I wouldn’t say Buckley is the most underrated boxer of all time. But then again, nobody is saying he is, not even the commenter you replied to. He was simply making a point on how Buckley’s defensive skills may well have been the most underrated in history, not his overall boxing ability, and crazy as it seems, I fucking agree with the guy.
Let me explain to you what the tag “journeyman” boxer means, since it appears you have little understanding of it. A journeyman boxer is not a sub-par professional whose skill-set is so limited he will never be in danger of ever being compared to just-decent boxers, let alone elite ones. Sure enough, this does wash to some extent but it hardly tells the story. A journeyman boxer is a boxer who makes his money from dropping matches. He gets paid to lose. He is not a good boxer by any stretch. His technical skills may be mediocre. His power may be non-existent and perhaps he is slower than molasses. It’s all good though; he takes fights to lose them and pick up his check when the day is done. Promoters approach him and ask him to fight their guys so that he can lose to them and make their guys’ records look more impressive. They know he will make sure he loses the match. If the journeyman boxer is to have a lengthy career, he will be smart enough to make sure he rarely ever gets KO’d. He’ll lose, but usually by points. This will call for him to have great defense; to only allow himself to get hit by punches that he knows won’t really rock him. He knows to slip the more damaging punches. His stamina levels will also need to be phenomenal, so he is able to hang with the guy he is fighting till the end of the final round, pick up his UD loss and his paycheck and then go home and sleep with his wife Kimberly, who naively believes he goes into every fight looking to win but is unfortunate to always lose. Poor conditioning will mean he is more likely to get KO’d, which will do his ambition to have a long, if mediocre, career little favors. I’m not saying that he only loses because he wants to, and could switch it up any time he wanted and pick the W. Read what I wrote above- his boxing skills are truly ass and the only two things going for him are maybe a great chin, a great defense and great conditioning. It’s very likely he couldn’t win even if he wanted to. Johnny Greaves, a journeyman boxer who lost 96 of his 100 pro fights put it this way, “Turn up, fight, lose, get paid, happy days.”
Rockin’ Robin Deakin, another journeyman boxer with a truly awful boxing record of 2 wins in 53 pro fights, had the misfortune of being born with a clubfoot. The guy loved boxing and wanted to make money as a proper fighter but with a setback like this, the only boxers you are going to beat are tomato cans. So he learned to take any fights he could, make sure to lose and get paid. The trouble with Deakin was that he often got hit, often “lost his head”, and started to engage the fighters he was meant to lose to in slugging wars. He admits that this was a reason why business was bad for a while. The word out there is that there is proper money in the journeyman trade; not Mayweather-money, but decent money that will place you above just about most people who are not entrepreneurs or working in high stress careers. Promoters also remember you and should they have a new boxer in their stable whose record they want to pad, you will be the first guy they consider aiming their checkbooks at. The BBC wrote up a piece on this. Just Google “journeyman boxer” and it is in the first page.
This fucking guy, Peter Buckley, fought over 300 fights. He dropped 256 of them and not once was he knocked out. He was going into fights knowing he was going to lose them. He couldn’t apply defense by offense most times and knocking the other guy out to stop him from knocking him out was not an option he could take. It wasn’t stick and move with this guy, it likely was just move…and move some more. Maybe a jab here, a soft body shot there and sustained concentration and effort to avoid hammers flying at his head the rest of the time. Understand that his opposition most assuredly had no clue this guy opposite them intended to drop the fight anyway, so they would go all in looking to knock some head off of the shoulders. So do I think he is underrated? I think his defensive skills have to be up there with the best of them. And I’ll defend my statement no matter how many times I get called out for it.