Which Of Tyson s Title Opponents Would Have Caused The Biggest Shock..?

Nobody was a bigger shock than Buster. Maybe Carl Williams at #2.

 

Probably Spinks because it would require 12 rounds of perfection

 

Maybe Holmes because regaining the title after 20 defenses would have been huge accomplishment, regardless of Tyson's name.

 

Tyrrell Biggs

 

Holmes comeback and regaining the world heavyweight title would have been shocking.

 

Gotta agree.
It would have been like Old man Foreman x 10.

 

Holmes sounds like a fair answer though, as it so happened, Larry did manage to last the longest out of Mike’s 1988 opponents.

Don’t know if Larry wore it for other fights but, IIRC, he had Shock The World emblazoned on the back of his robe for the Tyson fight.

 

No one was worse than Buster, but apart from him, it would certainly be Bruno or Carl Williams, because after 1988 Tyson looked absolutely dominant; probably no one in history had an aura like that at the time.

 

Per the set odds, Douglas was, apparently, by far the challenger least likely to win so we instantly put him aside to sort out the others.

While some might say hindsight is a wonderful thing, the odds set against Douglas were far fetched - accented more on the perceived and overstated invincibility of Mike which probably pivoted on the 91 second destruction of Spinks more than any other fight.

Suffice to say, many only afforded Buster pretty much the exact amount of time that Spinks managed to last against Tyson - about a minute and a half.

Busters record going had its glitches but wasn’t as bad as the crazy odds suggested, imo.

So, putting Buster back into the line up, is there any way to argue that, based on all info going, Buster perhaps should’ve been at least rated a better chance than old, less than ideally prepared Holmes?

 

Tony Tubbs would have been a shocker

 

Vitali Klitschko did it after four years; Wlad came very close after two. Both were roughly the same age as Larry.
What if Rico or Ngannou had won their boxing debuts? Wouldn't that have been an even bigger shock?

Im convinced that if the Tyson-Holmes fight had never taken place, many people today—considering what happened later—would favor Holmes in hypothetical matchups. From today’s perspective, no one would view a victory for Larry as an upset, and arguments such as "a 38-year-old Larry was better than a 30-year-old Buster" would frequently be cited. After all, Larry performed far better against Holyfield than Buster did—or even Tyson himself.