard for most of the fight. Leonard staged one of the greatest rallies of all time to TKO Hearns in Round 14, but under current 12-round rules, Hearns would have won a unanimous decision.

Their rematch in 1989 was a draw, but that decision was widely criticized and even Leonard admitted Hearns should have won.  

Joe Frazier

Joe Frazier was Muhammad Ali’s greatest rival, and one of the leading lights during the Golden Age of heavyweights in the 1970s. He lost against only two fighters, Ali and George Foreman.

Every fight between Frazier and Ali was a life-or-death struggle, but against Foreman, Frazier was blasted out both times. Frazier’s two fights with Foreman totaled less than seven rounds and he was knocked down by Big George a total of eight times.

Smoking Joe was a notoriously slow starter. He was a short, stocky heavyweight and against elite competition he sometimes had to wait a few rounds and slow his opponent down before he could muscle his way inside and turn the tide.

Against Ali it cost him rounds early. Against a massive puncher like Foreman, it got him pounded down so badly he simply couldn’t recover.

George Foreman

At his very best, George Foreman looked like the most dominant heavyweight to ever climb into the ring. As detailed in the previous slide, he captured the belt in 1973 when he demolished Joe Frazier, knocking him down six times before winning by Round 2 TKO.

He followed that performance by stopping Ken Norton in two, as well. At the time he appeared unbeatable.

But then he went to Zaire and fought Muhammad Ali.

In that fight Ali unveiled his now legendary rope-a-dope strategy. Ali spent much of the fight covering up against the ropes, deflecting or slipping most of Foreman’s big punches and countering sharply to the champ’s face.

But it was Foreman’s lack of mental toughness that ultimately cost him the fight. Ali taunted him relentlessly in clinches, and as Big George began to tire, his confidence began to vanish.

In Round 8 Ali shocked the world by knocking Foreman out.

Muhammad Ali

Muhammad Ali always called himself The Greatest, and it’s hard to argue with him. In my opinion, he’s the best heavyweight who ever lived.

Ali was a decent-sized heavyweight for his era, with the speed of a middleweight. His quickness allowed him to lean back dangerously to avoid punches and then dance out of harm's way.

These were tactics that made boxing purists cringe, but Ali could get away with it. Still, against an aggressive pressure fighter who could intelligently cut off the ring, Ali could be made to appear mortal.

Ali had a habit of keeping his hands low or wide, and a pressure fighter with a good left hook could be absolutely dangerous for him. In his first fight with Henry Cooper, he was all but knocked out cold when the Brit caught up to him with a thundering lead hook.

The lead hook was Joe Frazier’s money punch, so it’s hardly surprising that he was such a punishing opponent for Ali.

The only other fighter Ali truly struggled with before growing old was Ken Norton, an extremely strong and athletic fighter expertly trained by Eddie Futch to cut the ring off on Ali and take away his room to move.

Mike Tyson

Mike Tyson exploded onto the boxing scene like a hand grenade in the 1980s. By 1987 he had unified the heavyweight crown as the youngest heavyweight champion of all time.

His fall from glory was sudden and shocking. In February of 1990 he was knocked out by Buster Douglas in Tokyo, among the most shocking upsets in the history of the sport.

Although Tyson would come back to win a portion of the title later in the decade, he was never again truly viewed as the baddest man on the planet.

He was stopped by both Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield, and with the rematch against Holyfield he famously lost his composure completely and bit his opponent’s ear, twice. He also served a three-year prison sentence during the first half of the 1990s on a rape conviction.

Tyson’s career, which had seemed so promising, was ultimately stunted and diminished by his own self-destructive behavior.

Tyson was a street kid who received almost no parenting of any kind growing up. His rapid climb to glory came about when he fell under the tutelage of the great boxing trainer, Cus D’Amato, who became his surrogate father.

But D’Amato died tragically in 1985, just as Tyson’s career was taking off. Without his steadying hand, Tyson was a time bomb waiting to destroy itself.

Joe Louis

Joe Louis ruled as the heavyweight champion for an astonishing 12 years and made a record 25 title defenses.

Early in his career, in 1936, he was upset by former world champion Max Schmeling. Schmeling had noticed that Louis had a tendency to drop his left hand as he returned his jab. The crafty German was able to counter Louis hard as he did it, hurting him early in the fight and ultimately stopping him in 12.

But Louis learned his lesson from that and knocked Schmeling out in the first round in the rematch.

To the extent that Louis had a flaw as a fighter, it was his vulnerability to a fighter with very good movement. In 1941, he very nearly lost his title to light heavyweight champion Billie Conn, who flummoxed him with movement before getting cocky and idiotically closing into range to get knocked out in Round 13.

Against Joe Walcott in 1947, Louis clearly deserved to lose. Walcott used movement brilliantly and the split-decision in Louis’ favor touched off a storm of outrage, even at a time when Louis was among the country’s favorite sports heroes.

It should be noted, though, that Louis seemed to learn from these fights as he had with his setback against Schmeling. He knocked out both men in rematches.

Sugar Ray Robinson

I said in the introduction that there was no such thing as a perfect fighter, but Sugar Ray Robinson is very close to being the exception to that rule. For the first 12 years of his career he went 128-1-2, capturing the welterweight title and then the middleweight belt.

In 1952 he very nearly won the light heavyweight championship, collapsing in the 105 degree heat against Joey Maxim after Round 13, in a fight where he was far ahead on the cards.

In his 30s, after hundreds of professional rounds, Robinson became something closer to mortal, though he still held the middleweight title most of the time.

During the stretch of dominance that started his career, only one fighter truly challenged his supremacy. That man was the Bronx Bull, Jake LaMotta.

Like Ali, Robinson could only be bothered when an opponent managed to take away his room to move. While Robinson was a supreme matador, LaMotta was an extremely clever bull that sometimes managed to get his horns into Sugar Ray’s body.

LaMotta handed Robinson the first loss of his career and caused him a lot of problems in their other five fights. LaMotta had terrific head movement and an iron jaw when his head movement wasn’t enough to avoid Robinson’s heavy hands.

Still, Robinson ultimately won their series five fights to one. It is probably a stretch to say that LaMotta exposed his flaws.

But he did make the all-time, pound-for-pound king appear human, at a time when nobody else could.