A Lightheavy That Could Defeat Foreman or Liston??

This is a photo of Liston shadow boxing Foreman. https://external-preview.redd.it/p5...bp&s=abaeba4bd95259ec22a9d34ceb791ff71ae88c56

Here is Foreman in the olympics.

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This is Foreman in '73. Are you going to sit there and tell me there's a significant difference physique wise? https://boxrec.com/wiki/thumb.php?f=Foreman150584795.jpg&width=375

He was 219 when he debuted, at which point he was still sparring with Liston (he stopped sparring with him at 20-21 iirc, not 19). And when he defeated Frazier he was...... 217.

 

I give very little shot for anyone over a prime Liston and only the slightest bit better against Foreman and that would be the obvious boxers like a Tunney or a Charles ... either has a shot at heavyweight but at 175 coming up less ..

 

Utterly irrelevant to my comments.

No 19/20 year old professional male athlete is fully physically developed. Foreman’s relative weight at 19 vs 24 is also irrelevant. His whole body composition would have changed significantly in those 5 years.

 

"They are both known for their skills at cutting off the ring, even though neither of them ever demonstrated such skill in an actual fight."

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Billy Conn's ring IQ was certainly not better than Liston or Ali's. If it was he probably wouldn't have lost 1 in 7 times he stepped in the ring.

 

Untrue. Being an athlete doesn't magically prolong your development rate, and physical development stopping by that age isn't uncommon at all.

Did his body composition change significantly in those 3 years between Liston-Martin and Foreman-Frazier? No. We have photographs and video footage that prove otherwise, regardless of age.

 

Sonny Liston tore through the heavyweight division from 1958 to 1962,becoming the most formidable threat to Floyd Patterson.
Yet according to you Sonny Liston was a '' poster boy for being big and dumb ''. The same Sonny Liston who is acclaimed as being one of the finest boxer-punchers in heavyweigh history ?
The same Sonny Liston whose formidable fighting abilities caused the great Emanuel Steward
to rate him on a par with Muhammad Ali ? There is absolutely no way this ATG could be dismissed as being merely '' big and dumb ''.

You claim that George Foreman never demonstrated an ability to cut off the ring.Please watch
Foreman's fight with Ken Norton.As a bonus watch the first round of the famous Rumble in the Jungle.Foreman so successfully cut off the ring against Muhammad Ali that Ali admitted he was forced to adopt the rope-a-dope stategy in the second round.
Ali said it was impossible to avoid Foreman by using his usual legendary footwork because of
Big George's consummate use of ring-space.Hence Ali's rope-a-dope strategy.

 

Ali never intended to move all night. He was no fool and knew that he didn't have the legs to do it. He also knew that George had about 140 rounds of boxing, amatuer and pro, and that he would be able to out smart him, which he did.
Being acclaimed by one of the finest by fans most of whom don't really understand boxing. And you can be one of the best at anything at heavyweight and still not be all that good at it.
"Cutting off the ring" against Kenny Norton means absolutely zero. Stick and move was never an elements of Norton's game

 

You are trying to convince me that cutting off the ring on Kenny Norton means something? When did Kenny Norton ever establish any credentials as a guy that could move? Watch the video you posted and you can see that he is trying to do something that he doesn't do well and is uncomfortable with. Why didn't you post one of the Peralta fights?
Of course Conn had a higher ring IQ. He fought guys like Kreiger, Zivic, Apostoli, Yarosz, Young Corbett 3. There is nobody that Liston fought that compares to that; the smartest guy he fought beat him pretty easily the first time and ridiculously easy the second time. Ali got smart when he got old.

 

So basically you are calling Ali a liar.The man himself stated he intended to use footwork against Foreman but had to abandon it because of reasons I've already given.Are you seriously suggesting that Ali intended to let Foreman continously batter his body by laying on the ropes ? Apparently Foreman's punches had Ali urinating blood after the fight.
Ok,you claim that Foreman never successfully cut off the ring yet when given the empirical evidence of Foreman doing just that against Ken Norton you dismiss it because '' stick and move
was never an element of Norton's game ''.
Look, the fact is Foreman successfully cut the ring off against an outstanding fighter who gave Muhammad Ali and Larry Holmes sheer hell.Foreman also did the same against Ali in the first
round,forcing Ali to completely change his strategy.Case closed.
What on earth do you mean '' you can be one of the best at anything at heavyweight and still not be all that good at it ''.
Skill is skill,no matter what the weight-division is.
It wasn't only fans ( who you regard as being mostly ignorant of the skills of boxing ) who admired Liston but such men as Eddie Futch and Emanuel Steward,two of the greatest trainers in boxing history.Also two of the greatest ever boxing-historians,Hank Kaplan and Herbert Goldman were passionate advocates of Liston's skills.Sonny Liston was a terrific technician but his skills are sometimes mistakenly overlooked because of his nuclear punching power.

 

The flipside of that is he rarely ever had the chance as barely anyone could last that long.

Robert Davila took him 8 in his 8th pro fight, winning 1 round on two cards and 0 or the other.

Levi Forte went 10 in his 12th fight winning 0 rounds on any card.

Peralta went 10 in his 16th pro fight, winning 1, 4 and 3 rounds on the cards.

Scrap Iron was stopped in 7. Foreman rates his chin as the best and grabbed him as a sparring partner.

Peralta was stopped in 10 in their return.

Then Ali and Young.

So if my count is right a whopping 40 opponents out of 47 couldn't find their was past 5 rounds.

Of the 7 that did 3 were in his first 16 fights and two others were stopped leaving just Ali and Young, his only two losses.

 

Fair point,yes fighters can,shall we say, give their own version of the truth.However nothing will ever convince me that Ali entered the ring in Zaire intending to use rope-a-dope as plan A.He had to change strategy because of Foreman's control of the ring.

 

Lol. Do you actually watch boxing beyond highlights or just read this forum and watch the Ali documentaries?

 

There is actually a three part heavyweight article on this site with Manny. We've discussed it in here for a decade or more.

Q: If Sonny Liston had gotten his shot earlier against Floyd Patterson and if he didn’t have Ali coming up, how good could Sonny Liston have been?

A: Sonny Liston, I watched Sonny Liston when I was a teenager do something that I’ve never seen any heavyweight do—walk through the whole division almost from being the number ten guy all the way up to the champion because he was that devastating like around ’57, and ’58, and ’59. I mean he had unbelievable brutal punching power. He was mean, punched with both hands, and I think that the time that he finally got to the title, I think his best years had gone and right after he won the title he began to live the life of a middle aged wealthy man. He lost the real focus that he had earlier. ’57, ’58, and ’59 he was one of the most vicious machines probably ever in boxing, but after he won the title, from my reports and from what I gather, he started drinking a lot and he was golfing and he just lost that total edge. He was living the life of a comfortable man and then here comes exactly what the computer prints out—the thing in the world for him.. A fast, young fighter, good movement, a solid amateur background, and who had been fighting on a regular basis, so therefore when the match-up came it was just perfect timing for one, terrible timing for another guy who had slipped past his prime—but if they had fought, in like say ’58 or ’59, a prime Sonny Liston and a prime I would still say Cassius Clay or whatever—I don’t know. I don’t know. Sonny at that stage was just such a really powerful wrecking machine and I remember the fights he had with Cleveland Williams—oh my God. I don’t know, Sonny might have won if they would have fought at that time.

Source: Heavyweight History With Emanuel Steward: Part 3 Of 3 • East Side Boxing • News Archives (https://www.boxing247.com/weblog/archives/128028)

 

I remember Eddie Futch being very complimentary about Sonny in an old magazine that,alas,I no longer
have in my possession.Rummy did a brilliant interview with Emanuel Steward in which Emanuel stated
he wasn't sure if even the peak Ali could have defeated the prime Sonny Liston.That's one helluva compliment
from the great man.
One of my favourite boxing-journalists,Frank Lotierzo,lauded Liston as a terrific boxer as well as being a great
puncher.You can access this article by typing in '' frank Lotierzo on Sonny Liston '' in the search bar.
There's a terrific podcast called The Modern Martial Artist by a guy called David Christian.In a video about
Sonny Liston,Christian highlighted Liston's technical skills as well as his tremendous punching power.
As I'm sure you know CT, no fighter could earn such accolades simply by being '' big and dumb ''.
Liston had skill as well as power,and plenty of it.

 

Ah yes your erudite observations are always welcome.I am of course being sarcastic,in case you didn't
get it.