PATREON: Who are Australia's greatest boxers?

This article was requested by our patron Nadim El-Haddad, who asked one of our writers to take a look at the Bleacher Report list of the greatest Australian boxers and provide our own. His reasoning: this list looked a bit off.

Our historian agreed, but before he can provide his own list, he has to ask the question:

What makes an Aussie boxer?

There is so much more to nationality than ‘where were you born’? But when it comes to boxing, who do we decide who flies the flag for Australia?

Australian boxing fans are a passionate bunch, and will gladly trade blows with anyone who criticises not just their own but their adopted Australians. Two of the most notable of these transplanted Aussies are Kostya Tszyu and Vic Darchinyan, who in this writers mind are bona fide top ten fighters in their respective divisions (Tszyu being one of the all-time great 140lbers and Darchinyan staking a claim as a truly great super flyweight in the midst of traversing over a stones worth of weight classes).

But are they Australian? Dual citizenship aside, do these fighters really tick the boxes?

What boxes, you may ask?

Take Lennox Lewis as an example: Born in England, moved to Canada as a youngster, represented the North in the Olympics, and then moved back to England to start his pro career. He flew the flag for Great Britain, despite his bizarre accent, and can truly be considered a British fighter.

Take this the other way, and take it back to Australia: Barry Michael was born in England, moved to Australia while still in single digits, fought for domestic honours and spoke with an Australian accent. He would be considered an Australian boxer.

Vic Darchinyan represented Armenia at the Olympics in Sydney, and stayed down under to start his pro career. In my eyes, he doesn’t quite make the cut when I’m considering the greats of Australian boxing.

Kostya Tszyu was one of many talented Russian and Soviet fighters to make the move overseas to start a pro career after the fall of the union. He is considered an Australian fighter by many, and adored by fans in the Southern Hemisphere.

Yet fellow members of the same storied amateur boxing team including Vyacheslav Yanovskiy, Orzubek Nazarov and Yuri Arbachakov moved to Japan to start their pro careers. Yet, they are not considered Japanese fighters, even though Arbachakov looked so Japanese the Tokyo faithful nicknamed him ‘Yuri Ebihara’ for his physical and stylistic likeness to their all-time great flyweight Hiroyuki Ebihara.

Is it that Australia is so starved of all-time great talent they’ll take anything?

My hunch would be no, but rather they were happy to see such excellent fighters call their home, their home. Which is admirable. But for the purposes of this list, I’m going to give a run-down of the true Australian all-time greats.

So why not a top ten? My prejudice is not limited to Australians, but to all thin rosters. I can’t for the life of me just bestow greatness upon anyone for the sake of making up the numbers, so I choose not to make a top ten list of the greatest straw-weights of all time. I combine the 105lbers and 108lbers instead.

Likewise with cruiserweight, which—due to its widely fluctuating weight limit over the years—is a difficult beast. Instead, anyone great enough at cruiserweight tried their luck at heavyweight as well. So I combine cruiser and heavyweight legacies into one list, and lo and behold, there aren’t any career cruiserweights breaking into the top twenty at heavyweight.

I don’t give out participation medals.

So could I have included Tszyu and Darchinyan to make up the numbers? I certainly could have, but chose not to.

For my money, these are the absolute locks for all-time great status that came from down under.

The Six Greatest Australian Fighters of all time

Jeff Fenech
The ‘Marrickville Mauler’ is far and away my choice for the greatest Australian boxer of all time. Consider this: from 1984 to 1991 Fenech went 25-0, winning titles from bantamweight to featherweight, and was heinously robbed of a title at super featherweight (in the infamous ‘draw’ against fellow great Azumah Nelson) that would have made him a four-weight undefeated world champ. A skilled boxer when he needed to be (usually when his brittle hands gave way) Fenech is mostly known for his educated pressure style, throwing punches in bunches with no regard for what was coming back at him.
With excellent wins over the likes of Kronk representative Steve McCrory (who won the gold medal at the ‘84 L.A Olympics when Jeff went out early in the tournament), legendary super bantamweight warmonger Daniel Zaragoza, dangerous puncher Victor Callejas, Mexican iron man Marcos Villasana, and one of the most all-round skilled fighters of all time in Samart Payakaroon, plus a host of impressive secondary wins (including 25-0 Jerome Coffee and tough nut former world title challenger Mario Martinez) Jeff Fenech passes the eye test both on film and on paper. And as for titles, his record speaks for itself.
If you only watch one fight: Watch Fenech get off the deck to batter defensive genius Payakaroon…actually, I have to cheat on this one, you could also watch his featherweight clash with Villasana, which is one of my favourite fights of all time.
2. Lionel Rose
Lionel Rose ranked tenth in our countdown of the all-time great bantamweights. That is all that needs to be said: to be ranked so highly in one of the deepest divisions of all time speaks volumes. Check that piece out for a detailed breakdown of Rose’s career.
If you only watch one fight: Make it his stunning victory over Fighting Harada. Sure, the Chucho Castillo fight is the better two-way clash, but watching a young Rose widely outbox one of the most potent offensive forces in boxing history is an unbridled joy.
3. Young Griffo
What to say about Young Griffo? Born Albert Griffith in Millers Point in 1869, there is no footage of the man, but judging by other footage from the era it is likely we would wince at his stylings.
But there can be no doubt that for his day, Griffo was a wonder: a defensive expert who goaded some of the greatest fighters of his day to try and hit him, but had more struggles with the bottle.
Look at the names on his resume: Joe Gans, Young Peter Jackson, Frank Erne, Kid Lavigne, George Dixon, Ike Weir, ‘Torpedo’ Billy Murphy, some of these multiple times and with many more standouts of the era having struggled to land a glove on the ‘Australian Will O’ The Wisp’.
His alcoholism is as noted by boxing historians as his immense defensive talent (think a prototypical Nicolino Locche) and a Philadelphia Inquirer article following his 15-round draw with Joe Gans perfectly encapsulates the pluses and minuses of Griffo as a figher:
“He simply smothered Gans by his cleverness, and in two of the rounds had the colored boy on the edge of Queer street, but on both those interesting occasions his own manifestly lack of condition made it impossible for him to follow up his advantage.”
So Griffo was a nightmare to fight and a nightmare to assess to modern historians. 118-11-68 (33 KOs) with more fights that will surely be discovered in time, Griffo’s standing as an all-time great featherweight should not be dismissed, but never won the lineal title. Instead, it is his apparent mastery of the world’s best lightweight Jack McAuliffe, who retired undefeated but was almost certainly beneficiary of a dodgy draw against Young Griffo, that demonstrates Griffo’s elite talent.
Only his sometimes odd showings, out-of-ring discipline and the difficulty of getting a tight grasp on just how great he was sees him just outside the top two. But third? Not to be sniffed at.
If you only watch one fight: This historian has never come across footage of Griffo, so for now I highly recommend you sign up to a service such as Newspapers or NewspaperArchive dot com and peruse the countless excellent primary sources they have in their databases to research Griffo.
4. Les Darcy
Another Australian who never won the legit title in his day, but whose legend lives on due in part to partisan fans and some cheerleaders amongst boxing historians, the talented Les Darcy can be seen as an Aussie Salvador Sanchez: accomplished but still in his prime when he died much too young.
That 21-year old Les Darcy had already beaten world class fighters before his untimely death shows how good he was. In one of the middleweight division’s greatest eras, Darcy beat fighters as good as George Chip, Jeff Smith, Eddie McGoorty and Jimmy Clabby. Like Mickey Walker and Harry Greb—his great peers—he fought men of any poundage that was willing to get into the ring with him, winning the Australian heavyweight title and being recognised down under as the world middleweight champion.
His claim to be world champ is tenuous at best, and patently false at worst. But there can be no doubt that Les Darcy beat some legitimate world class talent in a great era in one of boxing’s deepest ever divisions.
Darcy’s inability to convincingly beat the arguably great middleweight Jeff Smith (loss by DQ in the first fight when he refused to fight on, win by DQ in the rematch on a dubious foul) and his death on tour in the U.S before he could get the big fight he sought out, means he falls short of top ten all-time great middleweight status. A fight with Harry Greb was rumoured when Darcy toured the United States, but reports show Greb was ready to fight but Darcy stalled him out. This is not an indictment of Darcy, but shows why talk of him being one of the very greatest middleweights of all time is much too rich for this historian’s blood.
But top twenty? Top twenty five? In a division as deep as middleweight, this sees Darcy good for his spot here.
If you only watch one fight: There is actually some good footage of Darcy, but watching him fight George Chip—an excellent middleweight in his own right—gives you a chance to watch two leading fighters in arguably the greatest ever middleweight era.
5. Johnny Famechon
‘Fammo’ was a skilled out-fighter who won a title in one of the division’s greatest ever eras.
Born in France and moving over to Australia as a youngster, to see ‘Fammo’ and to hear him, he was an Aussie through and through. All semblance of a suave Parisian must have been beaten out of him in sparring sessions and fights on the Australian domestic scene, but his greatness was proved against true international class: Dropped multiple times and luckily escaping with his title against the legendary Fighting Harada, Famechon battered Harada in their return, emphatically stopping the Japanese pound-for-pound star and picking up the biggest win of his career.
He had tough fights with other excellent fighters, but their skill pops on film and their paper records speak for themselves: the peerless Vicente Saldivar is second in this writers list of great featherweights, and Cuban master Jose Legra would be in contention for a place in the top fifteen. That Famechon went tit-for-tat with these two, and defended a title against a true all-time great, means he is firmly in Australian all-time great circles. Future bantam champ Arnold Taylor is another sweet win on his resume, and Famechon’s skillset is evident on film.
If you only watch one fight: Make it Famechon’s first fight with Harada. Sure, the ‘win’ he picked up is a joke to anyone with a working set of eyes, but it remains a back-and-forth fight in which Famechon demonstrates just why he was the perfect blend of grit and skill.
6. Jimmy Carruthers
If ‘Young Griffo’ wasted his prime by hitting the bottle as much as his opponents, little Jimmy Carruthers’ prime was snatched from him by a tapeworm.
An aggressive but skilled southpaw, Carruthers (pictured at the top of this article against Aboriginal boxing legend Elley Bennett) famously competed in the first—and thankfully only—barefoot world title fight against teak tough Thailander Chamroen Songkitrat, retaining his title over 15 rounds in the former Muay Thai fighters homeland and with his preferred choice of footwear (being, none).
Carruthers would have to relinquish his title due to ill health, and that’s the only reason he isn’t higher: the likes of Raul Macias and Robert Cohen would follow him as the bantamweight title became fractured until Eder Jofre came to unify the division again. With a few of the excellent little battlers that followed him on his ring record, it’s likely that Carruthers would have pushed Lionel Rose close for the title of Australia’s greatest bantamweight. He would have ended up higher on this list, but the excellent South African Vic Toweel (beaten twice, including by devastating first round knockout) former title challenger Luis Castillo, and a tough win over domestic rival Bobby Sinn, mean Carruthers proved himself enough to be considered a truly great Australian fighter. Him being the first legitimate world champ from his country is important too, as well as his first retirement seeing him carry out a very impressive pro record of 19-0 with 11 knockouts and Commonwealth and world titles (three defences). His return seven years later and middling record of 2-4 after his first ‘retirement’ should not even be considered when assessing his worth.
If you only watch one fight: It has to be Carruther’s stunning destruction of Vic Toweel
Missing Out
The likes of Dave Sands, Jeff Harding, Barry Michael, Michael Katsidis, Tony (and Anthony) Mundine all made a name for themselves on the world scene with varying success, and I count myself a real fan of a few of them. But are they all-time greats? Even in their respective divisions, I would argue not. Is Michael Katsidis one of the greatest all-action fighters of all time? Undoubtedly, but that is not what this piece is looking at. Fred Henneberry, Ron Richards and Jack Carroll all mixed it with world class opposition, but I didn’t think about including them here either.
Bob Fitzsimmons would be number one if I considered him Australian, but born in England, spending time in Australia and New Zealand and generally labelled a ‘Cornishman’ throughout his fighting career, Fitz is one of those that just doesn’t fit in any box! If you’re Australian and consider him one of your own, feel free to slot him in the top spot. Same goes for Peter Jackson, who could easily make this a top eight of Australia’s best if we were to include him and ‘Ruby Robert’.
Do the Australians even need to claim Tszyu and Darchinyan as their own? The answer is clearly no, as Aussie boxers have done their countrymen proud, with a variety of superb stylists and legitimately great operators.
Jeff Fenech remains the pick of the bunch for me, but I highly recommend you watch (and read up on!) these men. And I thank our patron Nadim for an interesting topic for us to look at.
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