Trying to rank boxers across different eras is a difficult task, but it can also usually be a lot of fun, and hopefully that has been the case, and will continue to be the case, with these ongoing rankings experiments where we attempt to rank the best boxers from each weight class across different decades. Slowly but surely, we are marching our way towards the Grand Finale Top 100 Boxers under this scoring criteriia.
In Part 1 of the new “Top 10 by Decade” series, we began by exploring the heavyweight division with a formula designed to try and objectively identify the Top 10 heavyweights from each decade. Then we we worked our way south through the different weight classes, and today in Part 15, our attention is turned to the flyweight division.
For the flyweight division, Ring Magazine began doing divisional rankings all the way back in 1924. So for our purposes here, we will begin our analysis with the first full decade containing a complete data set of rankings, which in this case is the 1930s.
The flyweight division is rich with history and tradition, and many immensely talented pugilists have competed as bantamweights over the years, including Midget Wolgast, Miguel Canto, Jackie Paterson, Pascual Perez, Pone Kingpetch, Sot Chitalada, Pongsaklek Wonjongkam, Jung-Koo Chang, Betulio Gonzalez, Yuri Arbachakov, and Chartchai Chionoi, just to name a few
The main idea here with these ranking experiments is to try and eliminate personal bias and individual preferences, while also excluding all head-to-head considerations, both real and hypothetical. It is more a measurement of tracking the boxers who were perceived as having the most prolonged success in a given weight class from specific decades. This edition of Rummy’s Corner is the fifteenth episode in a series of “Top 10 by Decade” videos that will continue to be released over the course of the coming weeks. There are four episodes left in the series after this one: the two remaining weight classes, the grand finale Top 100 Boxers, and a summary episode recapping everything. Please watch and enjoy!