Ranking the 10 Most Dominant Boxing Performances of the Past Decade

True dominance is hard to achieve in boxing. To mow down fellow prospects and reach contender status takes tremendous natural talent and sustained focus over years.

To reach the top and remain there for fight after fight and year after year is rarer than even serious fans sometimes seem to realize. Even in today's era of carefully selected opponents, when a fighter can collect titles while winning 30 or even 40 straight bouts, it is an historic accomplishment.

This is not a golden age for boxing on the level of the 1940s and '50s or '70s and '80s. But this list of dominant performers from the past decade demonstrates that there is greatness in any era.

Roman Gonzalez

Roman Gonzalez is only 26, so his story is still unfolding. But what he has done in the first eight years of his career has already earned him a spot on this list.

Right now he is angling to go down as the greatest fighter in history below 112 pounds. The Nicaraguan native is 35-0 with 29 knockouts and has held world titles at minimumweight and light flyweight.

The biggest problem he faces at this point in his career is finding a credible opponent. After he has made multiple defenses of the WBA 108-pound title, a move up in weight would seem to make some sense.

But Juan Francisco Estrada is probably the best fighter in the world at 112 pounds, and Gonzalez has already beaten him by wide margins.

Joe Calzaghe

Even though Joe Calzaghe retired as a world champion with a perfect 46-0 record, he comes in with some of the same criticisms that Chris John does. He was a talented champion who spent his career fighting mostly at home and mostly against second-tier competition.

Calzaghe ended his career with back-to-back victories over Bernard Hopkins and Roy Jones. But Jones was far past his prime, and Hopkins was well past 40. After Hopkins and Jones, the biggest names on his resume are Mikkel Kessler and Sakio Bika. 

Still, it's unfair to dismiss Calzaghe's ability to keep winning title fights year after year. There are very few easy fights once you've got a belt or two around your waist, and he wore championship gold for years.   

Sergio Martinez

The most amazing thing about Sergio Martinez is that he didn't start boxing until age 18. But the former soccer star's natural athleticism and instincts made him the most dominant junior middleweight and middleweight of the century so far.

Martinez drew in his third professional fight and lost a bout with Antonio Margarito in 2000 when he was still relatively new to the sport. Since then, the only blemishes on his record have been a draw to Kermit Cintron and a majority-decision loss to Paul Williams, both in 2009.

The Cintron fight shouldn't have been a draw, and Martinez avenged the loss to Williams a year later via one of the most dramatic one-punch knockouts of the last 10 years.

He has been able to combine incredible agility with explosive power and speed to put together a dangerously awkward southpaw style.

I think his best days are behind him, but he'll leave big shoes to fill in the middleweight division when he's gone.   

Nonito Donaire

Nonito Donaire has largely dropped from the attention of boxing fans since losing to Guillermo Rigondeaux in April. I've even seen and heard a few comments from folks trying to claim that "The Filipino Flash" had been overrated all along.

But I don't remember anybody suggesting anything of the kind prior to April. They would have been laughed at.

Donaire entered 2013 ranked anywhere between No. 3 and No. 5 on pretty much every pound-for-pound list in existence. And he had fully earned that reputation, with highlight-reel wins over world-class caliber champions like Vic Darchinyan and Fernando Montiel.

In 2012 alone, he recorded dominant wins over four world champions: Wilfredo Vazquez Jr., Jeffrey Mathebula, Toshiaki Nishioka and Jorge Arce. It is likely that he has beaten more world champions than anybody else in the sport.

Donaire was thoroughly outboxed by Rigondeaux, and I'm not sure he'd do better in a rematch. But that takes nothing away from what he had accomplished going into that fight.

No fighter in this century has more consistently cowed world-class opponents in the ring. His combination of speed and explosive power has intimidated fighters when they saw it up close.

For a fighter who has competed between 112 and 122 pounds, that is quite an accomplishment.

Chris John

Chris John of Indonesia is undefeated in 51 professional fights and has been the WBA featherweight champion for the past decade. No credible list of the most dominant boxing performances of the past decade could omit him. 

Still, he is an enigma to North American fans. The only two recognizable opponents he has beaten are Rocky Juarez, twice in 2009, and Juan Manuel Marquez in 2006. Last November, he knocked off 44-0 Chonlatarn Piriyapinyo. 

I have a difficult time justifying a top-10 pound-for-pound ranking for John at this time. But he's been beating professional fighters by wide margins since last century. So leaving him out would have been myopic. 

Andre Ward

Andre Ward won a gold medal in the 2004 Olympics and made his pro debut the following December. He is undefeated and has been winning professional fights since 2004.

But he really fought his way onto this list during the last four years. 

Since capturing his first super middleweight title in 2009, Ward has cleaned out his division as thoroughly as any champion in this century. He has plowed through a murder's row of Edison Miranda, Mikkel Kessler, Allan Green, Sakio Bika, Arthur Abraham, Carl Froch and Chad Dawson.

And none of his fights have even been close. He's demonstrated himself as so much better than everybody else in his division that his biggest professional problem now is finding somebody worth fighting. 

In the future, he might face potentially interesting opponents in middleweight Gennady Golovkin and light heavyweight Sergey Kovalev. Edwin Rodriguez has begun to develop into a promising talent at 168, but he's nowhere near ready to step to Ward right now.

Ward's stretch of dominance doesn't look like it will be ending anytime soon. 

Vitali Klitschko

Vitali Klitschko has not lost a fight in the past 10 years. In fact, he's only lost a few rounds. Since losing due to cuts against Lennox Lewis in June 2003, the older Klitschko brother has gone 13-0 with nine stoppages.

The Klitschko brothers get disparaged in the United States for the quality of their opposition. But there is no legitimate contender they haven't dispatched. Like Joe Louis, they cast shadows that make their contemporaries appear smaller.

They get criticized for having boring fights. But they have two of the highest knockout ratios in the history of the heavyweight division. 

If Vitali had not retired for over a year from 2005 to 2007, he would probably rate ahead of his younger brother here.  

Wladimir Klitschko

A decade ago, few fans would have predicted that the younger Klitschko brother would end up so high on a list like this one. In March 2003, Wladimir Klitschko went down by Round 2 TKO against Corrie Sanders. In April 2004, he fell to Lamon Brewster by Round 5 TKO.

At that point, a majority of boxing fans in North America wrote him off for good. Ten years later, many of them have yet to admit that they had done so too soon. 

In the past decade, he has compiled one of the most dominant runs in the history of the heavyweight division. Since the start of 2003, he has gone 20-2 with 15 knockouts. 

Since the loss to Brewster over nine years ago, he hasn't even been in a competitive fight. Under the tutelage of Emanuel Steward, he developed into one of the most technically perfect big men in the history of the sport.

He does have chin issues, which would limit my consideration of him on an all-time heavyweight ranking list. But for the past decade, his battering ram jab and sledgehammer right have been far too dominant for anybody to test his chin.

Manny Pacquiao

There are die-hard Manny Pacquiao fans who will try to argue that he deserves consideration in the all-time pound-for-pound top five. I think they are woefully wrong.

But there are also Pacquiao haters who try to portray the Filipino Congressman as nothing special and merely 100 percent hype. I think they are wrong, too, and beyond that, I feel sorry for them.

Because their desire to be haters is making them miss out on one of the most exciting boxing stories of their lifetime.

Pacquiao's performance over the past 10 years has not been perfect, but more often than not, it has been dominant and at times shockingly so. He knocked out future Hall of Famers by the handful and climbed weight classes in unprecedented fashion.

To my eyes, his days as a truly dominant fighter are behind him now. But he will make history at least one last time this fall when he headlines a major boxing card from China against Brandon Rios.  

Floyd Mayweather Jr.

Floyd Mayweather Jr. has had exactly one very close fight in his career in his first clash with Jose Luis Castillo. That fight happened more than a decade ago.

In the past 10 years, nobody has come close to him. The best anybody has done was a split decision by Oscar De La Hoya in 2008.

In the years since, very few writers or fans have come forward to agree with the judge who scored for De La Hoya. Considering how hated Mayweather is, I think that's notable. In my opinion, that was not a close fight.

My biggest criticism of Mayweather's record is that he goofed off in the WWE during 2009 instead of fighting Paul Williams or Antonio Margarito. I would like to have seen him fight Shane Mosley when "Sugar" was about five years younger.

Naturally, I would have liked to have seen him fight Pacquiao in around 2010. 

But, on balance, over the past 10 years, Mayweather has been closer to impeccable than anybody else. He hasn't always been the most exciting fighter in the sport, but when it comes to his performances against the competition, he's been the most dominant fighter of the past decade.