Pick The Darkhorse Heavyweight GOAT.

Late to the party but I’m backing Liston also.

Ridiculously underrated by some.

 

LL was getting out-fought by Vitali. Vitali lost that fight because he was cut (a cut that came because of a head-clash). LL landed some good uppercuts but he was losing that fight.
LL only took over the HW division after the top guys had all faded. He beat Tyson and Holyfield when they were shot.
I would hardly consider his win against McCall to be 'setting the record straight' considering the fact that McCall was having a mental breakdown and refusing to engage in the fight. In any case losing to fighters of that calibre is inexcusable for a supposed 'ATG'. Louis and the other atg's you mentioned never lost to opponents like that in their prime. He got tapped on the chin twice and stayed down (or at least didn't beat the count) both times.
There's also the issue of his timidity and his reluctance to take any risks and 'go for the kill' unless he was 100% certain. He pretty much gave birth to the boring 'jab-and-grab' style that the Klitchko's were so reviled for in their heyday - he was the Proto-Klitschko. Could you imagine Louis or Dempsey or Frazier (insert your own dangerous heavyweight) just standing there and watching a guy breakdown in front of them and not immediately putting them down? Never understood the LL approbation.

 

You raise some fair critiques, I didn’t mean to imply McCall was setting the record straight I was talking about Rahman LL never beat McCall. The Vitali bout, I remember it was VK slowing down and LL coming on strong, good bout LL was old and pulled out the win regardless. I’m not overly high on Lennox I think Tyson executes him if he’s “on” and I’d be interested to see how Holyfield tackles him before he got too big, i still favour Lennox doe over the smaller Holy. I think the version LL beat was as good as the one who beat Tyson but that’s my 0.2$.

 

It seems like there is no serious discussion as to who the GOAT heavyweight is, it's always Ali, Rrght or wrong. When other names are mentioned it's Louis, Marciano, Tyson, Lewis or now Usyk.
My real dark horses for the title GOAT heavyweight are Larry Holmes ( who gets totally dissed ) and Vitali ( would have been undisputed if not for brotherly love ).

 

It was caused by a right hand. Stop with the BS. And it was his final fight. Should we judge Louis on his performance vs. Marciano, Ali vs. Berbick, Frazier vs. Jumbo?

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Was Ruddock fading? Was Bowe, who ran like a chicken, fading? Was Golota fading after twice schooling Bowe? Was Bruno, holding a belt, fading? Moorer and Foreman wanted no part of Lennox.

Did McCall sign the contract? His preparation is on him. What's Lennox supposed to do, give him 3 rematches and hope a prepared, non-cracked out version shows up? 90% of the game is half mental. A W is a W by any other name.

Can you imagine Dempsey and Frazier having the length of career against the murderer's row of power punchers that Lewis face? No, you can not. Because their kill-or-be-killed style would have led them to seeing stars half the time. Effectiveness and longevity are not friends with risk taking fight styles.

Lewis is very close to being the GOAT. And in a head-to-head sense, I would lean his way.

 

Joe Frazier, doesn't make a lot of top 10's but whooped the #1 guy on a lot of top 10's, one of the greatest victories in sports and Philly is like that Balboa guy was really great, gets massively downgraded because of his losses to Foreman when Foreman himself questioned how he would do vs FOTC Frazier

 

Fair enough

 

Thought it was an accidental clash of heads, must've misremembered.

I never made some grand judgment on his career on the basis of the Vitali fight, just pointed out that he was losing.

I don't hold Ruddock or Golota in particularly high regard. What did either of them ever do? Riddick Bowe ducked that fight because he knew that he didn't have anything for LL. He had clearly stopped taking Boxing seriously, as evidenced by his lackluster performances against the tomato can Andrew Golota. Do you think Lewis would've beaten him if they fought in '93 or '94?

LL won the McCall rematch on paper. Yes. But he didn't 'set the record straight'.

Dempsey was probably one of the more defensively responsible fighters at HW, he had more trouble with technical boxers. He had a longer career than LL and lived to his mid-80's, he also faced fighters of similar size. There isn't a single fighter that Lewis knocked out that a prime Frazier wouldn't have taken out quicker. Outside of Foreman and Ali in Manila, nobody ever out-fought him.

Like I said LL got tapped on the chin twice and was put down both times. Never showed the heart of a champion. That goes a long way in my opinion. All the aforementioned ATGs got of the floor to win. Lewis (and also Tyson) are the only ones that never won a fight after being knocked down.

You are entitled to your opinion. I obviously do not share your high opinion of LL. We can leave it at that.

 

Politics aside, Stevenson should be in the Hall of fame which is the boxing hall of fame not the professional boxing hall of fame.

 

Jack Johnson deserves a mention.

With a large part of the USA hoping he'd lose and all the pressures pressed against him by certain parts of American society, he still thrived against many great fighters and what little Ive seen of footage of him he seems to have had the tools to inflict most boxers this side of Ali and Marciano defeat and I bet he'd won at least one of 3 against those two.

I dont think his loss to Willard was a set up necessarily, although maybe t was because of political pressure but Willard was much bigger, Willard was also a hard hitter, he was younger, and Johnson obviously then was much older and also more prone to have trained less and to the Havana heat therefore affecting him and trust me I never stepped in Cuba but I lived in Puerto Rico 17 years of my life and I know all about that heat and humidity. Its a miracle we survived our afternoon basketball games without a heart attack there but we were teenagers!

Johnson in his prime was a very tough one to beat,

 

George Foreman...









...because, he's Big George Foreman (of course!!!).




(Right, back into "the sticks" now to watch Foreman in his greatest ever performance against Jimmy Young)

 

If Foreman didn’t have the loss to Young he would be higher rated, he only lost to Ali in his prime outside of Young, and the Young and Lyle fights were George in a mental wilderness where he’d lost belief in himself.
To come back as he did and win a proper title at 45 is pretty amazing. I don’t care if it was Moorer he beat, Moorer isn’t Ali but he was unbeaten and had just beaten Holyfield. He was hardly the bum many portray him as. There’s only one big George

 

Yeah - Foreman is immortalized for that feat of late-stage reemergence. Deservedly so, in my book.

The bigger 'What-if' for me is where he'd have been placed, had he pulled off the 'W' in Zaire. (And, conversely, how would that have impacted Ali's rating?)

Much hinged on that one event.

 

Gene Tunney all the way. 85-1 and gets absolutely no credit because he beat the fan favorite of the day.

 

Ruddock was #1 ranked by the WBC. He was Ring's #3 in their annual report behind Vander and Tyson, neither of whom were available to fight Lennox.

But he would have had to fight Lewis in 93, after he had beaten Vander and was at the absolute peak of his career. This is well before Golota. And he was a coward. I would pick Lewis to KO him.

Again, it wasn't Lewis' fault that McCall didn't prepare. Was he supposed to wait around until McCall's feels were just right? Professionalism is a big part of Professional Boxing. He beat the man that signed to meet him in the ring. We can ask no more or insist upon imaginary conditions.

He used a lot of energy moving around until he didn't, got tired and then had huge defensive lapses. He also chose a hodge podge of underwhelming hype jobs to face in title defenses who wouldn't exploit the fact that he was largely a 4 round fighter, a very good 4 round fighter, but a guy without much of a Plan B.

Lewis had a 14 year career fighting at least once a year and as much as 8 times. He was fighting for the Euro title in his 14th fight and it was almost exclusively elite competition until his 44th fight. Dempsey had a 13 year career, taking 3 years off entirely, fighting his first decent opponent (and losing) in approximately his 27th fight.

Who was a harder puncher that Frazier beat than... (inhale) Vitali, Tyson, Rahman, Tua, Grant, Briggs, McCall, Morrison, Bruno, Tucker, Ruddock, Mason... hell, I'll even go Holyfield and Mercer? There's a reason that Frazier beat who he beat and lost to who he lost. And no, Frazier would not have taken these guys out "quicker". Most he wouldn't have taken out at all.
Outside of Foreman and Ali in Manila, nobody ever out-fought him.