Was Ali really still a great fighter when he beat Earnie Shavers?

at that moment, no. still tough as nails though. and honestly? to tough for his own good. i.m.h.o., the four fights that destroyed him were foreman, shavers, frazier 3, and holmes. in each, he took TREMENDOUS punishment. and it showed in every fight after each one. he was diminishing. by the time with berbick, he should have been retired.

 

But Shavers & fighters like him are elite-he had been one of the very best HWs in the world for years.
Which means for years he would be favored in a boxing match against all but a very few humans on the planet.
Likely in a bare knuckle fight too.

I get you are saying that he was not historically great, but that is a different, extremely rarefied standard.
Nobody who is among the top 10-assuming they deserved the rankingt-let alone the top handful for years, & earns a few title shots, is anything like "lower level".

Even though someone like he & Wilder are limited in how well-rounded their skill sets are, given who they could & did beat, they are still the definition of an elite HW.

 

You didn't take my words in context. I said that Ali couldn't dominate lower level fighters THAN HIS OWN LEVEL. I mean, Ali was HW champion level fighter for over a decade and he usually didn't struggle against fighters that were clearly inferior to him.

 

Ali-Norton III: 9-6 Norton

 

Yo Cec

I do hope you know I was joking. Maybe not?

 

Hell yeah! And up at 4? What the….? I hope it was clear I was joking - a light reply to JT’s prior post. Ali took incredible shots which is exactly how he earned his reputation for an amazing chin.

 

Actually you did not say that at all. Your whole quote, which a number of people have contested, was...

"Well, I think we came up with quite a bit different conclusions from this fight. I see this as Ali finally reaching the point when he could no longer dominate lower level fighters and Shavers couldn't take advantage of it. The fight was ugly to watch".

Maybe you

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Totally agree. Among the many other right hands landed, power aside, the right hand Earnie triggered in round 2 was a great looking punch - very fast, very well executed, caught Ali on the move. Quite a few of Earnie’s punches had that 1-2 sec delay before loss of body control, as if the punch was reverberating all the way down from head to feet - which made them even more dramatic.

Like the old Looney Toon Cartoons when the character realises they’re walking on thin air after running off a cliff - they know they should be falling - and, at that very moment of realisation, they do fall. Okay, that’s just my weird analogy. LOL.

 

I didn't write "low level", I wrote lower level. I don't know you can come up with the conclusion that I did the former.

 

I cut & pasted your quote, you did write "lower level"-that is not in contention.
You have shifted the goal posts.
You did not say nor imply that lower level meant lower than Ali.
That is what people are objecting to.

Again the smaller point is that by the time Ali faced Shavers, even though he had a clear stylistic advantage, it was a close, somewhat controversial fight despite Ali's Heroics: because of Ali's decline, Shavers WAS on his level by then.

But the larger point is your words paint Shavers as not a top, elite HW-which he was for years, despite his flaws.
I am not saying you intended to do this, but the language you chose communicates this.

 

It's always been my opinion that Ali did n't really take too much punishment in the Foreman fight. Okay,he was tagged by a few big shots but he took the majority of them to the body. Most of the headshots he avoided or parried. I agree with you about the rest.

 

Greatest defense in history!!!! Multiple ATG's couldn't land a single flush shot!!!!!!!

 

For sh*ts and giggles, interesting to compare Frazier’s round 15 left hook in FOTC to Shaver’s round 2 right hand at MSQ 1977 to ponder which single shot was the most powerful.

It might seem easy to choose the harder punch - opting for the one that yielded the KD. But it was round 15, both fighters well fatigued - perhaps both power and opposing resilience proportionally degraded - BUT it still looked like a helluva punch in any context, whether it had been round 1 or round 15.

On the other hand, a fresh Shavers landed flush on Ali early and the ropes, which Ali grabbed on to when he teetered back, might or might not have saved Ali from going down.

I’d probably pick Frazier’s left hook but then Joe also landed some more hellacious hooks after Ali arose (someone else observed this) - and I don’t know if they weren’t even harder than the KD shot - one of those hooks landing while Ali was leaning on the ropes which would’ve provided some support.

How Ali took those we’ll never know…..

 

If I said "lower level", it means that it has to be relative to some point of reference, right? You can't be "lower level" in absolute sense.
I think that's all about semantics though, we shouldn't spend too much time on that.

That depends on how you define "elite" and "top". Shavers certainly was among the best HWs in the world at some point of his career, but I'm not sure I'd call him elite in a way most people use this word here.

 

Shavers round 2 right hand all day i'd think. A lot of things went into that 15th round KD.