Great ****ogy. But Liston was only legitimately down once in his career. I can guarantee you Cleveland Williams hit harder than all those above. Foreman said Williams was the hardest puncher he faced. He faced most of those above.
None of them barring Vitali landed anything significant on Lewis though, not a good expample of his punch taking skills tbh.
I think Liston was a special fighter for his day, the same as Louis, Marciano, Johnson, Dempsey etc. But on a H2H basis at the turn of the century, I'm picking the 6'5" 240, extremely powerful, Olympic gold, skilled super heavyweight, over the 6'1 212 boxer who essentially learned to box in jail and never faced anyone remotely the size and skill of Lewis.
It is, because it demonstrates that in all likelihood neither would Liston. If nothing else, it shows you how hard it is to land cleaning against him, given his attributes, which is actually my main point. What makes you think that if none of these other fighters can land anything of note that Liston's going to.
I you want to hang every outcome of any fantasy fight featuring Lewis on the McCall and Rahman defeats than go with it.. By that logic anybody could have beaten him.. But rather strange how Vitali klitscko, David Tua, Andrew Golata and many others found differently.
So we're discounting that he was stopped against Clay in the first fight, and down again in the 2nd fight and that apparently the Martin fight never happened either. How convenient. It's already been established that it wasn't all that easy to hit Lewis cleanly, and it's been established that Lewis was in with some of the heaviest punches of all time. Tua, Vitali, Mercer, Morrison, Ruddock and Tyson, those guys could punch. And perhaps I'm getting old, but I don't recall Foreman facing many of these fighters other than Morrison who he lost to.
Don't know about that H2H, I'd probably favor Vitali on that basis. Maybe start a thread if you haven't already and see how that plays out.
You know this "he was loosing before he won" arguments are really really lame. And if you think Vitali only landed one good punch, you've obviously never seen the fight. Might want to watch it, it's fairly entertaining.
You're actually comparing Lewis to Wepner Well don't expect me to draw up a list of all the ****py 6'1 heavyweights who ever fought, because that would be one hell of a long list of nobodies.
I was comparing them based on size. You claimed Liston never faced anyone remotely the size of Liston. It was wrong. I provided evidence.