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

Fair enough Cross,of course there are many colourful myths in boxing folklore ( and dear old Bert Sugar loved
a good embellishment ! ) so perhaps it is not unreasonable to have doubts about the removal of Bethea's
teeth from one Sonny Liston punch.I happen to believe this did happen but obviously we are all entitled to our own opinion.

However there is another example of Liston's immense punching power which is confirmed by the victim himself.


Ray Shoeninger,a former sparring partner of Sonny Liston, described what happened during one of their sparring sessions ;

'' He shattered my teeth.He knocked my shoulder out of place.Hey,I lost three teeth when he hit
me with a jab wearing 20 ounce gloves.''

This incident certainly confirms that Sonny had the capability to remove seven of an opponent's teeth with a single punch whilst wearing standard boxing gloves.

 

Is the implication that KOs are less impressive if you're heavier than your opponents?

Because if you want to play that game, Wladmir was both taller and heavier than quite a few of his best opponents. That's not a game you want to play.

 

Take a look at the posts preceding the one you quoted. I was spelling out the implications of giving Liston extra pounds for what we assume he could have weighed with different training.

 

That's not enough. We need a recording of his statement, a photograph from his mouth, and a note from his dentist.

 

I'm not sure what is up with this weird narrow take you have on weight.

In a h2h matchup, you normally lay out what are the conditions of the fight: number of rounds, glove size, rules, ring size, what type of ref, etc. Every single one of those factors can affect the outcome even if the two fighters are levels apart.

When it comes to fighters from an older era to modern (at least 50+ years apart), you do have to actually ask the question: are you simply teleporting the old fighter in a time machine into a modern arena, or are they getting acclimated to the new rules and customs? Dempsey for instance was used to being able to stand over fallen opponents up until around halfway through his championship reign if I'm not mistaken. If you took Toledo Dempsey and then immediately teleported him to face Anthony Joshua for example, and you didn't bother telling Dempsey he had to go to a neutral corner, you'd have absolute chaos in the ring.

So you have two options: either take Liston as is, or you tell him "by the way, championship fights are now 12 rounds, not 15. And you might not want to boil yourself down and dehydrate". There isn't necessarily anything "wrong" with plucking Liston exactly as he was, but then you can't complain if hilarious x factors like Dempsey dropping Joshua again just as he stands creep up in a hypothetical fight.

Lastly, in regards to his comparison to Brewster, stating Brewster has about 10 lbs and 1 inch on Liston isn't any sort of gotcha moment as if they're worlds apart in overall strength, athleticism, frame, etc. As alluded to above, Liston was doing old school training to keep the fat off and was prepared to go 15 if necessary. Despite making every effort to keep himself relatively trim and stocky, and Brewster going out of his way to embrace modern nutrition, weights, keeping himself hydrated etc, Brewster is still only 10 lbs heavier. That's very telling. One guy is cutting and avoiding weights, the other bulking with modern equipment and it's that close...? It suggests they are basically the same size regardless of if you allowed Liston to adapt or not.

 

You're not even scratching the surface pal. We need poor Bethea's remains exhumed for starters. Lets see what teeth he had when he passed. We also need at least four of the missing ivories found, wherever they ended up. To then warrant further debate, a close up color photo of said missing teeth is required from with 2 hours of the fight.

 

Go for 40!

 

And that level of scrutiny still isn't as ridiculous as ranking Liston ahead of Wlad or picking him to beat Wlad.

 

It's pretty straightforward. The more you depart from the fighter as he actually existed, the more you're counting on your imagination accurately to fill in the gaps.

An example: Time machining Jack Johnson to fight Evander Holyfield as-is gives you a fight where the guy you see on film is pretty much what you get in the ring. The more stuff you start throwing in to help Johnson (or Holyfield, if you send Holyfield backwards), the more you're talking about imaginary fighters.

How would Johnson adapt to big gloves? Well, it would negate some of the stuff he did. We're already not sure quite how he'd get around that problem. But he sparred with bigger gloves, so hey, maybe not much. I think we even have some sparring footage of him with bigger gloves to check. But it negates some of his inside game, and his defense, and we need to speculate about how he'd overcome that. Now throw in neutral corner rule. Big change? Not really. It is a change, but not a huge one. He might have even encountered something like that at some point in his life. Now let's tell him to stop dehydrating. How would a fully hydrated Johnson perform in the ring? What would he weigh? What are his new limits on stamina? Don't know. We guess, though, and Johnson departs further from the actual data we have. Well, what if we give him months, or years, to learn the techniques of modern gloved boxing, as many people bring up in threads? We never saw him fight that way. We have no idea how well he'd learn it. But dehydration isn't enough; let's call up Mackie Shilstone and bulk him up, too. It's not fair that Holyfield only gets the steroids; let's put Johnson on gear. At some point, you aren't talking about Johnson anymore. You're talking about a fictional character inspired by Johnson and bearing his name.

I also don't agree with this, "Well, we make this allowance, and that allowance, so we can do it as much as we want" that's implied by your post. We should keep the changes to the bare minimum we need to make the fight happen. Otherwise, you get to the same point Marciano fans do. They probably know good and well that Marciano is too small to beat Tyson Fury, and that Fury's chemical assistance makes the matchup worse. But they love Marciano, and they want to give him a chance, so they argue the same way Liston is being boosted. They make him bigger, stronger, etc. than he actually was.

You're free to do that if you want. It's a free forum. I just don't buy it anymore.

If you think Liston is big enough at 213, then there's no need for anybody to imagine a bulked-up version to make him competitive. Just use the Liston of history.

 

Lost the post but I'll just open end it.

It's actually an insanely simple thing to measure.


1000 pounds moving 1 foot in 1 second = 1000ft/lbs


hunted it down to Boxing Illustrated December 1963 but surely there's a source for that too.

 

The article looks good and I'd love to read The Dreadful Power of The Human Punch by James Allan but this is the only source I have found so far:

This content is protected

That said, stop at 3:45 and look to the bottom right. The article clearly states UST not US Army. The testing co is a fair enough source but given everyone says Army, including myself, I think we've our first instance of miscommunication becoming myth. As best I can see it was UST using an army base to conduct the study.

Takes away from my war time propaganda theory a bit.

 

Marciano once hit a man who evaporated instantly then returned three seconds before he had been hit sporting a long white beard screaming 'Beware Trump....' The Rock was so powerful he'd created a hole in time. True story...