You are looking at this the wrong way. Liston woudl have beaten Ali at the time of his first fight with Patterson, and after that Ali capitalizes on his lack of focus. Ali is only trading experience between fights, while Liston is trading professionalism.
I think Liston could’ve got a decision when he actually fought Ali. I had him up on the cards but it was very close and I think I’m in a minority there. I suppose it depended on Liston more than anything.
Voting for Cooper as I think had Ali played around like he did against Cooper, Liston would’ve taken his head off.
I don’t see any way to even make a reasonable guess. Ali obviously would have fought the feared heavyweight champion Liston completely differently than how he fought any of his actual pre-1964 opponents. For all we know, any of those versions of Ali reasonably could have beaten Liston.
I assume this is subject to their true, concurrent time lines. I will stick with that. Other permutations might’ve been 1) at what point in Ali’s career would he have been reasonably favoured to beat the prime version of Liston? OR 2) what is the earliest version of Ali that could’ve taken the 64 version of Liston that Ali did actually beat? Keeping it simple as per and in line with my first paragraph, I would say the Cooper fight also. Though a bit careless vs Henry, Ali was still growing and filling out and he really came home nicely at age 22 yo to land at an optimally (virtually) coordinated 210 lbs for Miami.
