Essential The Official Boxing Random Thoughts Thread...All boxing heads ENTER.

Tommy Gibbs

Tommy Gibbs

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patscorpio said:
MW in the latter half of the 90s had a lot of bad MW champions
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nah, they were good, we just never got to see them fight each other because Don King controlled all 3 belts. From 95-2001, Holmes, Holpins, and Joppy were the 3 mw champs. Lonnie Bradley was the WBO champ, but it wasn't a major title back then and the other sanctioning bodies wouldn't allow their belt to be unified with it. Hopkins beat Mercado for the title and was just dominant. Joppy was dominant too until 97 he lost a controversial decision to Green in a fight he dominated. He beat Green in the rematch and got his belt back. Holmes was handed the belt against Taylor(who knocked out Jackson on Tyson/Mcneely undercard). Holmes held the title for a few years until he lost it to Cheriffi and then he got it back from him.

Everyone wanted to see Joppy vs Holmes for unification. The 2nd and 3rd ranked guys in the division from DC that both sparred with each other. They would talk trash at press conferences about what they did to each other in sparring and such. But Don King kept all of the champions from each other because he knew neither could beat Hopkins(he would later beat both). So King held the mw division hostage because he had a plan for Trinidad to move up to 154 and later 160 down the line and he was counting on Hopkins and those guys being older. After 6 years of King holding the division hostage and Trinadad tearing through 154 basically ending the careers of Vargas and David Reid, King finally has a MW tournament for undisputed in 2001. Joppy fought Tito and Hopkins fought Holmes. The winners would face each other in September. Tito surprisingly blasted Joppy and Hopkins shut out Holmes in a boring one sided decision. The fight was scheduled for the week that 9/11 happened and got postponed for 2 weeks. Leading up to the fight, HOpkins threw the Puerto Rican flag to the ground twice. One time he did it in Puerto Rico and they almost killed him in the gym. They had to get him out of there. We all just knew Tito was going to put a hurting on Hopkins because he was considered "old" at the time when he was 36. But we all saw what happened... I was legitimately scared for Hopkins' life that night cuz he is my all time favorite fighter and I had followed him his entire career. So the middlewights weren't bad, it's just that Don King was holding the division hostage to set up Trinidad becoming undisputed years later. There were guys like Quincy Taylor, Lonnie Bradley(who was undefeated WBO champ, but his career was put on hold with retina injury), Antwan Echols, Otis Grant, Andrew Council(who is a very good trainer now), and the future of David Reid moving up in a few years to take over the division after Hopkins would get old(neither of those ever happened).
 
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