Longest Knockout Streaks In Boxing

As of today, leaderboard is:

1. LaMar Freeman "Cedar City Bomber" Clark - American heavyweight, ran himself to 42-0 (41), winning his pro debut on points and then scoring forty-one consecutive stoppages before stepping up in class and getting exposed thrice over (by Bartolo Soni, Pete Rademacher, and Muhammad Ali). Of those 41 men that he knocked out however, 27 were making their pro debut - making this streak, if numerically significant in the record books, maybe not exactly the stuff of legend. Lots of these stiffs would make most modern Thai fighters with their padded forty-odd-and-0 records blush.
   
   
2. Donald Wayne "The Man of Steel / Don" Steele - American heavyweight. Technically speaking, the stocky trucker knocked out 42 men in a row (which ought to put him at #1, just ahead of Clark) but his third match, versus David Nelson, was unsanctioned - and thus goes down on his official record as "No Contest". Starting the count then with his subsequent KO victory after Nelson, his streak hit 39 before he ran afoul of Danish puncher and Olympic bronze medalist Brian Nielsen. Only nine of the 39 were debutants, an improvement over Clark's percentage (in fact, proportionately, only a third as many).
   
   
3. William McKinley "Blackjack Billy" Fox - American light heavyweight, went into his challenge of Gus Lesnevich with a 36-0 record. All of those victories were by KO. While not as dire as Clark's opposition, these 36 were at best fringe contenders. Lesnevich ultimately showed the difference in class, dominating all but one round and stopping Fox in 10. A year later he would blitz Fox in a questionably-earned rematch (with LaMotta going in the proverbial tank in Fox's directly preceding bout).
   
   
4. Rodolfo "El Gato" González - Mexican lightweight, slugged his way to a fearsome 33-0 (33) on the domestic scene. This was an entire decade before González - incidentally José Becerra's cousin, and sparring partner of Mando Ramos and Carlos Palomino - would retire Eudibiel Guillén "Chango Carmona" Chapín to claim the WBC lightweight championship of the world. Of his sequential first 33 victims, granted, 24 of them were making their pro debut - but on balance I'm willing to err on the side of putting a little more stock in the merits and toughness of novices from the mean streets of Michoacán than in Clark's fodder over the same time period ('59-60) in Utah.
   
   
5. Wilfredo "Bazooka" Gómez Rivera - Puerto Rican super bantamweight, debuted with a draw but over the next nearly 7 years would halt every contest inside schedule. A total of 32 destructive knockouts, encompassing the majority of his reign at 122lbs. If not for the intervention of another ATG by the name of Salvador Sánchez Narváez, who knows how much further than 32 that number may have swelled to - certainly, the following year, Bazooka had no problem picking up where he left off. He would stop eight consecutive foes (including four more super bantamweight title defenses) between his unsuccessful WBC featherweight title challenge against Sánchez and his successful one against Juan LaPorte three years later.
   
   
6. Deontay Leshun "The Bronze Bomber" Wilder" - American heavyweight, tied with Gómez for 5th place with 32 knockouts in a row. Bermane Stiverne, in their first meeting, would extend him the full twelve round distance to prevent Wilder from breaking Bazooka's streak - not that Wilder minded, as he got his first world championship in the bargain with his UD victory. Much like Fox's, the opposition faced by Wilder before his first world title shot is somewhere in that vastness that soars high above LaMar Clark's quantity-over-quality 42-0 but still doesn't occupy the same atmospheres as eventual three division champ Gómez's legacy-making 32.

By far the most impressive there IMO, in terms of substance, is Gómez's. If you want to exclude him and Clark on the basis of their debuts (and Steele due to his unsanctioned knockout turned NC) and look more narrowly at the longest KO streaks to start a career, then it's down to Fox followed by González and then Wilder as the "Big Three" worth chasing.




We may or may not see any of the above displaced in our lifetimes. I'm not holding my breath for anyone to even crack thirty in a row anytime soon. Currently the longest active kayo streaks in the sport are:

1. Alessandro "Rognoso" Riguccini, 20 KOs
   
   
2. Nelson "The Albanian Eagle" Hysa, 17 KOs
   
   
3. Naoya "The Monster" Inoue & Dayán "Dynamite" González, 11 KOs
   
   
4. Andy "Da Blade" Hiraoka, Luqmaan "Prince" Patel, Bek Nurmaganbet, and Subaru Murata, 10 KOs
   
   
5. Armando Martínez Rabi, Jadier "One Billion" Herrera Montero, Alejandro Luis "El Cuervo" Silva, Abdullah Mason, Mikito "Iron Fist" Nakano, and Enriko Moses "The Wrecking Ball" Itauma, 9 KOs
   
   
6. Riku Masuda, Kemahl "The Hitman" Russell, and Joshuah Lupia, 8 KOs
   
   
7. Hovhannes Bachkov, Michał "Zły Chłopiec (Naughty Boy)" Cieślak, and Osleys "El Tornado" Iglesias Estrada, 7 KOs
   
   
8. Isaac "La Bestia" Lucero, Emiliano Fernando "El General" Vargas, Bekman Soilybayev, Ernesto "Tito" Mercado, and John "The Beast" Mannu, 6 KOs
   
   
9. Euri Cedeño Martínez, Jack "El Terrier" Turner, Frederick Gleluo "Pretty Boy" Kiwitt, Riku Kunimoto, Daud "Cino" Yordan, Hayato Tsutsumi, Miguel Ángel "Fantastico" Esparza Cruz, Masamichi "Yabuki" Satô, and Ağıt "Big Puma" Kabayel, 5 KOs
   
   
10. dozens-way tie (beyond my patience to enumerate) at 4 KOs

(Gervonta Davis, btw, managed to sandwich 16 between his UD wins over Germán Meraz and Isaac Cruz...closest I can find in very recent memory to bettering Hysa or Riguccini)

That's from everyone in the BoxRec top 500 p4p (presumably including just about anybody world-ranked...or at least it sure as hell ought to) - took me an hour to go through checking one by one manually. A mere 34 men have current stoppage streaks of more than 4 in a row. Everybody else, if they're not coming off a loss or a points victory or draw or No Contest, has between 1-4. Subtract the nine-way tie for 9th place, and you have just 25 boxers with six or more. Just eight in double-digits - and of those, only Naoya Inoue is facing world class competition. Er, he is sometimes, anyway.

Riguccini and Hysa might pump their numbers up into the mid or even high twenties, but neither is particularly young. They'd have to really scrape the bottom of the barrel to pad themselves up to Wilder/Gómez territory. Inoue is himself 32 years old, and it has taken him six years to build up an 11-0 streak. He would need to triple it to bump anybody off the all-time list. Great as he is, don't see that happening. Especially if he keeps moving up in weight and facing ranked contenders, eventually somebody's going to become the first since Donaire to last 12 (if maybe not beat him).

 

That'll make him #2...just edited him in.

 

Tyrone Brunson's streak was 19-0, all victories by 1st round stoppage (broken when he drew with Antonio Soriano). Seven years later his KO1 streak would be broken by Yemeni strawweight Ali Raymi. While the legitimacy of much of Raymi's career has long been questioned, he would finish with a record of 25-0 - all twenty-five victories by stoppage - before he was killed. The first 21 came in the 1st round - meaning he only broke Brunson's streak by a single fight.

The closest anyone has come to breaking that KO1 streak since is Edgar Berlanga, going 16-0 with sixteen stopped inside a round before Demond Nicholson spoiled the party by stretching him eight.

 

Absolutely agree, Clark may formally hold the distinction as #1 but his streak of knockouts may as well be a streak of piss if you put it up against the likes of El Gato's or Blackjack Billy's (or hell, even the Bronze Bomber's) ...let alone Bazooka's.

Very similar IMO to Ali Raymi's situation. He may have a longer official KO1 streak than Brunson, Berlanga or Valero but - there's a pretty heavy asterisk beside that. And that's with me not really rating any of those guys' streak opposition (besides maybe Antonio Demarco and Vicente Mosquera, both of whom came very close to snapping Valero's). The three of them were at least honest-to-goodness, on-the-level (if low-level) prizefighters facing live bodies and not willing Yemeni & Somali "co-stars".

 

Honorable mention to gloved pioneer John Lawrence "The Boston Strong Boy" Sullivan - scoring 25 straight knockouts to start his MoQ run. (broken when George M. Robinson took a literal dive onto the canvas without a punch landing and was disqualified)

Had the coward Robinson taken his lumps like a man, and factoring in Sullivan's subsequent stoppages before meeting Alf Greenfield, the streak would have hit 31.

We unfortunately don't have complete data on his bareknuckle career - just three recorded bouts, but it could have been far more.

 

Snapped by a couple of great fighters, Zarate & Byrd.

 

To knock him out, absolutely. Byrd should have (in hindsight) been given a little more credit than he was heading in...I think a 100-1 underdog or something dumb like that? He was a very skilled operator in his prime at 29 years old, coming in 30-1 and Ike was a much bigger one-punch KO artist than Vitali was.

Byrd was down on the cards when the shoulder injury forced Klitschko to quit, but he still managed to bag a couple of rounds and land 50% of his power shots overall on an unbeaten Klitschko - and that was coming off less than a week and a half's notice! (it's often forgotten that VK was supposed to face Razor Ruddock that night; honestly by 2000, Byrd was an upgrade over Ruddock)