Ranking fighters across different eras is a very tricky business. In Part 1 of the new “Top 10 by Decade” series, we explored the heavyweight division with a new scoring experiment designed to try and objectively identify the Top 10 heavyweights from each decade, from the 1930s through the 2000s, while also providing a snapshot of what things look like in the current decade. Here in Part 2, we are going to take the exact same approach and apply it to the cruiserweight division, as we work our way south.
For the heavyweight division, Ring Magazine began doing divisional rankings for the back in 1924, so for the purpose of that video, our journey began in the 1930s – which was the first full decade with a complete data set to work with. The cruiserweight division is much newer, so we don’t have the same historical depth in our analysis. Ring Magazine began doing official publication rankings for the cruiserweight division in 1983, but they inexplicably abandoned the practice in 1987, when they reduced their ranking listings to only include the original 8 weight classes. Ring Magazine resumed doing rankings for the cruiserweight division in 1989. So for the purposes of this experiment, our journey begins in the 1990s. This inherently gives us less to work with, and that will likely be the case moving forward with all of the newer interim weight classes.
The main idea here 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 had the most prolonged success in a given weight class during very specific time intervals. This edition of Rummy’s Corner is the second episode in a series of “Top 10 by Decade” videos that will be released over the course of the coming weeks. Please watch and enjoy this, the second installment in this new series of videos!