Which Heavyweight Is Possibly Overrated Because Of Nostalgia?

NM

 

The criteria for who won a round and consequently who won enough rounds to win a fight is ring generalship, clean punching, effective aggression, and defense. It's not who was worse for the wear.

 

I'm counting 17 heavier guys for Louis and a number of them were top 10 ranked.
Carnera, Baer, Nova, Godoy, Galento, Simon, and Buddy Baer were all top 10 ranked compared to only Williams for Liston so that's a pretty big difference (7 vs 1). Maybe you could throw out Galento since he was fat.

Moreover I don't see any Liston victims being top 10 heavyweights today. They are simply too small or too chinny.

Who did Liston beat who would make it into the top 10 the last few years? Floyd would be going up against massive punchers 60, 70 pounds heavier.

 

Johansson did come close though when he stopped him early in fight one and dropped him twice in round one of fight 3.
And it's a lot easier to avoid early kayo losses if you don't fight punchers.

If Patterson fought Marciano or Foreman (odd to think his era overlapped with both of them) or even Williams I would be very interested to see how he handled their power in contrast to Liston.

 

Well, Ingo didn’t really come close. Floyd simply kept getting back up after numerous KDs despite his dazed state and increasing vulnerability.

For Floyd’s proven durability, prior KDs notwithstanding, I would look more to his post Liston fights against good hitters.

Being KD’d is one thing, but being KO’d outright is a somewhat different thing again.

Rocky was past it as at the Moore fight at the least but Patterson vs Williams would’ve been a very interesting fight.

People can try and reason why Floyd was never obligated to fight Williams but that doesn’t mean that Floyd might not have engaged an irrefurably eligible Big Cat at any rate. Floyd did avoid his #1 and #2 after all.

It’s funny/ironic that some people will demand an air right case and nothing less for eligibility whilst accepting, at the same, obviously ineligible (or much less eligible) fighters having been accommodated a title shot.

 

Good points, especially on Patterson's somewhat lacklustre title reign. Ultimately, Cus D'Amato was too protective over Floyd Patterson. Hence, why Patterson chose to separate from him in order to finally fight Liston (even though Patterson himself knew he stood no choice).

 

Correct. Otherwise, Ali would've won the Fight of the Century, since he wasn't as damaged post-fight as Frazier.

 

I find the categories of ring generalship and defence a little bit strange.

They are simply means to a material, and far more easily score-able ends - that being who’s landing what, how often and the degree of interpreted damage.

Also, why is there so called “effective aggression”?

You’re certainly not going to factor “ineffective aggression” and you can still obviously be effective without it being driven by or contained within a necessarily aggressive approach.

Remember the days when they used to say that any individual’s scoring of a fight would heavily depend on their subjective leaning to either the aggressive style or the style of the boxer?

Imo, that was hardly calling for the application of uniform scoring criteria. Lol.