Make a reasonable argument for rating Ingemar Johansson as heavyweight GOAT

Since I started this madness, it's only fair that I take a shot.


For starters, @Bokaj's strategy of overwhelmingly focusing on prime performances is probably the way forward to build Ingo into the GOAT. This is similar to how Bowe gets excuses for laziness in training against Golota, Tyson against "Tokyo Douglas," etc. So we will start by mostly disregarding his post Floyd I fights as symptoms of early decline and loss of focus. We will also give Ingo greatness credit for his raw talent (see also below.)

Focusing disproportionately on who performed better between ATGs against common opponents (rather than just who beat the most Ring ranked guys, or what the record on paper is) is also a good strategy. @Bokaj's other idea of matching performances one-on-one allows Ingo to get maximum leverage out of his few best wins, while safely ignoring his competitors' comparatively massive volume of work. (For example: "We can't really count Ali beating Norton heavily because we don't know how Ingo would have done against Norton. All we can do is compare what Ali accomplished against an over the hill Patterson to what Ingo did to the prime version...")

We need to argue as well that Patterson declined sharply post Ingo, and that his subsequent record of relative success shows how weak the succeeding era was -- thereby damaging Ali and Frazier's case against Ingo. We can point out how brutal the three fights with Ingo were, draw analogies to Tyson's similarly short reign with a similar style to Patterson, etc. And we can also compare the Patterson who fought Ingo (who we argue was past it anyway) to Tokyo Douglas, based on Patterson's unusually fervent motivation by his own account. Liston defeating Patterson is therefore only a cleanup job of a Patterson who already had his Tokyo miracle, and whose days as a great fighter had been Bingo'd out of him.

Speaking of the Bingo, we will follow Foreman's preference for punchers when rating Ingo. That should give him an edge against boxers like Ali and Holmes in the ratings. And @janitor is right to sneak in a subjective evaluation of Ingo's skill on film. Just as Steward valued tall guys fighting negatively, D'Amato valued bobbers and weavers who fought like Dempsey, and so on, *we* will place particular value on sneaky, tricky punchers; Schmeling will do pretty well on this list as well.

We will also adopt the common forum idea that you only need to be around 190 to beat the best big men. Similarly, we will go with the assumption that the late 50s / early 60s were the strongest era of boxing ever, based on: (1) the survival of large numbers of boxing gyms that the TV market would eventually kill, (2) the perfection of boxing technique, (3) the forcible removal of the dead wood from the 40s/early 50s hiccup caused by the War's interruption of normal functions. Also, Europe's poverty postwar might have provided a decent flow of talent temporarily. (This has the added advantage of boosting Ingo's credit for beating European level fighters.)

Finally, we can give fighters "greatness" credit for overcoming out-of-ring obstacles to becoming great fighters. Usually, this kind of credit is given to fighters who suffered discrimination or severe poverty (Johnson, Walcott, Braddock.) In Ingo's case, he succeeded in spite of the enormous obstacle of living in a spoiled, prosperous welfare state without much boxing infrastructure. To rise to the heavyweight championship from such an excessively privileged background is a feat perhaps nobody else has accomplished, and is therefore a testament to Ingo's enormous raw talent.

 

Exactly! And the fact that the late 60s / 70s needed such a long time to dispose of late-Ingo-era fossils like Liston and Patterson (heck, even Cooper, who should have beaten Bugner an outrageous amount of time after he fought Ingo) shows just what a meatgrinder Ingo's era was compared to the comfy 70s. Heck, Ali was immediately post-Ingo, and he managed to lock down the 70s title despite blatant physical decline.

(Come to think of it, these sorts of standards, if applied consistently, would probably have the odd setup of Tyson and Ingo sharing a position near the top. Along with anyone else who beat another heavyweight champion in the latter's absolute prime -- a very short list. Part of the fun of this is figuring out what the other 9 slots will look like after jury-rigging the standards to make Ingo #1.)

 

For added points, make the video yourself. Use plenty of 3-second slow-motion clips interspersed with giant walls of text against black backgrounds explaining what an ingenious technique Ingo is using. Add contemplative piano or violin music in the background for even more greatness, and call it: "Johansson: Poetic Violence in Motion," or similar.

 

That's a sculpted physique like Ruiz, right there.