5 Boxers Who Made A Career Out of Getting Their Face Punched in Repeatedly
If you’ve ever seen a high-profile boxing match, you probably know that the two fighters’ records are going to be near spotless. It’s rare to see a title card that has more than a handful of losses between the combatants. Meanwhile, up-and-coming talents are often touted as “undefeated” in order to drum up excitement.
Of course, such records don’t come from nowhere. Those gaudy win totals are connected to real boxers who were defeated. Boxers who make up an essential part of the sport, and are called anything from the respectful “journeyman” to the much more derisive “tomato can,” a term that comes from, well, their propensity to spill red liquid.
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Here are five brave souls who did a considerable amount of slipping and sliding in the red stuff over their career…
Kristian Laight
You’d think that losing 279 times out of 300 fights and never once experiencing the thrill of knocking out your opponent would take a little of the fun out of boxing. Not for Laight, an all-time nameless opponent who still calls boxing “the best job he ever had.” He even developed a specific, money-motivated strategy of defense so that he would never have a fight stopped, despite the odds. That’s because a stoppage requires the fighter to take 28 days off, meaning it was also a stoppage on his income.
Peter Buckley
Buckley comes close to matching Laight’s record of profitable poundings. Buckley fought the same amount of times at an even 300, and lost 256 of those fights. It’s not often losing that many bouts earns you a revered nickname, but for Buckley it did, with him known as “the King of the Journeymen.” This was a man who had no airs about what he was there to do, which was kiss canvas. Here's a wonderful quote: “I could try my heart out and still get beaten. Or make it as easy as I want and still get beaten. For the same money.”
Reginald Strickland
Strickland did manage to sneak more wins than the earlier fellows on this list, with his record at the time of a New York Times profile sitting at 260 wins out of 344 fights. Looking them up gets a little more complicated, though, because in pursuit of paychecks, Strickland had to resort to the journeyman strategy of fighting under assumed names, since the boxing commission can’t in good faith sign off on one man’s frequent beatdowns.
Jason Nesbitt
Nesbitt is another fighter who is proud to bear the “journeyman” name. You could almost argue that it takes more guts to fight exclusively as an underdog, rather than being able to duck under the ropes knowing you only need one or two good punches to end the fight in your favor. It’s a thankless job, with no promise of victory, done by some of the toughest men on Earth. Like being an offensive lineman for the Chicago Bears.
Eric Crumble
Interestingly, there’s a possibility that Crumble doesn’t actually exist. Many believe that “Eric Crumble” is a go-to alias for someone willing to lose a fight, but not under their own name. A sort of pugilistic Alan Smithee situation. Something that’s backed up by there being almost zero photo or video evidence of a definitive, real Eric Crumble.
