Better All-Around Fighter: Primo Carnera or Riddick Bowe?

Sure but it would help if I knew exactly what you found so impressive about the outside skills Carnera displayed in the second Sharkey fight. Would you care to elaborate? I'd also be interested in your explanation for why Carnera failed to leverage these impressive outside skills in more fights.

 

BTW, couldn't disagree more. In your lingo, Bowe was clearly a "much greater puncher" than Carnera. If it's not obvious enough on film, just contrast the way that contemporary commentators who saw them live discussed them.

 

Paul Gallico really shredded Carnera in "Pity the Poor Giant":

“When he fought Joe Louis he was defensively but little better than he was the first time I saw him, which, as it happened, was not in Madison Square Garden, but in the smoky, stuffy, subterranean Salle Wagram, a little fight club in Paris where I happened to be one evening when Jeff Dickson was promoting a fight between Primo Carnera, who had been fighting a little less than a year, and one Moise Bouquillon, a light heavyweight who weighed 174 pounds. Monsieur See was experimenting a little with his giant. It was obvious that Bouquillon was going to be unable to hurt hi very much, but what I noted that evening and never forgot was that the giant was likewise unable to hurt the little Frenchman. Curiously, the fight was almost an exact duplicate of the one that Carnera as champion later fought with Loughran. Walter (Good-Time Charley) Friedman was there too. Many years later he told me quite frankly: “Boy, was that a lousy break for us that you come walking into that Salle Wagram that night and see that the big guy can’t punch! Just that night you hadda be there. Leon wanted to see if he could go ten rounds without falling down. And you hadda be there. We coulda got away with a lot more if you don’t walk in there and write stories about how he can’t punch.”

 

Also from Gallico:

“During the fight Carnera hit Loughran more than a dozen of the same uppercuts that had stretched Sharkey twitching on the canvas and never even reddened Tommy’s face. Loughran was a cream-puff puncher and yet he staggered Carnera several times with right hands and was himself never in any kind of danger from a punch….If nothing else, that fight beneath the Miami moon exposed how incompetent Carnera was a bruiser, and how utterly false were the stories about his invincibility, besides casting fresh suspicion upon his knockout of Sharkey. We had all seen Loughran put on the floor by a 175-pounder. If a man weighing around 280 pounds, as Primo did for that fight, hit him flush on the jaw and couldn’t drop him, and yet had knocked out one of the cleverest heavyweights in the business, it wasn’t hard to arrive at a conclusion.”