Open Thread and "Best Chin" Poll

theres a youtube vid of one of his earlier fights that shows him getting rocked all around the ring. i dont think its that good.

im too lazy to look up the vid or fighter but i promise its there.

Was the way you phrased the question an attempt to stop people mentioning Margarito?!!

Bingo.

I thought long and hard about Johnson, Andrade, and Toney. In the end, I too went for Andrade. While Toney’s move up in weight in some ways suggests the best chin of them all, I ultimately felt that Toney is (or was) too well rounded in his defensive arsenal to attribute his resilience specifically to his chin.

It’s the way Andrade incorporates his confidence in his chin as an explicit part of his fighting style that led me to go with Librado.

i think adameks jaw is a bit overrated. hes been in a bunch of wars and come out on top of all but one, but the guys he fought haven’t been huge bangers. he was rocked some by cunningham whos a feather fisted boxer. someone with good pop can knock him silly with his lack of defense. guillermo jones for instance would ko him at crusier imo.

yeah I thought about Kirk too. He’s been clearly rocked and dropped by Allen Conyers, but if the fight goes past the first round, his chin seems to get better. But, it could also be that he has a weak chin and so far he’s made everyone fight off the back foot. Julio landed some bombs, but he also landed a lot of punches on his way to crashing into the ropes behind him.

Okay, maybe I’ll catch hell for his… but Margarito doesn’t even remotely qualify. It IS true that his defense is “suspect”, to put it mildly. In a way, I feel as though he DID have a very good chin, once upon a time, but that certain guys in his camp also noticed that he didn’t have much else. I have looked at many of his fights, particularly since his loss to Santos. Someone has already said it, but if you are loading your gloves and bobming guys with them, it’s almost impossible to rate your chin, because it becomes very difficult to gauge the effectiveness of a man’s punch who has been subjected to your illegal power…. even for one round! The pre-Santos version Margarito didn’t had “stopping power” agains elite fighters… afterwards he KO’ed in the first round guys like Golden Johnson who had gone a long way with punchers like Shane.

In short: Margarito was a cheat. It happened, and it can’t un-happen. Ther is no part of his career that isn’t suspect, anf that includes his chin, which, while it can be reached about the same no matter the condition of the opponent, can also be protected to a large degree by debilitating his opponents with hardened hands. He is out of the sack race.