The only thing that annoys me more than having to do a men’s top 10 pound-for-pound list on a semi-regular basis is having to then do a women’s top 10 pound-for-pound list on a semi-regular basis.
It is annoying enough to be tasked with ranking the unrankable, but this task becomes doubly annoying when the boxers being ranked struggle for competition in their respective weight classes. That, for now, remains the case in the ever-evolving women’s game, which makes the idea of extracting these admittedly brilliant women from their weight classes for the purpose of comparing them in a mythical pound-for-pound list seem somewhat absurd.
That said, it is content – and content is king.
“Content”, by the way, is maybe the only word that annoys me more than “pound-for-pound”, but it’s fair to say the two belong together. As do Claressa Shields and Katie Taylor for that matter. They are the consensus two best female fighters in the game today and, regardless of how the rest of the list shakes out, it is usually Shields and Taylor you see topping most pound-for-pound lists involving women.
For good reason, too. Between them, they have a total of 42 professional wins, Shields and Taylor. They also have a combined three Olympic gold medals (Shields with two, Taylor with one) and seven World Championship gold medals (Taylor with five, Shields with two) from their amateur days. As pros, they have even more titles to their name. Shields has won numerous in the following weight classes: super welterweight, middleweight, super middleweight, light heavyweight and heavyweight. Taylor, meanwhile, has been a world champion at both lightweight and light welterweight.
Together, they have won the lot; done it all. Yet which of the two, if pushed, should we consider to be the pound-for-pound number one?
At a glance, Taylor, 25-1 (6 KOs), would appear to boast the standout wins: Amanda Serrano three times, Chantelle Cameron, Delfine Persoon, Natasha Jonas, and Jessica McCaskill. However, there is just as strong an argument to be made that Shields ruling over five weight classes as opposed to two means significantly more. Not only that, it is Shields and not Taylor who has so far managed to avoid any controversial decisions or come even remotely close to losing a fight. About Taylor we cannot say the same, of course. She has been beaten once already – by Chantelle Cameron in 2023 – and some believe she deserved to lose at least one of the three fights she had with Serrano and one of the two she had with Persoon.
Perhaps, it could be argued, fighting better competition leads to closer fights, yet Shields, 17-0 (3 KOs), has hardly been starved of tough tests in the nine years she has been a pro. Her opponent this weekend, for example, is Franchon Crews-Dezurn, a former world super-middleweight champion Shields just so happened to fight for the first time on her professional debut in 2016. In addition, Shields managed to beat, in consecutive fights, the following world titleholders: Nikki Adler, Tori Nelson, Hanna Gabriels, Hannah Rankin, Femke Hermans, Christina Hammer, Ivana Habazin, Ema Kozin, and Savannah Marshall.
It is for that reason Shields’ promoter, Dmitriy Salita, sees the imagined battle between Shields and Taylor as something of a no contest.
“I love Katie Taylor,” Salita said. “She is such a wonderful role model and person, so what I say is nothing personal. Katie Taylor is great and she is a future hall-of-famer. But she’s no Claressa Shields, man.
“Delfine Persoon, who just fought Caroline Veyre on my show two days ago, lost to Taylor in an ugly fight. Now, Persoon is a very capable fighter, but she gave Taylor a tough go of it twice. You look at Claressa and there’s never been a close fight with Claressa. She is on a different level to the rest of them.”
