Best Heavyweight Ring General Aside From Ali and Johnson?

Tunney
Holmes

 

Why should it necisarily be one of those two?

 

Rocky Marciano.

I know this will raise a few eyebrowes, but think about it. He never allowed his opponents to fight from their comfort zone, he set the pace and had a way of turning it into a rough, inside fight.

 

I like this pick, because I like your reason for it.

 

I think that there are many diferent types of ring generalship. I think that depending on criteria the following fighters could be ranked with your top two.

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Gene Tunney

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Ezzard Charles
Joe Walcott
Larry Holmes

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Ring generalship for an offensive fighter requires verry different atributes to the generalship of a defensive fighter. You can excel at one and be poor at the other.

The most outstanding example to my mind taking everything into acount is Sam Langford.

"Whatever da other fella want to do, jus don't let him do it".

 

Tunney
Walcott
Charles
Holmes

 

I concur, although I reckon you might wanna alter the color writing that Larry Holmes is written in to a more burgundy hue.

 

holmes.

 

:good

I agree

 

I don't really buy Ali as a great ring general, so much as a physically gifted tough guy who could psych out many of his challengers. Holmes dominated Norton for seven rounds, to an extent beyond anything Ali ever managed against Ken. Muhammad was also befuddled against Jimmy Young, and for three rounds, Folley got the better of him.

As for Holmes, he was supreme at adapting to unexpectedly adverse conditions in mid-fight. Against a surprising challenge from unheralded Weaver, Larry masterfully set Mike up with the uppercut bomb which decided the match. Against Snipes, Holmes was advancing until Rennie's punch of a lifetime, then adjusted by outboxing him in retreat, until the taunting Snipes was ready to be taken. Louis and Blackburn needed a rematch to plot an effective strategy for taking out Godoy. Larry would have likely figured out and implemented a similar solution in mid-match. Pre-fight planning can be brilliant, but life is not predictable, so the ability to improvise to changing conditions is also important. Of course, if talent is taken as knowing one's own limitations, Larry selected his opposition intelligently. As a middle ager, he really did box the ears off of Mercer and Esch.

While Ali gets credit for ingenuity against Foreman, the reality is that he went with the only approach available to use, his insane toughness. (And let's face it, Muhammad behaved as if he was on PCP during that event. On that occasion, he was a megalomaniacal lunatic, inebriated with himself to an extreme disassociative grandiosity. In layman's terms, he won because he was stark raving mad.)

Corbett, Dempsey, Tunney, Schmeling, Walcott, Charles, and Mike Spinks, are fine additions to Jack Johnson.

In the case of both Frazier and Marciano, they pretty much fought according to how their physical abilities required them to. It doesn't mean they weren't smart, just that the attributes they had restricted their capacity to demonstrate much variance in their performance. They were certainly intelligent enough to understand the primacy of their conditioning.

During Foreman's second career, he was ironically the architect of his own defeat to Tommy Morrison. The Duke called George for some career advice following his devastating kayo loss to Mercer, and Foreman recommended that Tommy relax and loosen up a bit. Against George, it worked. Of course, Foreman kept his own counsel with Dundee in his corner, and regained the title his way. The argument has been made by many that he should have been undefeated through the remainder of his career, and Larry Hazzard has essentially admitted that the inexperienced judges he assigned to the Foreman/Briggs matchup botched the scoring in favor of Briggs. It doesn't diminish George's importance in engineering his own successful comeback.