Boxing’s Top 100 - The Greatest Champions of All Time

By Bill Gray

           Finally boxers can be ranked based on objective, factual evidence, not mere opinions. Gray has identified 29 quantitative measures of career success, going far beyond the usual standards of wins, losses and knockouts. See who really is the greatest, who has been underrated, and who has been overrated. Consider the evidence for yourself.

Foreword by John Benson  

Bill Gray is a bit too modest about what he has accomplished in this book. Stated briefly, he has established a whole new paradigm for thinking clearly about great boxers and how to rank them. The old method can no longer be taken seriously by anyone who has delved into Bill’s new way of thinking.

The old method was simple and entertaining. If you wanted to write a book about the hundred greatest boxers, you would sit down with a piece of paper, start listing names, and just keep going until you got to a hundred. A really hard worker might compile a list of 150 or even 200 and then pare it down. And anyone who wanted to be taken really seriously would find a way to include boxers from all eras from the recent to the distant past, and to include boxers from all weight classes and from diverse nationalities.

The old method of ranking was to arrange and rearrange the names repeatedly, until the list looked about right. It was an art of presentation, not unlike any effort to put a collection on display. The end result depended on purely subjective thinking: if it looked good, it must be good. Satisfaction depended on the aesthetics.

The old method brought in evidence only as an afterthought. Beginning with the end result, and then searching for evidence to support it, such thinking inevitably became confused and internally inconsistent. The same author might counsel us to consider “greatness” based solely on the peak moment in each boxer’s career, then in the next sentence say that long-term durability is a mark of greatness, and then just a page or two later tell us that Sugar Ray Robinson was the greatest of all time largely because of his unique capacity to come back and win a title even in his twilight years. What happened to that clarity of focus on the theoretical peak in a boxer’s career? Evidence killed it. In all of the vast body of evidence concerning greatness in the sport of boxing, most of the relevant facts concern some question other than the peak moment. Such is the nature of history. We care very much how a person came into their prime, how long they stayed there and what they accomplished, and whether they then aged gracefully or disastrously. 

Most of the practitioners of the old method have been humble enough to admit that their subjective analysis is little more than a sincere effort to find clarity amid chaos. Their writings have been witty, informative by being well seasoned with facts to fit each case, and superficially coherent enough to make good reading. Much of their writing has necessarily addressed their shared experience of concluding, over and over again, that the basic stats of wins, losses, draws, and knockouts never quite tell us what we most want to know. The overall atmosphere among the traditionalists has been one of collegial frustration.

The old practitioners have naturally tended to support one another. Books about the greatest boxers have presented the same names over and over again. The usual boxers have been included in every book because they are famous, and they are famous because they have been included in every book. At the same time, once a boxer was excluded from the dominant popular thinking about greatness, his relegation to oblivion necessarily became permanent. He couldn’t be reconsidered for the label of “great” because he wasn’t included in any of the books about great boxers. Such ongoing circular thinking has had the ironic effect of adding credibility to each successive presentation. Nothing new or different can be considered or discovered because the whole method has been implicitly (and perhaps unwittingly) organized around the principle of avoiding anything new or different. While the old method served tradition faithfully, it failed to do much in the service of truth.

Enter, Bill Gray. Forget about starting with a list of one hundred or even two hundred names. Bill started with seven hundred. And he didn’t come up with those 700 names just by thinking longer and harder than anyone before him. He started with the simple, factual, objective question: Who has won a boxing championship in the ring? That first question yielded the 700 names.

Setting aside any urge to do rankings before assembling evidence, Bill began by collecting all of the available, factual, objective evidence concerning these 700 candidates for greatness. For each one he collected precise measurements of career success in 29 categories. Bill thus accumulated over 20,000 counts and measures. He organized this mass of information by carefully constructing a 29-point profile of the “average champion” using the median performances from his 29 categories. And then he methodically compared each of the 700 champions to this median or average champion. By definition, half of all champions have been above average, and half of all champions have been below average. And the top one hundred are, by definition, way above average.

When Bill tells you who the top hundred greatest boxers are, he is reporting the cold, mathematical results of his analytical, insightful, factual examination. Bill can tell you, precisely and objectively, why one boxer ranks higher or lower than another. And that is exactly what he does in this book.

This new methodology is the inverse of the old way of thinking. The new method starts with the evidence and then lets the chips fall where they may. The old method started with the answers and then went in search of evidence. The new method starts with the factual evidence and then moves slowly and carefully to the answers.

Although the two methods have opposite starting points, they don’t always yield wholly different answers. For example, when Bill added up the results of his dispassionate study, the number one boxer of all time turned out to be Sugar Ray Robinson. Guess who is number one in almost all of the traditional, opinion-based rankings. Right. Sugar Ray Robinson. The main point isn’t that the old method is always wrong. The main point is that the old method isn’t rational or objective, and therefore it might be wrong about one boxer or several boxers. And if it is wrong, it will continue to be wrong again and again. When the old method is right, as in the case of Sugar Ray Robinson, the old method agrees with Bill Gray’s method.

Being rational and objective, Bill’s method is also internally consistent. His clarity of vision is perhaps most helpful when he engages the question of career length versus career peak. Bill avoids the common pitfall of becoming too enamored with the notion of a boxer’s peak, although his method certainly recognizes and rewards performances that track at the highest level. Bill knows that a peak can last from one night to several years, and an extended peak is better than a brief peak. At the same time he does not give points for mere longevity.

To add to his measure of “greatness” through durability, a boxer must continue to perform better than the average champion. A longer career can help or hurt a boxer’s “career quality” – or CQ, as Bill calls his summary measure for each boxer. If a fighter can continue to perform better than the average champion, staying in the ring longer will add to his measures of greatness. If the boxer has slipped below the level of the average champion, however, continued fighting takes away from his career quality. This method rewards boxers who know when to quit. Through this method and in his narrative accounts, Bill laments the ill-advised continuations of careers than only tarnish the word “champion,” even as “ex-champion.” Bill deserves credit for never losing sight of the humanity of every boxer. In an age when sports analysts can too easily objectify the people about whom they write, Bill frequently reminds us that a boxer is a person, not a thing.

So, who is the greatest? Consider the evidence. See for yourself. Bill Gray’s method does not quite put an end to all arguments. You may feel that one of his measures deserves more weight than another, or that the concept of an “average champion” can somehow be improved upon. But, from now on, when you argue you will be using the language and thinking that appears in these pages. The paradigm has shifted.         

Boxing's Top 100 - The Greatest Champions of all Time is available at Barnes and Noble, and online at: http://www.johnbenson.com/library.html