When we look back upon a year in boxing, we tend to evaluate it not just in how many great fights we witnessed, but by the times special fighters did special things. In the case of 2025, we were given plenty of great fights, but we also witnessed two of our three best fighters do historically significant things.

In all likelihood, voting for the Ring Magazine Fighter of the Year Award for 2025 is going to come down to Terence Crawford and Naoya Inoue. It’s a conundrum voters have faced throughout boxing history, a debate between quality over quantity in terms of what determines a given year’s best boxer.

Crawford scored one of history’s most significant victories, a win over Canelo Alvarez in front of one of the biggest audiences to ever watch a fight, to become a three-division undisputed champion. Months after, “Bud” would decide that it would be the crescendo of his career — how could anything top it? — and hung up his gloves at 38.

Inoue, meanwhile, made four defenses of his Ring 122-pound title, the most defenses in a given year since the great Larry Holmes in 1983. Inoue didn’t have a Canelo on his schedule, but he did have three top-10 divisional opponents, and it would have been four had Sam Goodman not been replaced by Ye-Joon Kim in January.

Choosing either man is entirely justifiable, and there’s a good chance that Crawford’s retirement will help tilt things in his favor sentimentally, as it’s the final award he can be given as an active fighter, so to speak. This is not an article meant to dissuade anyone from voting for, or feeling Crawford deserves the nod for best of the year. Choosing Bud is one of two correct choices. However, in the likely event that does happen, it’s rather another opportunity to ensure that we aren’t taking Inoue for granted.

There are, to use the popular modern parlance, two ways to “dare to be great” in the sport of boxing. One is to jump up in weight, chasing competition and prestige at all costs. The other is to cement oneself in a weight class and dominate.

Throughout his career, Inoue has managed to do both. A four-division world champion, Inoue made one defense of a junior flyweight title, seven defenses at junior bantamweight, six bantamweight defenses and now seven defenses at junior featherweight.

No fighter in the sport has faced and defeated more fighters ranked by this publication since 2010 than Inoue. To be frank, the length and quality of Inoue’s reigns across three divisions individually have been enough to have other fighters enshrined in Canastota.

Though Inoue is one of this generation’s greatest fighters, and perhaps already the finest to ever come out of his country, he has won Fighter of the Year just once from this publication, in 2023. It’s a journey on the world stage that began in 2014 when, in a year that started with him having less than two years of professional experience, he won the WBC junior flyweight title, defended it once and jumped two weight classes to defeat a champion in Omar Narvaez who may wind up in the Hall of Fame one day too. Inoue wouldn’t win Fighter of the Year that year either, with Sergey Kovalev, at the peak of his powers, getting the nod.

Inoue not winning Fighter of the Year in 2014 or 2025 wasn’t and wouldn’t be a travesty by any means. It’s perhaps the curse of the artist who values mastery, consistency and longevity. The way that Inoue has entrenched himself in weight divisions, ensuring that there are no questions left to be answered before moving up in weight, suggests a man who values the evaluation of his overall body of work above all else. Year-end awards in boxing are no different than year-end awards in music in this sense. The best musician in the world won’t always win Artist of the Year or Album of the Year. Prince was nominated for 38 Grammys and won seven — one being a lifetime achievement award.

This phenomenon persists sometimes because different people experience massive peaks in a given year, while some greats maintain a steady high level for a very long time. But looked at more cynically, one could argue that sometimes we simply take the brilliance of greats for granted. In the same way we can fall victim to scoring a round for a fighter who does better than expected, sometimes awards can be handed out to someone who was unexpectedly great rather than the one we’ve grown to expect it from.

The brilliance of Inoue isn’t just visible in his indefatigable consistency and ever-growing resume either. It’s plain to see to anyone who turns on the screen and sees him upon it, one of the rare fighters who are evidently great to the uninitiated independent of the fight results. Of course, if you view a compilation of Inoue’s 27 knockouts, even a non-boxing fan can be wowed by them and comprehend this as proof of his excellence.

But this stage of Inoue’s career, one in which knockouts are coming comparatively less frequently with two straight decision victories, is helping illustrate how strong the connective tissue in his work is and has always been. “The Monster” isn’t just a fighter with astonishing power, he’s someone who can box and defend as well as anyone in the sport, and the times he hasn’t have seemingly been in service of his appetite for destruction. Most recently, against Alan Picasso, he curbed that appetite and put on as dazzling and aesthetic a boxing display as we’ve seen at an elite level in some time.

Watching Inoue with his hands at his side, slip a Picasso punch millimeters from his chin and respond with a crisp one-two and left hook to the body, among dozens of other beautiful sequences, appeared so effortless that one was tempted to, again, take for granted that this was being done to one of the 10 best fighters in the division and the biggest opponent he'd ever faced.

In 1983, Holmes didn’t win Fighter of the Year despite making four title defenses. Like Inoue, he’d won it recently (a year prior), and by then his dominance of the heavyweight division was old news. That same year, Marvin Hagler scored three wins, including a win over Roberto Duran, and won Fighter of the Year. Hagler’s win over Duran is probably discussed on a daily basis, but Holmes’ 1983, much like his career overall, wouldn’t be revisited and truly appreciated until after the fact.

Let’s not make the same mistake with Inoue. Whether he wins Fighter of the Year in a given year or not, we shouldn’t take for granted that we truly have a Monster walking amongst us.