Sonny Liston or Wladimir Klitschko who rates higher as a all time heavyweight?

Yes Shavers is overrated as a puncher

 

Yes and no.

The evidence suggests the man hit VERY hard, although he was bad at finishing people. But the way he was canonized as the hardest puncher who will ever live...no. IMO, that's a relic of the nostalgic sentiment that the 60s/70s were the best era not just in terms of entertainment and health of the sport, but head to head.

So their hardest puncher has to be the hardest puncher ever. Their best heavyweight overall would beat anybody else. Their physical specimens could ragdoll the bigger, weight trained fighters today. Their contenders would be champs in another era. Etc.

 

This was your comment.
"Patterson came in below the 1990s cruiserweight limit. That’s like dunking on a nine foot hoop and claiming to be the dunk champion." which clearly implies Patterson is disqualified as a great because he wouldn't be a heavyweight by modern day standards.

Now when I bring up Marciano, you change the goal posts with "Well yeah but Marciano accomplished more lolz". You're a clown.

 

It doesn’t clearly do anything. Patterson wasn’t a great because he wasn’t.

 

Did you get your girlfriend taken from you by one of these 70s fighters by any chance? I've never understood the vitrol you've had against that era.

I agree the 70s gets overrated, especially guys like Quarry, Lyle, and yes Shavers. At his peak he lost to guys like Bob Stallings. However, his power is legit. He was just lacking in many other fundamental aspects such as endurance and versatility. He certainly has a strong argument for hardest puncher of all time (though I wouldn't argue with anyone picking Wilder). According to all common opponents he hit harder than Foreman (in the words of Stan Ward "so much harder"), who 20 years later, had his power compared favorably to other monster punchers like Bowe, Tyson, Lewis, Wlad, the latter of two whom have fought relatively recently and almost certainly hit harder than anyone today not named (Peak) Wilder.

 

Nope, just weird

Decimation of native lands in the name of the Christian man. ... Our languages are dead or abouts but our sayings remain. Word choice, cadence, and sometimes I do say things in casual speech that is Tsalagi, not English. Mostly it's not that English isn't my first language so much as we have a colorful take on it. Not terribly dissimilar to the UK's Scottish-English except less exposed. You wouldn't say a Scot's usage of "How" is because it's not their first language you just accept they use "How" pretty colorfully and on understanding it find them less weird.

I am weird ... like genuinely have weird background for a boxing fan.

 

The earlier discussion of “18 title defenses vs 1 title defense but one is real others are fake” has some substance to it.
Most of WK title defenses would be contender fights.
In reality he had at most 13 title fights and in reality consodering his brother retirement really about 7-

 

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks.

 

So, getting back to this thread of the discussion...

Greatness, as most people talk about it in boxing, may have some agreed upon dimensions, but those seem to be by convention more than anything. The kinds of things people prefer to have in their champions. And the weighting they give to the various dimensions, how they weigh them against each other, are going to be based on their preferences.

On the issue of subjectivity and belts, it depends what attribute you're trying to measure. If it's something like, "Can they beat all of their contemporaries more often than anybody else?" then I agree that using belt ranking systems might give you pretty accurate results. But I don't think you remove subjectivity from that process entirely, and I don't think it follows that the Ring rankings are useless because of the flaws you correctly point out.

On the first point of subjectivity, we still have to decide which belts to pay attention to for purposes of counting something as undisputed. Most people will tend to reach the "right" answer on that, when asked, but it just shifts the subjective analysis from weighing fighters' abilities directly to weighing belts' legitimacy and competitiveness (which I think in practice would bring in stuff like the fighters' perceived abilities and the dreaded popularity question). The boxing fan doing the analysis is still eyeballing stuff and giving his best guess.

On the Ring issue, I guess we'd have to ask how well Ring's rankings are tracking fighter quality / results. If we look at the end of the pipeline -- the rankings themselves -- rather than asking how the sausage was made, there seems to be a correlation between Ring rankings and how good most of the fighters on those lists seem to be. (And between Ring rankings and sanctioning body rankings.) So whatever nonsense they're using to rank fighters isn't yielding results that are totally out of left field.

The apparent ELO ranking system on Boxrec is an interesting alternative, but I don't know how well we'd expect it to track real world results.

EDIT: As to why the Ring rankings have become THE CANONICAL SOURCE, I think it's about the group you're dealing with. The older posters seem to have grown up with Ring Magazine subscriptions alongside their comic book subscriptions, and even the more recent people have easy access to some Ring rankings in a way that they don't have access to historical sanctioning body rankings. The freakout probably comes in part from the fear of having to learn a completely different system, which they have no easy access to, and therefore couldn't contribute to the conversation. There's also not much room to gain social cachet by taking turns quoting the agreed-upon Sacred Writings along conventional lines if most people don't have access to the writings. The model here seems more social and participatory than analytical.

 

How could WK vs Byrd-the first one be a championship fight when Lewis was the champion?

 

From Wach to Fury-meaning the moment his brother retired leaving no discussion eho really was the champ until he lost.
7 title fights.
Some would consider from the Chagaev fight as The Ring went to the extreme no 1 vs no 3 guys to occupy the vacancy as they figured out a no 1 vs no 2 fight(the brothers) would never happen.

 

The story about Bethea losing seven teeth isn't something that was made up years later, it was quite widely reported at the time. Explaining the decision to suspend Bethea for six weeks, the Illinois State Athletic Commission "noted that Bethea took a severe beating in the Liston bout, losing seven teeth."

https://ibb.co/HL7F8q5g

 

Wladimir kayoed larger and more durable men than Liston who generally faced guys under 200 pounds and not renowned for durability.

I don't see how Bethea can save him here. Bethea is tiny by the standards of Wlads era