About Bruno's power..........

As a Brit I totally agree.

Frank was more a UK celebrity. He was in commercials, had a great rapport with BBC presenter Harry Carpenter. Hell he even had his own catchphrase 'Know whatI mean, arry'
But he was never ever a top flight boxer - Every decent boxer he faced beat him.
He is the bluprint for Amir Khan - Get as much milage from a limited boxer as you can.

I would regard him as a 2nd tier fighter on parr with [but not as good as] Mercer or Ruddock

 

He stunned Tyson just as much as Ruddock. So no power deficit there.

A single punch from him made the granite chinned McCall literally fly across the friggin' ring into the ropes. Probably as hard as McCall's ever been hit in there.

 

I don't think you can fault his power. As a one-punch hitter, he was always near the top in his era.
He had his problems as a fighter, but power wasn't one of them, imo.

 

Bruno had superb power.

 

His damned jab was like a lot of heavyweights straight right hands.

And who's going to fault him vs. Bugner?

Bugner was god damned near indestructable? Who ever put him down?

Shaver's? Frazier with a bodyshot?

Woopty friggin' doo.

 

There is no debate about Bruno's power IMO. It was the one thing about him (possibly jab aside) that was world class.

 

You could see Bruno was a huge puncher just by watching the kind of knockouts he scored.

 

Bruno had a clubbing power coming from having great strength.

He stopped a lot of the 20-40 ranked fighters who normally would go the distance with contenders. That in fact hurt Bruno as he never really learnt how to pace himself and that cost him in big fights.

Someone like a Tyson had timing based power, that looked a lot more spectacular than Bruno and also could be used more effectively against the very best.

 

Big Frank had great KO power but threw punches like he was underwater at world class level. Just too slow and robotic. I actually think Bruno had raw power comparable to someone like Tyson, but Mike's speed and timing made it a hundred times more effective.

 

Overall, Frank Bruno was a decent fighter. Good enough to beat the middle-rung and even the mid-upper rung fighters. But not good enough to beat the really good ones, except for Coetzee and McCall maybe. Bugner was old and past his best when Frank beat him.

As far as his power was concerned, I would say that he had very good power, just below those of the truly great ones like Foreman, Tyson, Shavers, Liston, etc.

 

If he'd ever become a smoother boxer, been able to throw in better combinations, he could've scored some frightening knockouts. I think he could've actually stood to lose some of that muscle, it made him a little stiff and it sometimes felt like an added drain on his stamina.

 

He hit very very hard, but he also hit SLOW, so the good world-class fighters were unlikely to be KO'd by him, they'd see his punches coming, enough to take a lot of the steam off them if not totally avoid them.
Guys like Witherspoon, McCall, Lewis, Tyson - they caught some hard punches that certainly gave them great discomfort, but they were all too good (or just too durable in McCall's case) to be knocked out by such a slow or predictable fighter as Bruno was.

Bruno was one of those fighters you figure would lots of world-class fighters would be very confident of WINNING against, but also the kind of beast who any one of them might not really look forward to facing.

 

215-220 would of been a great weight for Bruno, in my opinion, which he was at for a few years, anyway.

His career high weight from his last two fights against McCall and Tyson was 247 pounds. At that career high weight he actually went 12 rounds when he took the belt from McCall.

It's weird.

Even when he was 230 pounds he won back to back 8th round stoppages in 88', one of them against the ultra durable Joe Bugner.

Weird one, that guy.