Most embarrassing performance from a major heavyweight champion

Marciano defending against a short, butterball, no-power, no hoper named Don Cockell and having to foul and butt his way to finally getting the obliging ref to intervene in affairs in the 9th. Marciano threw all his mythological power against a guy 6 times previously stopped (mostly at middleweight) to no results.

 

Fury's performance against Ngannou was disgusting.

The fact we had to wait a year from his previous fight to fighting someone with no wins in boxing was a joke.

 

If and when Verhoeven fights next against a rated HW contender, the outcome and complexion of same will provide for better context to more accurately rate Usyk’s own performance against Rico.

I mean, if Rico gets dominated and blown away in his next HW fight (ala Ngannou vs AJ) it seems that could give cause for people to rate Usyk’s own performance vs Rico as being even less than what they already have it pegged at.

I should add that even if a performance is or appears to be relatively embarrassing, certain contexts and factors, such as age, number of fights, accrued wear/tear etc. can be reasonably taken on board for said fight not to necessarily have any impact on legacy.

 

Well, against Ngannou, when the going got tougher than expected Tyson did resort to blatant fouling.

The deliberate elbow should’ve seen at least a point deduction which then would’ve resulted in a split draw result.

As he always has done, despite his struggles against Verhoeven, Usyk kept it very clean. Big credit to him for that.

 

It's Douglas playing dead in round 2 against Holyfield.

 

I don't think any of these are that embarrassing bc you're downplaying Rahman and Ruiz and piling in early and late career performances.

I guess it's Fury, but he did enough to win and probably didn't care at all about that fight going in.

 

Was the wbc not on the line though?

 

No. It wasn’t on the line.

 

Douglas was already counting the payday before he went in to any kind of camp

 

Rahman was the top US based contender after Grant, Tua, and Ibeabuchi got cleared out.

I put down my money to attend the Joshua—Ruiz fight bc I knew that Ruiz was good. I wouldn’t have been there if it were if Trevor Bryan got the call. Ruiz was obviously around Parker’s level since he went on the road and had a pretty much even fight with him.

 

The point being that calling prime contenders fringe is bending the truth. They weren’t Derrick Chisora.

 

As far as embarrassing goes, Vitali against Byrd was bad. He had a serious injury but it was terrible optics in a fight he locked away and few viewers understood how bad the injury was.