Carlos Adames will enter the ring this Saturday to defend his belt against Austin “Ammo” Williams with a chance to solidify his standing as the no. 1 middleweight in the world – as the Transnational Boxing Rankings Board, ESPN, and The Ring all currently have him ranked.
He will also have a chance to take a significant step toward ranking among the top 10 160-pounders of the 21st century.
Adames isn’t there yet. And he can’t realistically get there against Williams.
But middleweight has not been among boxing’s deepest, most glamorous divisions very often this century, meaning Adames – who since moving up to 160 has beaten Sergiy Derevyanchenko, Julian Williams and Terrell Gausha, not to mention fighting to a draw against Hamzah Sheeraz that most felt should have been a victory – is closer to cracking that top 10 than you may realize.
Who’s he chasing?
Glad you asked. Counting down from 10 to 1, here are one boxing writer’s rankings of the best middleweight champs from January 1, 2001 to present, ranked solely based on their resumes in the 160 lbs division over that span – with emphasis placed on title fights, greater emphasis placed on lineal title fights and the greatest emphasis of all based on the quality of opposition faced and overcome.
10. Felix Sturm
Record in middleweight title fights: 15-4-2 (5 KOs)
Few can match the German’s longevity in the upper reaches of the division – he was in the middleweight title picture straight through from 2003-14, spanning a 28-fight stretch with all but one under the 160-lbs limit and all but two scheduled for 12 rounds.
At the same time, nobody in this top 10, or in the next 10 for that matter, can match his tally of four losses in title fights.
It’s a mixed bag with Sturm. And that applies to his record in close, debatable decisions as well — most notably his 2004 loss to Oscar De La Hoya and 2011 win over Matthew Macklin, results that most felt should have been reversed.
He split two fights with Javier Castillejo, drew with Martin Murray, lost to Daniel Geale, beat Darren Barker, lost to Sam Soliman. Sturm never faced the lineal champs of his time, but he fought most of the best of the rest, with just good enough results to squeak onto this list.
9. Miguel Cotto
Record in middleweight title fights: 2-1 (2 KOs)
Right out of the gate, we get the starkest possible debate between quantity and quality in these rankings. Sturm offered plenty of middleweight quantity without reaching the very top. Cotto wasn’t in the division long, but he made his time count.
The Hall of Famer from Puerto Rico technically fought in the weight class three times, though for two of those fights he came in under the junior middle limit, and for the third he scaled 155.
So he was never really a middleweight. But he was the lineal middleweight champion, stopping Sergio Martinez at Madison Square Garden in 2014 to etch his name in stone. Was “Maravilla” physically compromised that night? Most definitely. Does that erase all the credit for the man who knocked him down three times in the first round and swept every scorecard until the fight was stopped? Most definitely not.
After that, Cotto defended successfully against Geale by fourth-round KO, then lost the title to Saul “Canelo” Alvarez in competitive enough fashion against a fellow future Hall of Famer.
Quality over quantity. Lineal over longevity. Even if Cotto never really belonged in this division.
8. Arthur Abraham
Record in middleweight title fights: 11-0 (7 KOs)
Things got spotty for “King Arthur” once he moved up to super middleweight in 2009 and promptly went 1-3 in the “Super Six” tournament after coming into the series as one of the favorites. But at middleweight -- where, admittedly, he didn’t face anyone as capable as Andre Ward, Carl Froch or even Andre Dirrell – he was undefeated and mostly dominant.
I say “mostly” dominant because his greatest, most famous victory was a grueling 2006 struggle in which the German battled through a badly broken jaw to outpoint Edison Miranda.
Abraham cleaned that up with a fourth-round KO win in their rematch two years later, and his next-best wins at middleweight came against the likes of Howard Eastman, Kofi Jantuah and an aging Raul Marquez.
Abraham left a lot unproven in a three-and-a-half year alphabet reign, but all the meals he ate through a straw after the first Miranda fight weren’t for nothing. An 11-0 record in middleweight title fights is enough to get him onto this list.
7. Daniel Jacobs
Record in middleweight title fights: 6-3 (5 KOs)
It didn’t start smoothly for Jacobs. His first title try ended in an upset fifth-round KO loss to Dmitry Pirog in 2010 at age 23, followed by a near-death experience and a cancer diagnosis.
So Jacobs came back and earned his “Miracle Man” nickname. He sandwiched two wins over Sergio Mora around a spectacular first-round knockout of slight favorite Peter Quillin, and later handed both Sergey Derevyanchenko and Maciej Sulecki their first losses.
Jacobs’ only two defeats at the weight after Pirog were against two of the best of the era, and both came down to just a round or two – losing by seven total points on three cards against Gennady Golovkin and by eight total points on three cards against Alvarez.
Jacobs couldn’t quite get over that hump, but the versatile Brooklynite was the third best middleweight of that mini-era, and he proved he wasn’t all that far behind the top two.
6. Jermain Taylor
Record in middleweight title fights: 5-1-1 (0 KOs)
That “0 KOs” on Taylor’s middleweight title fight record is highly significant, in that he kept leaving it up to the judges – and was often lucky those judges seemed to like him.
Obviously, the 2000 U.S. Olympic bronze medalist deserves enormous credit for ending the decade-long reign of Bernard Hopkins. But neither of their two fights in 2005 was remotely definitive -- I scored the first narrowly for Hopkins and the second a draw.
Taylor followed that with a mildly fortunate split draw against Winky Wright, a clear-cut win over Kassim Ouma and a debatable split decision over Cory Spinks.
Then Taylor finally stopped going the 12-round distance – but not in a good way. Kelly Pavlik got off the deck to stop him in a 2007 thriller, ending the Arkansan’s lineal middleweight reign. As it happens, seven years later, Taylor did claim another 160-lbs alphabet belt by beating Soliman, in what would be Taylor’s final fight.
So, with different judges, who knows, maybe Taylor is like 3-4 in middleweight title fights and doesn’t make this list. But none of his opponents were pushovers (especially not Hall of Famers Hopkins and Wright), and he was, for more than two years, the lineal middleweight king.
5. Kelly Pavlik
Record in middleweight title fights: 4-1 (4 KOs)
Though Pavlik stopped Taylor to grab hold of the title lineage and then outpointed him in their over-the-weight non-title rematch, ranking “The Ghost” above Taylor isn’t as clear-cut as you might think.
The rest of Pavlik’s title fight wins are nothing to get excited about. He stopped Gary Lockett, Marco Antonio Rubio and Miguel Espino without losing a round to any of them. Pavlik’s only defense against someone whose name resonates years later came against Martinez, a slightly undersized underdog who cut up and outboxed Pavlik to take his title.
Other than the scintillating championship win over Taylor, Pavlik’s best victory at 160 lbs was probably his KO of Miranda that earned him the title shot.
Still, stopping Miranda, stopping Taylor and reigning for a couple of years as the lineal champ is enough to slot him above Taylor, even if that’s a close call.
4. Saul “Canelo” Alvarez
Record in middleweight title fights: 4-0-1 (1 KO)
Alvarez had a lengthy run at junior middle, fighting almost exclusively at that weight from 2010-’15, and a lengthy run at super middle, mostly campaigning there from 2018-present. But middleweight was a relative pit stop – albeit one with a few massive fights and arguably the best couple of wins of Canelo’s Hall of Fame-lock career.
He outboxed Cotto for the lineal crown while still growing into the weight class in 2015, then splattered Amir Khan in a safe first defense. After a couple of adventures in other divisions came the big ones: a hotly disputed draw and a room-temperature-disputed win against Golovkin, in 2017 and ’18, respectively. Alvarez fought one more time in the division, narrowly outpointing Jacobs in ’19, and that was that for him at middleweight.
There isn’t quite enough depth of resume at 160 for Canelo to earn a spot on the medal podium, but a lineal reign and an official record of 2-0-1 against Cotto and Golovkin get him close.
3. Sergio Martinez
Record in middleweight title fights: 7-1 (4 KOs)
Some might think of Maravilla as the bridge between the Hopkins-Taylor-Pavlik years and the Golovkin-Alvarez years, but as bridges go, the four-plus years the Argentine spent as lineal middleweight champ stretched across a lot of water.
It started with Martinez’s upset win over Pavlik in 2010 to snag the title, followed immediately by one of the most vicious one-punch knockouts of all-time against Paul Williams.
Then came Serhiy Dzinziruk, Barker and Macklin – all stopped late – followed by the fight that seemingly ruined Martinez’s knee, his dramatic defense against Julio Cesar Chavez Jnr. That knee barely held up enough to get him by Martin Murray, then didn’t hold up one bit against Cotto.
There’s not much to knock in Martinez’s reign, other than the fact that he and his team seemed to make a very conscious decision that the reward for facing Golovkin did not outweigh the risk. And because of that, No. 3 is the highest Martinez could possibly rank on this list.
2. Gennady Golovkin
Record in middleweight title fights: 22-1-1 (20 KOs)
The headliner of this year’s Hall of Fame class would stand atop this list if it was based on numbers alone.
“GGG’s” first alphabet reign began in 2010 and his last one ended in 2022, and along the way he knocked out his first 17 title-fight opponents while arguably deserving to win every middleweight title fight he ever had.
The flip side is that he could never get a truly great opponent into the ring with him until Golovkin was not quite as his most fearsome anymore. There were plenty of good-to-very-good foes: Macklin, Geale, Murray, David Lemieux, an undersized Kell Brook, for example. Jacobs represented a step up and became the first man in nine years to go the distance with GGG. Then Golovkin finally landed his ginger whale in Canelo, and the judges twice told him he didn’t quite do enough.
The numbers are exceptional. The lack of a signature victory keeps Golovkin out of the top spot here.
1. Bernard Hopkins
Record in middleweight title fights: 8-2 (4 KOs)
You can lop off the 15 middleweight title fights Hopkins engaged in during the 20th century. It doesn’t matter. His run from 2001 to 2005 – from age 35 to age 40 – is unparalleled in the weight class in the 2000s.
Golovkin may lack a signature victory, but B-Hop does not. His 12th-round KO of previously undefeated Felix Trinidad to unify the titles in 2001 is about as signature as any win any fighter has ever scored.
And stopping De La Hoya on a bodyshot three years later could count as a signature win if the Trinidad fight had never happened.
Hopkins also turned back Keith Holmes, William Joppy, Robert Allen and Howard Eastman – each a forgettable 12-round slog, but “The Executioner” never much cared how he won – before running into the much younger Taylor in ’05. Twice, the 40-year-old Hopkins fought Taylor on roughly even terms. Twice, the judges found a way to separate them that was unfavorable to Hopkins.
His middleweight run ended a bit like Golovkin’s first alphabet reign, with the sound of scorecards he didn’t agree with.
But there’s no doubt in my mind that Hopkins gets his hand raised when determining which of them reigns as the middleweight king of the first quarter of the 21st century.
Eric Raskin is a veteran boxing journalist with nearly 30 years of experience covering the sport for such outlets as BoxingScene, ESPN, Grantland, Playboy, and The Ring (where he served as managing editor for seven years). He also co-hosted The HBO Boxing Podcast, Showtime Boxing with Raskin & Mulvaney, The Interim Champion Boxing Podcast with Raskin & Mulvaney, and Ring Theory. He has won three first-place writing awards from the BWAA, for his work with The Ring, Grantland, and HBO. Outside boxing, he is the senior editor of CasinoReports and the author of 2014’s The Moneymaker Effect. He can be reached on X, BlueSky, or LinkedIn, or via email at RaskinBoxing@yahoo.com.
