Both Olympic Gold Medallists and next big thing in heavyweight boxing with an alphabet world title already under their belt, both highly skilled boxers with a devestating punch entering the fight as a heavy favorite, and both getting knocked out by a sucker punch landed by a hard hitting yet somewhat overlooked challenger, only to come back as a better fighter and rule the division for a long long time. Wlad put together quite a resume by now including big wins over former, reigning and likely future world champions and beat a bunch of unbeaten contenders as well, so they call it the Klitschko era as they named the previous one after Lewis. Which upset do you consider bigger and why?
hmmmm interesting. i see rahman tko lewis as a much bigger upset. but yes mccall was by far the bigger of these two. he was a journeyman going into that fight. lewis was the man. wlad had shown weaknesses in the purrity fight.
hmm I think alot of people would agree that younger verson of Lewis was not his best. I think his loss to Rahman would be considered a bigger upset. So I say about the same. Neither fighters I think were household names when they had those losses.
I picked the 3rd option, and for some reason, I found - and still find both knockouts incredibly funny. Something about how they both dropped...
Tricky. Lennox is better than Wlad but McCall is better than Sanders... As Lewis is an atg heavy /i say his loss was a bigger upset.
Very close to call both were in similar positions. I don't think many thought of Lewis as the heir apparent though as Bowe and Holyfield were more highly regarded at that time. Wlad was being pushed by HBO as the next dominant champion but he had already lost to Puritty so I'd say the Lewis loss to McCall was the slightly bigger upset.
At the time, Lewis was still unproven as an ATG candidate and McCall seemed to be fairly well respected as I remember. Sanders, I didn't think, would stand much of a chance against Wlad. Although in retrospect Lewis' loss was the bigger fight as he is now considered an ATG, at the time I don't think it was quite as suprising as Wlad's loss to Sanders.
Bowe was already taking alot of heat for not facing Lewis, who had Ko'd him for the gold Medal...Many thought Lewis would be the best of the bunch after his destruction of Ruddock and Bowe's obvious avoidance of him... Lewis was a household name...
