Comparing Tyson's Chin To Marciano's - Sacriledge?

You haven't even seen the Lowry and Simmons fights and you're accusing the reporters who were there of lying or grossly exaggerating about what happened. You're dismissing the reports purely on the grounds that a later, improved version of Marciano did well against better fighters. That's pathetic.

Sonny Liston got knocked down by Marty Marshall in an early fight, and had his jaw broken by him in an even earlier one ..... but I guess those things couldn't have really happened either, because of what we see when we watch Sonny against Cleveland Williams on film !

If Clay-Cooper hadn't been filmed or photographed I guess we'd surmise that stories of Clay being knocked down hard and looking glassy eyed must be exaggeration because we see a later Ali taking the best of George Foreman's punches ....

I think Marciano had a GREAT chin, as proven by his championship fights.
But that doesn't mean we have to dismiss reports of him being badly hurt in earlier fights as untrue.

 

Tat jab was the key weapon against Tyson he really planted his feet on it. In earlier thread it was argued that a number of fighters from that period would have beaten Tyson, but none had a jab like Douglas.

 

Nunn v Kalambay ko1 Kalambay ,never stopped before or since.
Young dropping Big George.

 

Tyson was hit and survived much bigger punchers. Bonecrusher Smith, Tony Tucker, Razor Ruddock, Frank Bruno, Lennox Lewis off the top of my head all hit much harder than anyone Rocky fought. All we can say is that he fought bigger punchers. IT gets back to my point overall on Rocky ... we know his chin was very good. We know he was a very good fighter. We don't know how good because he never fought al time great punchers or great fighters ...

 

For start, your "heart" has to be in the game. You have to still want to fight. And you need to be in top shape to make sure that "heart" is strong. Marciano just wasn't egotistical enough to think he didn't have to train to win.

That's why fighters have gone through careers being different. That's why you've heard fighters, even Tyson, at the end of their careers say, "My heart just isn't into it anymore."
That's why even the top guys who were known to be tough in their prime, never give up, have stayed down when they could have gotten up but it was late in their career. They knew the fight was over.

If Marciano was a shot fighter and took the kind of shots that Tyson took from Lennox, Lewis would not only not have gotten up on one knee like Tyson did but he would have been KO'd early in my opinion.

Tyson continued on with a busted knee against Williams but once he was knocked down, it was over. He knew it.

McBride: again, shot version.

Marciano retired in his prime. Got out.
Tyson on the other hand kept going on without training properly, was a drug-addict, didn't want to be a fighter anymore, and just took his beatings for the pay.

Different stories.

 

It funny how people magnify this BS...good points Suzie

 

Sounds like the first fight with Ted Lowry from what I read. But there is no video on it from what I know.

 

I think they both have very good chins but it is the heart of Marciano that far surpasses Tyson's both were good givers but Tyson folded up his tent on the receiving end. As far as chins both were solid.

 

Douglas was also sitting down on his punches when he fought certain fighters which can make a difference. Against Tyson, he was snapping his head back from the start and you could hear the impact from the TV. Imagine if that was ringside.
Those were clean shots right on his skull. No head-movement, just flush shot after shot.

But to me, even though it was interesting seeing him take such shots, he is still an idiot for not preparing for that fight properly and taking such clean shots when at his best, when he was training properly, he most likely would not have. Sure, a great test of him being able to take it that long, but still...an embarrassment of what he was originally trained to do: Don't get hit and hit back.

Holyfield said he was actually worried about Douglas because he saw Douglas drop a man with a Jab.

 

Interview with Rocky Marciano

by John Summers, published in the Mandrake column of the Sunday Telegraph, 7 November 1965 under the headline ‘Gentle as a Rock’ Is boxing a noble art? Fit to be taught in the nation’s school gymnasiums? To find out I advanced upon the greatest authority, ‘the most dangerous unarmed man in the world,’ the most successful gladiator in history – 49 fights, 49 wins…
I knocked on Mr Rocky Marciano’s bedroom door and a voice you associate with misty New York dockside rasped: ‘Friend or foe?’
‘Friend, I think.’
Inside there were blue whorls of cigar and cigarette smoke, a small crown of American lounge suits and a plump man in ragged trousers and short padding barefoot and swinging an arm as thick as your thigh.
‘… So I keep coming forward like this, left foot first, and I hit him a shot with the right, and I see his eyes roll up in his head and I give him the left to finish him…’
‘Rocky, you remind me of a skunk…!’ Somebody interrupting. I backed quickly for the door.
The Rock’s eyes widened below the stitch mark – one eye took thirteen stitches, seeing him through just one million dollar world title defence: ‘A skunk?’
‘The way you fought, Rocky, like a skunk with a farm dog and the dog keeps backing away because he knows what a punch that skunk packs in his tail!’
‘Right! Joe Louis couldn’t take my shot to the head – not even high on the head. I got to him with one high on the head and I see his eyes go “Great to meet ya!”’ The Rock comes for me. ‘Have a cup of coffee! You’re welcome!’ The Rock opens his fist and there’s a cup and saucer hidden in it.
The honesty in the round, hearty face is humiliating. I told the Rock we’re talking of banning boxing in Britain.
‘Right! Well, it’s got to come! It’s got to – in fifty, twenty-five years’ time – no, less than that – it’s got to come; as people get more civilized, they’re going to ban boxing.’
‘Rocco, my baby!’ A man lying full-length on a divan barks: ‘Whaddya sayin’…!’
‘I tell you it’s got to. They will outlaw boxing. A hundred years from now we’ll be like the gladiators, something out of history.’ The sad, gentle eyes. ‘There won’t be any boxers any more – aw, boxing’s just got to go. Less than twenty-five years, ten years or less than that maybe. In America they let fighters go on till one of them’s half-dead – Joe Louis couldn’t take a shot to the head any more.’
‘He couldn’t take one on the button, Rocky!’
‘He couldn’t take a punch anywhere on the head any more. Even high on the head.

This content is protected

This content is protected

This content is protected

This content is protected

This content is protected

‘Talk about divine justice. The officials handling me in that fight, awhile after they all dropped dead.’ The Rock massaged his chin quickly.
Are there punch-drunk boxers in America? ‘Not many. Ezzard Charles. Oh, he’s banged up, oh God yes he is. After he met me.
‘Rocco, baby! He is not! Charles is not.’
‘Aw, yes. Aw, terrible, yes. He is.’ The Rock demonstrates with a press picture showing his victim’s face like a chocolate marshmallow crushed between the Rock’s fists.
‘Think! What kind of money Cassius Clay versus Rocky would take now! Rocky could take Clay right now!’
There is a famous story of the Rock’s pugilistic encounter in a wartime brawl in a British pub. ‘Right! That’s true. But if I get in trouble like that now I have to back away. Talk my way out of it. I have to … I never like to see people hurt. I was an old man when I won the world title – I was twenty-eight. That’s why Patterson can’t beat Clay! He’s an old man. He’s twenty-seven.’
The Rock’s finger’s play constantly with the poke of his English ratting cap on his head. Going bald has hurt the Rock more than anything could do in the ring. He wears the cap even indoors and, for public appearances, a well-made American hair-piece.
‘Over here in Britain boxing is so civilized anyway. They’d never let me become heavyweight champion of England – I bleed too easy. Sure there are fights that not quite right. But not the world heavy championship. There’s too many people like Norman Mailer – like you – watching us all the time.’
The eyes soften. ‘I don’t even go to the fights any more. Don’t like to see people getting hurt. I’m a bad fight referee even.’ The Rock admits it sadly. ‘I spoil the fights. Soon as one of the fellers starts bleeding a little even, I stop the fight. The crowd don’t like it. You hear the crowd yelling. Screaming. Go on! Let ‘em fight! Beat him to death, go on! That’s the really brutal part of the boxing. The crowd.
Outside I met a sports writer. ‘You saw Marciano – what’s he like? More animal than man, I suppose?’
In the mid-1990s John re-worked this article for an unidentified magazine (possibly Country Quest), under the headline ‘How Wales Spurred on a Champ’ with this additional introduction: In the history of Welsh sports it is nowhere adequately recognized that Wales has actually once produced a world heavyweight boxing champion.
The story begins in wartime Wales and with only a few weeks to go till D-Day, when Britain’s southern ports were being readied to send allied forces to invade the continent of Europe in the final stages of World War Two.
And Swansea. South Wales it was that was one of the major boarding points for men and vehicles to be boarding their ships for the Normandy landings.
One of these soldiers as a chunkily built American GI, whose extraordinarily short legs carried him on a body that could have been that of a Roman gladiator.
The Italian cafe and fish ‘n’ chip shop community of South Wales knew him as a regular guest at their Sunday dinner tables.
To them he was Rocco Marchegnano.
One night Rocco got himself in a brawl in Swansea’s Wind Street in a bodega grill and he was nearly arrested.
His story was that on being provoked by a group of Australian soldiers with the words: ‘Yanks – you’re overpaid, over-sexed – and over here.’ He had knocked out three of them.
Next thing, as Gl Rocco was later to describe it he got in another brawl in a South Wales valleys miners pub, swapping blows with a Welsh miner who he described as ‘Big as Tommy Farr’.
And this time the ‘Snow Drops’, the US military police, were called in – they were known as Snow Drops because their US soldier steel helmets were painted white. Rocco was threatened with court martial.
‘But that’ll make us one lorry driver short for D-Day,’ protested his US commander at the GI camp in Morriston near Swansea.
A solution was hit upon. Rocco was ordered to take up amateur boxing in the clubs around Swansea.
When Rocco went home again to Brockton. Massachusetts when the war was over and back to his job as boot repairer, he changed his name to Rocky Marciano. And decided to turn professional.
I interviewed Rocky Marciano in the ‘60s. just before he was tragically killed in a plane crash.
‘They’ve closed down that lovely Mumbles Train.’ bewailed Rocky Marciano. ‘Why, I used to ride on that into Swansea many a morning. I was stationed down there in Swansea and we were billeted on Mumbles Pier and we had to sleep on straw palliases.’
When I interviewed Marciano he was just being celebrated as the greatest – and most successful – world heavyweight champion of all limes.
And the one who had amassed the largest fortune from the ring ever. Forty-nine ring battles - and 49 wins.
‘And it all started for me down there in Wales,’ he said. ‘Wales has always had that great prize-fighting tradition and from that I took my inspiration. I used to get the Mumbles Train into Swansea and get off at Rutland Street in the centre of the town and make for a gym that a Welsh heavyweight called Jim Wilde used to run just by Swansea railway station. No – not Jimmy Wilde. That was a much lighter guy from an earlier time, I used to call in at Swansea market and eat some of that hot laver bread that Welsh people cook out of seaweed, would anybody believe it. We don’t have anything like that in the States.’
But now having retired undefeated from the ring Rocky, had turned against the very idea of boxing and he said he thought it ought to be banned. An interesting notion from the British public these very days, when a recent series of tragic ring deaths and serious injuries have been grabbing public attention.





>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

This content is protected

In the end, you still have to know how to defend against a punch. You have to roll with the punch. See the punch. And don't get caught with a punch you don't see coming. Marciano seems to be underrated here.
And, something Marciano always did that Tyson didn't, ALWAYS be in top condition because your stamina is key to keeping your punch resistance up. The last thing you need to be is exhausted with you gasping for air out your mouth.








​

 

Tyson to me had the better chin. He stood up to far superior firepower. Rocky had better heart, and will to win.

 

Then I take if you did not see round 11 of Marciano vs. Walcott? Rocky was hurt, and holding on. Film doesn't lie.

 

Unforgiven,

SuzieQ has too much of an emotional investment and will reject legitimate testimonials and news paper reports. It is well known that the relatively light punching and defensive minded Lowry stunned Marciano.

I read Simmons badly cut Marciano. Henry's testimonial is first rate:

 

Yeah, he does. He does have a different physique compared to Ali and Holmes, as well.
But he didn't really show that power very much. Wasted potential if you ask me.