1975 Ring Magazine's 'All-Time Heavyweight Top 10'

Man you're lightning quick on the reply, I didn't even have time to get my edit in to make it more readable.

To answer your post, absolutely!

Frankly, I love reading stuff like this about what people thought the all time rankings were in their eras because people tend to be so iron-clad in their opinions today, so I find it interesting to see what would be looked at as against-the-grain rankings today be accepted as reasonable at the time. Especially when fighters were retired in both cases and are ranked dramatically differently, because that means the only thing that could've possibly changed is public opinion about the exact same career.:thumbsup

 

Here's a couple examples of what I mean:

Sonny Liston goes from not being top 10 in 1975 and below Dempsey and Johnson in both 1975 and 1994, to being ranked above both men in 1998, just 4 years later. Marciano overtakes Dempsey between 75 and 94, and passes Johnson by 98.

Nevermind that obviously, none of these men were fighting in that time frame. Just a little food for thought the next time anyone takes things like rankings a little too seriously.

 

Great points. :good

 

wonder if in 30 years Lewis will over take the likes of Ali.

So far he is edging on Joe Louis lol.

 

Give that **** 10 more yrs & that will be changing like a mofo.

Oops.

 

These echo my thought as well. I remember there being a list in the 50's that had Dempsey on top and Louis was 2nd, and this was after their careers had finished. The real interesting part about that was that most of the people who compiled the list actually saw all these fighters, from Johnson on forward. Yet fast forward 5 decades or so, and their input is either lost or rendered meaningless, as all the fighters have not only retired, they're dead.

Here's a quote from Monte Cox's excellent site.


In 1950, the Associated Press conducted a poll of sportswriters to name the greatest fighter of all-time, pound-for-pound, and Dempsey was the runaway winner, collecting 251 votes. [Joe Louis finished a distant second with 109 votes; Henry Armstrong was third with 13.] The sportswriters of the first half of the century named Dempsey as the greatest fighter they had ever seen. As late as 1962, in the Dec 1962 Ring Magazine, a panel of 40 boxing writers tabbed Dempsey as the greatest heavyweight of all time.

 

Everything depends on who had compiled it. The '75 list (even though Nat was gone by this time) was compiled by a slew of Nat Fleisher's maintstays. All of them elderly and all of them, like Nat, showed a true disdain for Ali. Indeed, I believe it was the accompanying article where they mentioned Ali several times throughout and get this, they were still calling him Clay. However, interspersed in the article there were several references to Ali. It was like they didn't know what to call him let alone where to rank him. It is no surprise that the next generation of writers lean towards their contemporaries.

Scartissue

 

That is comedy goldness of the very highest quality, thanks for that :good

 

Even excluding 70s fighters it was a poor list. No Liston, No Patterson, No Wills, No Langford, No Charles, No Walcott, No Schmelling. Yet Fitz makes 7 and Tunney 6.

 

When I look at the general disdain given to anybody picking a fighter of the last 25 years to defeat Ali, all I see is that the names have changed, but the case is the same- the legend outgrows the man. No surprise that Heavyweight greats tend to have that effect on fans though.

 

The paragraph I laughed my ass off at was mainly about boxing `experts` calling Jack Dempsey the best ever fighter, you must know how wrong they were spouting that nonsense, surely.

 

It's an atrocious list. A list trying to hang on to myth and legend and not reality. Where's Sonny Liston? Where's George Foreman? Hell, Patterson ranks above several of those fighters.

 

Yep, they had to eventually tho, must have killed some of them

 

That's exactly my point my friend- nothing gets the exaggeration of legacies going like a heavyweight champ that can capture the public interest, and Dempsey did that in spades. Over the last 100 years, I'd still say he's one of the four kings of heavyweight "buzz"- the kind of star that had everyone interested in them, win or lose and to a certain measure, became bigger than the sport. The other 3? Louis, Ali, and Tyson.

It's easy for us 60 years after the fact to say how "wrong" it appears that Dempsey was thought of that highly, but I can assure you if this was 1950 and we'd all been there for his rise or heard direct stories of it, we'd be hyping him up the exact same way, if not quite to that extent. I do find it funny that he was voted best overall standard that widely, but I'm not surprised he got that kind of hype because it seems like it usually takes a good 20-30 years after a fighter retires for them to "peak" rankings wise- which would've put it square at 1950.

 

Very astute observation.