In the late spirit of Halloween, who were some fighters that turned into boxing terrors of themselves for just one night?
None. Even the obvious choices like Buster Douglas - who was superb against Mike White - weren't great for one night only. It just doesnt' work like that. I don't think. I'll keep an eye out to see what other mentions there are.
Buster was a serial underachiever who, that one time, actually lived up to his potential. I think that's probably the way we should look at this -- fighters who had big potential, but only lived up to it once.
By the way, the most popular answers in here will obviously be Buster Douglas and Riddick Bowe. Should have probably specified no HW's just to keep 3/4s of the posts from being those two.
It's a total myth that Douglas lived up to his potential once. His performance against Mike White was astonishing and is arguably the best jabbing performance of Buster's career - it was crazy. It would be interesting to see a comparison of the odds on a Buster win versus Tyson and a Chisora win versus Fury. But calling for fights not to happen so nothing can happen or preferring nothing to fights is mad stuff, either way.
I agree, but it was Mike Williams not Mike White (who Douglas also fought). Douglas looked as good or better against Williams than he did against Tyson.
Billy Backus, Lauro Salas, Freddie Cochrane, Harold Dade, Paddy DeMarco, Jimmy Braddock based on the fact that they were fighters with in-and-out records who were not expected to win titles but came through on their big night. If I am not mistaken, all were undisputed lineal champions who held titles in one of the "original" eight divisions.
Douglas was always good, the feeling of him being inconsistent was mainly due to his other big fights with Tucker where he was winning, and Holyfield where he was negatively affected by outside factors and didn't motivate himself like did with Tyson. Otherwise he was solid up until his first retirement.
I think Myorga was percieved to be just that, threatening, intimidating and ferocious, that is, until he came undone... in fairness, I think he was a bit unhinged and didn't train nor disipline himself properly otherwise he might just have actually lived up to it!
Didn't White knock Douglas out? His fight with Williams was the one where he scored three KD's off jabs -- he was jabbing like Larry Holmes with a power upgrade that night. But, also in his fight with Williams, he was out of shape, huffing and puffing at times, etc. You show up out of shape, you're not living up to your potential.
Ray Boom Boom Mancini on May 8 1982, he looked like a monster in the ring separating WBA champion Art Frias from his title.
I don’t remember the finer details that well - only watched once in real time - but didn’t Mike Rossman do a pretty big number on Victor Galindez the first time around. It was the undercard to Ali v Spinks I recall.