Where do you rank Tyson Fury in ATG Heavyweight Lists?

I like your list and the point you were trying to make but I am going to mention my one true disagreement. Based strictly on heavyweight fights, I have a hard time putting Michael Spinks ahead of Fury. I just don't feel like he fought enough at heavyweight and the one loss was devastating.

 

Very true.

 

I have him 17th

1. Muhammed Ali
2. Joe Louis
3. Oleksandr Usyk
4. Rocky Marciano
5. Wladimir Klitschko
6. Lennox Lewis
7. Jack Dempsey
8. George Foreman
9. Larry Holmes
10. Jack Johnson
11. Sonny Liston
12. Joe Frazier
13. Evander Holyfield
14. Mike Tyson
15. Vitali Klitschko
16. Gene Tunney
17. Tyson Fury
18. Max Schmeling
19. Riddick Bowe
20. Anthony Joshua

 

Whereas I disagree on a lot of these, its the kind of list that I find fair.

 

He's somewhere between 35 and 50.

Beating an old faded Klitschko and Wilder were okay but not great.

But his resume has no depth - instead of fighting contenders, he fought journeymen like Schwarz, Seferi and fringe contender Chisora X3. He deserved to lose to Ngannou and with honest referees, the first Usyk fight and the Wallin fight would have been TKO losses.

And then there's the positive test for steroid abuse.

 

Gerry Cooney beats Tyson Fury to a pulp. Wouldnt last 2 rounds

 

The lack of rematch with Wlad is an asterisk.

The PED's are an asterisk.

The limited depth on his resume isn't the best.
The huge fluctuations in performance aren't ideal for ranking too high, either.

Run his career several times over and this one is quite likely the only one he gets to Usyk undefeated.... If he gets there at all... He got very lucky at times (though I'm not sure Ngannou was one of them).


Outside 30 should definitely have been a poll option - it doesn't take bias to get there.

 

If he fights and beats Joshua 16th-20th.
If he fights and loses to Joshua 21st-25th.
If he doesn't fight again 16th-20th.

 

No.

 

The problem with saying this is that Cooney got very heavily into booze and cocaine, and never really had a prime. The guy who beat Norton would have beat a lot of guys to a pulp. But that guy was already mostly gone by the time he lost to Holmes, and long gone by Spinks.

 

Did Fury really have a prime, either, though?

(Or at least one that's fair to judge him on)

Around the time of the stinkout against Wlad he was on the PED's and got caught with them - can we judge him as if that was just his prime performance levels as if he was clean when he likely wasn't?

And then the return after booze and cocaine... Extremely inconsistent performance levels, looked very good a couple of times and absolutely shocking a few as well.

Where's the consistent and clean run that's a legit prime?

 

If he was on PEDs...and to be fair I still have my questions about that...he was on them for the Hammer fight. He passed a number of tests between Hammer and Wlad.

I don't doubt that he is the kind of guy who would use PEDs...I don't doubt that he would load his gloves with eggweights and use gypsy magic if it he could get away with it. But again, I don't get why they would have allowed a title fight to go on if they had him dead to rights for PEDs. I also don't know why they folded when he threatened to sue and settled it for basically conceding in writing that he took them but allowed him to come back without a second more time added to his cocaine bust. To be fair, the whole thing is still, TO THIS DAY(!) a bit fishy to me. And though they were claiming elevated levels, it was a naturally occurring substance that he supposedly had in his system, so maybe they really weren't so sure that it wasn't a result of uncastrated boar, or whatever, and only became so when Fury became a political figure.

Not saying he didn't do them, but I will never 100% believe it until UKAD comes out and explains their own egregious errors.

 

I remember something you said about Roy Jones, once a PED user always a PED user.

 

Had you read the post, you would know that the issue is that UKAD acted very suspiciously, allowing the fight with Wlad to go on, then attempting to make something of it after the fact, and then essentially backing down. I don't know what to make of this, and I don't believe that UKAD had what they were claiming, since it is indeed a naturally occurring substance that Fury was found to have elvated levels of.

I have explained it twice, and will not explain it a third time.

 

Furys in that drug cheat conversation now, just like Roy