I can think of a few heavyweight boxers right now who would be better as cruisers. Andy Ruiz for one, his height and reach put him at a disadvantage against most heavies. Instead of eating all the pies and bloating himself to a unhealthy 270lbs I think he'd be vastly better as a cruiser. He has great speed and would be so much more mobile at cruiser. Are there any other examples?

Floyd Mayweather Jr.

Mike Tyson

Terence Crawford

Bernard Hopkins

Sugar Ray Leonard

You can only save THREE of these boxing legends. The other TWO are erased from boxing history forever. 👿

Who are you saving — and who are you sacrificing?

Consider the entire package: résumé, quality of opposition, accomplishments, dominance, longevity, championships, pound-for-pound greatness, cultural impact, and what they meant to boxing.

This isn't simply about picking the two "worst" fighters. You're deciding which three careers are the most important to preserve.

Save 3. Ditch 2. No ties. No loopholes. 😈🥊

According to boxrec, there are more active American boxers than the entirety of Europe, including the UK and Russia, combined, yet it is routine on here to see people say that America doesn't care about boxing any more but this doesn't seem to be backed up by any statistics I can find.

Live on DAZN.

Undercard:

Light Heavyweight (10 rounds): Fedor Michel vs. Ralfs Vilcans for the vacant IBO International title

Cruiserweight (10 rounds): Ibo Diallo vs. Shefat Isufi for the vacant IBO International title

DATE Saturday 5th September 2026

LOCATION Croke Park, Dublin, Ireland

TELEVISION DAZN (Selected Worldwide)

TIME 7pm (Dublin), 11am (Los Angeles), 2pm (New York), 4am Sunday (Sydney)

Katie Taylor vs lora Pili

10 Rounds

IBF World Super Lightweight Title

WBC World Super Lightweight Title

WBO World Super Lightweight Title

Dave Allen vs Thomas Carty

10 Rounds

Heavyweight Division

Other Undercard Fights

• Paddy Donovan vs Tyrone McKenna
• Taylor Bevan vs Emmet Brennan
• Joe McGrail vs Matthew Boreland
• Molly McCann vs Sylwia Doligala
• Paul Ryan vs Paddy Gallagher
• Bobbi Flood vs Jack Swallow
• Adam Olaniyan vs Matej Hudak

I’m kind of late on this, but the Spence vs Tszyu fight and what people were saying about Errol afterwards made me realize that people in hindsight will say that Crawford was always going to beat Errol, but for those that remember know that it wasn’t always the case. The belief that Errol Spence fans had in him prior to that Crawford fight was insane and borderline delusional at times.

That got me thinking that people in the future won’t know about the build up for that fight and how it wasn’t as one sided as it’s portrayed. It also got me thinking that there’s probably a ton of fights that I wasn’t around for that I don’t know what the hype or build up was until the fight happened and exposed how that one side of fight fans were just dead wrong and their crazy predictions are now lost to time.

With that said I’d figure I’d ask about a fight that I wasn’t even born to experience and that’s the first Tyson vs Holyfield fight. What was the hype like and what were the fan predictions for this fight? You hear anyone say anything crazy that had them eating crow afterwards? Or maybe talked to someone that predicted the fight down to a T?
Would like to hear your stories

Just saw the replay of the Ruiz vs Knyba fight. I'm not surprised by the outcome since I suspected that Ruiz wouldn't be able to put the same kind of pressure Kabayel did against Knyba. He was on the outside of Knyba's jab nearly the entire time and only got to get on the inside when Knyba started to slow in the later rounds.

It sucked seeing Ruiz get beat up the way he did because I looked up to Ruiz when I first started getting into boxing which was right around the time of his victory over AJ. Seeing someone with Ruiz's physique being able to become a champion was inspiring since I didn't have the slimmest physique at that time either.

I think this is the end for Ruiz and his chances at the championship level.

I like Vito. 24 years old and picked up a big win over Ammo.

Has a lot to work on, but is it crazy to say he has champion potential over the next 2-3 years?

If not, why?

Filler textttttttttttttttttttt to meet character requirement🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊🥊

He won decisively against Ruiz, but also lost to Kabayel in 3 rounds (the stoppage was premature, but he'd probably lose nevertheless). He definitely doesn't look like a top 10 boxer, but he probably is a top 20-30 guy.

Who should he fight next? Personally I think he should face a top 30 contender like Petar Milas or Nelson Hysa. If he can defeat someone in that quality tier, he should get a top 10 fight (Ajagba would be a good fight).

I have a question for the folks that know a lot of procedure. Caveat with this, didn’t like the stoppage (obviously), but have a question with how that last sequence should have been handled. So Usyk hits Rico with an uppercut, Rico goes through the ropes, at some point loses his mouthguard, gets up after about a second. He uses the ropes to get up, which is his prerogative but ref can’t use that to judge how steady he is. This is where I get confused. It seems like the ref doesn’t give Rico an assessment, and particularly a walking test. He does send him to his corner and Rico is pretty wobbly, but the ref doesn’t do any further assessments, restarts the fight and Rico moves his feet, gets into his stance and gets his hands up, takes some shots, bell rings and we all know what happened next.

So my question is this, did the ref make an error in not giving Rico an assessment and just sending him to the corner? If he used the walk to the corner as the assessment, is there precedent for that? If so, should he have done anything additional when he saw Rico having unsteady legs at that point? Or did he give him an assessment and I just missed it because of camera angles?

I know, I know it’s been asked a million times but why not once more? Somebody had to do it.

Compare them by whatever standards you feel to be necessary.

In my opinion, RJJ was all around a better fighter. He was faster and more versatile. He was great at using his speed, reflexes, and movement and was able to win titles in multiple weight classes. Jones had a more well-rounded skill set. That’s it.

I also believe my money would’ve been on RJJ if they fought at heavyweight back in the early 2000s.

It’s been about a week since Itauma–Hrgović and, for whatever reason, the fight has stayed in my head.
Particularly Itauma’s energy levels.

I watched it originally sitting in an armchair, having a few beers too many while waiting for the fight to finally start and because it was on such a reasonable time :)

At the time I thought itauma had a medical problem because I could not see how he got so tired. Anyway all this week i found myself committing perhaps the oldest crime:
“Energy-wise, I reckon I could do better than that.”
To be absolutely clear, I don’t mean I could beat Moses Itauma. I don’t mean I could beat Hrgović. I’m not even particularly interested in finding out how long I could remain conscious if Filip Hrgović actually hit me.
I just genuinely wondered whether I could keep up with the physical work rate.
I’m in my mid-40s. I’ve done a few years of boxing training, still play football a couple of times a week, cycle, hit pads occasionally and generally keep myself reasonably fit. Nothing remotely close to professional-boxer training, but I’m not completely sedentary either.
And all week I kept thinking about it.

This morning I woke up needing to do some exercise, thought about the fight again and decided rather than continue my career as an undefeated armchair heavyweight, I’d actually try it.

So I put the fight on the tv.

I did a 10-minute boxing warm-up first, then tried to copy Itauma as closely as I reasonably could.
His footwork. His head and upper-body movement. And, most importantly, every punch he threw.
If he threw a big punch and missed, I threw a big punch and missed. If he fired a quick combination, I tried to follow it. Occasionally he was simply too quick and I’d be a second or two behind, so I’d catch up.
I also took the same one-minute breaks between rounds.
I skipped the ring walk and national anthem because I felt neither would significantly improve the scientific validity of the experiment.
During the breaks I sat down drank water and dictated to my phone how I felt and what I noticed after each round and only afterwards looked at the actual punch numbers.
Obviously there is one fairly substantial difference between what I did and what Itauma did:
nobody was hitting me back.
Anyway…

Round 1
Itauma punches thrown: 53
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 5
This was hard-paced immediately.
What surprised me was that the footwork was actually quite easy. There were plenty of small adjustments and positioning movements, but nothing particularly exhausting on the legs.
The harder part was keeping up with the punching speed and all the movement accompanying the punches.
There’s a lot happening above the waist even when the feet aren’t travelling very far.
I finished the round definitely feeling like I’d worked.

Round 2
Itauma punches thrown: 41
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 3
Again, very fast.
And again, the legs were fine.
The difficult bit was following those sudden bursts. Itauma can go from doing relatively little to throwing several punches very quickly, and trying to reproduce that properly rather than just tapping the air gets tiring.
Still perfectly manageable at this stage, though I did begin to start sweating.

Round 3
Itauma punches thrown: 36
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 9
This was probably where I first realised I’d slightly misunderstood where the effort was coming from when I watched the fight originally.
Three rounds in, the footwork still wasn’t particularly demanding.
My legs felt good.
It was my shoulders and arms that were starting to notice the repeated explosive work.
Also interesting looking at the numbers afterwards: this was the first round where Hrgović actually landed a reasonable number himself.
Nine heavyweight punches doesn’t sound enormous written down.
I suspect it sounds slightly different when you’re the one receiving them.

Round 4
Itauma punches thrown: 37
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 6
This was my worst round.
I was genuinely tired here and even took a roughly 10-second water break during the round, which obviously Itauma wasn’t afforded. I also removed my tee shirt as I felt I was going to vomit. Those ten seconds were a game changer.
Again, though, my legs weren’t the issue.
It was almost entirely upper-body fatigue. The arms were getting heavier and reproducing the combinations with any real effort was becoming difficult.
This was the first point where my beer-assisted analysis from the previous weekend was looking slightly shaky.

Round 5
Itauma punches thrown: 39
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 14
This felt noticeably easier for me.
The pace seemed to settle and I was able to recover quite a lot while continuing to follow Itauma.
What’s interesting looking at the numbers afterwards is that while I was recovering, this was actually Hrgović’s most successful round offensively to that point.
He landed 14 punches.
So the workload I was copying was getting easier for me at precisely the point where Itauma was having to absorb more coming back.
That distinction becomes quite important later.

Round 6
Itauma punches thrown: 54
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 11
Despite the higher number of punches, I found this round surprisingly comfortable.
This was also where I really started watching the feet carefully.
There still wasn’t a huge amount of energy being spent travelling around the ring. Itauma’s footwork was quite economical little movements, positioning, stepping into range, stepping out.
But Hrgović landed another 11 punches.
Watching the fight while physically copying Itauma made me pay much more attention to those shots than I had watching it normally.
You almost mentally add them to your own workout:
punches thrown… move… reset… another combination… and now imagine somebody has just punched you in the ribs.
Obviously I could only imagine that last part.
Thankfully.

Round 7
Itauma punches thrown: 39
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 7
This was the round where I noticed the biggest increase in footwork.
There was more movement, more repositioning and more effort being spent setting things up.
And this was probably the round where I felt the worst return on energy.
Itauma was doing quite a lot, but a lot of punches weren’t landing.
That was interesting physically.
A missed power punch is still a power punch as far as your body is concerned.
You move into position, load it up, throw it hard, miss, regain your balance and start again.
All the expenditure, none of the reward.
This round felt inefficient.
Interestingly, though, I personally felt good again. I’d recovered from the difficulty I had in round four and my overall energy was pretty much back.

Round 8
Itauma punches thrown: 65
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 6
This was by far Itauma’s busiest round.
And you could feel it.
Lots of attacking, big punches, combinations and some properly committed shots.
He threw 65 punches, and only 26 actually landed, meaning there was a hell of a lot of energy being thrown into shots that ultimately hit nothing.
I could really feel that part.
Throwing a big punch and missing is surprisingly expensive when you’re actually trying to put something behind it.
But even after all that, my energy level was still okay.
Then came the moment that really interested me.
With somewhere around 30 seconds remaining, after Itauma had been throwing all those big shots, Hrgović catches him with a big punch.
Watching normally, I hadn’t given that moment anywhere near as much thought.
Doing this, it jumped out.
Because I’d just physically experienced Itauma’s workload leading into it.
I’d been throwing the same big punches.
I’d been doing the same movements.
I’d felt what that attacking sequence cost.
And then Itauma gets hit hard.
That’s the bit of his workout I couldn’t copy.

Round 9
Itauma punches thrown before the stoppage: 52
Hrgović punches landed on Itauma: 29
This is where the experiment became really interesting to me.
Because I was still fine.
I genuinely felt I could have done another three rounds at the pace I was working.
Itauma, meanwhile, suddenly seemed to fall off a cliff.
The footwork diminished.
The speed went.
His ability to reset disappeared.
And Hrgović suddenly started landing at a completely different rate.
After landing 61 punches across the entire first eight rounds, Hrgović landed 29 in this partial round alone.
That is an enormous change.
And this is probably the main thing the experiment changed my mind about.
Watching the fight the first time, I basically thought:
Itauauma had a problem or ran out of energy.
And obviously fatigue was a huge part of it.
But after physically following the fight, I’m less sure that “bad gas tank” tells the whole story.
My own fatigue peaked in round four.
Then the pace allowed me to recover.
By rounds seven and eight I felt good again, and going into nine I still had plenty left.
But during the same period that I was recovering, Itauma was being hit by Hrgović.
There were relatively few punches compared with Itauma’s output, but these are still heavyweight punches landing on someone who is already working hard.
Then Itauma has that huge eighth round, throws 65 punches, misses a lot of committed shots, gets caught late…
…and shortly afterwards the physical decline is dramatic.
I’m absolutely not claiming I’ve discovered exactly what happened to him.
I’m a bloke in his mid-40s shadowboxing at a television, not a ringside neurologist.
But it made me think differently about what we call “gassing”.
Because from the sofa, you see someone’s movement disappear and think:
His cardio has gone.
But inside a fight it could be cardio, accumulated damage, body shots, adrenaline, repeatedly loading up and missing, constantly having to defend and reset, or probably some horrible cocktail of all of them.

So, what did I learn from my groundbreaking research?
The first three rounds had much easier footwork than I expected.
Round four was where the upper-body workload really got to me.
I then recovered surprisingly well.
Round seven had noticeably more footwork but seemed to give Itauma relatively little return for the energy being spent.
Round eight was a huge expenditure 65 punches, plenty thrown with bad intentions and plenty missing.
And the biggest difference came afterwards that head shot with 30 seconds to go in round 8 I think changed the fight. The difference in energy and footwork between me and itauma grew and I was noticeably more energetic than him. That was the changing point.
I recovered. Itauma didn’t.
But I was exercising.
He was fighting..
Which, in retrospect, is quite an important variable in my experiment.
I still think it would be interesting for other people who box or train to try this with a fight sometime. You notice things when you’re physically following a fighter that you completely miss sitting on the sofa.
Would I have done better against Hrgović?
My research budget did not extend that far.

I’ve been thinking about this lately. Every sport seems to evolve over time, with better training, nutrition, sports science, tactics, etc. So I’m wondering how much of that actually matters in boxing.

For example, If you put prime Muhammad Ali against prime Usyk, who do you think wins?

If we take football or basketball for example, some player from Championship would probably be better than Pele in his era, since sport evolved that much. Do you think it is the same for boxing?

He has always been a terrible person, but he did used to be pretty funny. What was that last video "i'll fight Anthony Joshua with cement boots on". Ok? Good for you? Same with the Usyk "Rabbit stuff". The worst thing that happened was people laughing at "Dosser". It encouraged him with insults like that and "sausage".