Whitaker may have been the purest defensive player of the three. His 1984 Olympic gold medal helped launch a professional career built on reflexes, balance and anticipation. Many fans still believe he deserved the decision in his 1993 fight against Julio Cesar Chavez. Whitaker was arduous to hit cleanly, but his style sometimes hurt him in the eyes of the judges because he focused more on control than doing damage.

Mayweather took parts of Leonard and Whitaker and turned them into a business model that kept him undefeated for 50 fights. Early in his career as “Pretty Boy”, he relied more on speed and combinations, before later becoming a more cautious and defensive fighter. His victories over Diego Corrales, Oscar De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton, Canelo Alvarez and Manny Pacquiao helped build one of the most successful careers in boxing history.

Arguments between fans usually come down to preference. Leonard fought in the deepest era. Whitaker may have had the best natural defense. Mayweather retired undefeated and was the most financially successful of the three. None of the answers are clear, which is probably why the debate still rages on all these years later.

Tony Bellew added fuel to that conversation this week by discussing Fury’s failures and the difficulty of fighting Usyk.

“Just tell it like it is. He was better than you. Tyson Fury spent 12 months belittling him, dehumanizing him and insulting him,” Bellew said on the Fight Your Corner podcast.

“Then when he beat him I thought, ‘I’ve been robbed’. No, he’s amazing, I just didn’t think he was that good, he doesn’t deserve the recognition he deserves, which I don’t like. When you get beat by someone better than you, just put your hands up.

“It’s killing him. That’s what breaks his heart the most: the fact that he’s met someone who is just better than him. But he’s not the only one and he has to accept that,” Tony Bellew told Sky Sports.

What stood out about Bellew’s comments was that he had experienced Usyk himself. Bellew led on two scorecards entering the eighth round of an undisputed cruiserweight fight in 2018 before being stopped.

“Oleksandr Usyk is the only person I met and my game plan was going perfectly. Everything was perfect,” Bellew said. “At the end of round seven I have two cards in my account and I draw a third, but at the beginning of round eight I didn’t know where I was. It made me very tired.

“He’s the best fighter I’ve ever fought. His footwork was on another level. He took everything I did and finally used it against me. He’s unique. I’ve never met anyone who could do to me what he did to me.”

The timing of Bellew’s statement is compelling because Fury’s career has looked very different since his first loss to Usyk. Fury clearly lost the rematch, retired for over a year, and then returned to fight Arslanbek Makhmudov, looking slower and less fluid than the version that dominated Wilder and defeated Wladimir Klitschko earlier in his career.

Fury still won the fight, but the aura that once surrounded him did not fully return.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Tony+Bellew+fight+your+corner+fury&sp=EgIIAw%253D%253D