Curious as to how Joe Louis would survive the opening rounds vs a prime Mike Tyson

No I understood you bro. Just making a fuss is all. I totally agree with you. Louis and Tyson are the 2 best punchers in heavyweight history. Didn't say hardest or strongest, just the best at what they did. They get you hurt and it's a wrap.

 

Yes I've seen both of them.

Conn gets the better of Louis in multiple exchanges and hurts him badly at one point. Louis was in very bad shape. If Conn hadn't got over excited and could punch, he could have decked him.

Ive also seen the first Schmeling fight which you see Louis getting blasted over and over again with the same counter, getting knocked down, then out.

These are guys, Conn especially, who aren't known as punchers. One is a super middleweight weighing 168lbs, the other is around 185lbs.

Tyson is known as a puncher and weighs 220ish lbs.

It's simple math.

 

I have to disagree here. When Tyson was stopped (at least against Douglas, Holyfield, and Lewis), those were sustained beatings over many rounds, pretty much the whole fight- 10, 11, and 8 rounds, respectively.

Tyson took real beatings in those fights. When he was stopped, he was indeed hurt by a final or multiple final blows.

Those guys were indeed good enough to follow up. They were good enough to issue a sustained beating in the first place and also good enough to follow up when they hurt him.

If Tyson's history is any indication, Louis is going to have to put a long beating on Tyson. He will have to beat the fight out of him.

I just doubt Louis, who was knocked down at least 12 times by much lesser punchers, will have the durability to make it that far.

 

Well, Louis and his team would study Tyson and they would come to the fight well prepared. Louis isn't going to enter the fight naive. Louis would let him come and he'd plan on catching him with something coming in. Louis would also have to plan on weathering the storm a bit if he was unable to stun Tyson early. Tyson would be a MoFo for the first four rounds for just about anyone.

Louis had quick hands. Louis didn't need a lot of room to land hard punches. Short accurate punches at close or mid-range. Louis also had a good jab and it was stiff. Tyson would have to get thru all that to work his way in. Tyson ain't running, he won't be hard to find.

Louis is taller and has the longer reach... so did a lot of Tyson's opponents though. Tyson would be about 10 or 15 Lbs. heavier. If you want to make it a modern era fight look for Louis to come in a little more bulked up... my point is that the few extra Lbs. Tyson has on Louis isn't a big deal.

I do think Louis would go down once maybe even twice in the first half of the fight but I do think he'd survive those rounds.

 

A pre-prime Louis and a past-prime Louis. Conn was a great smaller fighter who Louis carried a bit... almost too much, then Louis decided to get him out of there. He knew he had 15 rounds to do it and he did it with plenty of time to spare. He would prepare properly for Tyson. I'm not saying he would win, I'm just saying his entire training camp would be different.

As for the Schmeling loss? He improved after that loss.

 

Good post, and I agree with some of it. My main problem here is, that you mention getting dropped but that it's not a problem because he most often got up and took care of business. Getting dropped by Galento's and Braddock's of the world and getting up to win, means relatively nothing when trying to do that to Tyson. It's not like the guys Louis got dropped by were technical wizards who set up their punches so well that anybody would be caught by them. We can make up all the excuses in the world for Louis taking them lightly, or being overly aggressive or whatever excuse you want... doesn't change the fact that he got caught by sloppy shots at times, by fighters vastly inferior to Tyson, and by vastly worse finishers than Tyson. That doesn't sound like a winning recipe to me.

Then we have the issue of Louis' jab and how Tyson excelled at getting under a jab and making people pay. Louis' defense after he jabbed never got good, and so I fail to see how this wouldn't be capitalized on by somebody adept at doing it. My last big issue here is durability. In a fight like this, it's often who can take a punch that much better than the other, especially in a firefight type of scenario. I just envision Tyson landing more blows and being able to take the blows he receives better. Who's to say, but I'm I believe the stylistic matchup favors Tyson.

 

How would his training camp be different? How did he train for Conn? How do you know?

I assume you're attributing pre-prime to the Schmeling loss and post-prime to the Conn scare... Untrue.

Its very debatable that he corrected that flaw from the Schmeling loss. Still had the same problem.

Also Louis went on to have many great performances against perhaps his best opposition after the Conn fight, so no, he wasn't post-prime for that one...

And losing on 2 of 3 scorecards going into the stoppage and having his brain scrambled was the motivation to step it up. Like he was getting lumped up for fun just carry him? Nah.

I wish the full fight was available for public viewing.

 

Honestly I don't see Louis going to the 3rd round against prime Tyson if I'm going to be honest here.

 

I agree! I see Louis winning in the 2nd as well.

 

I would take exception to the statement that Billy Conn "couldn't punch his way out of a wet paper bag."

Conn was the only man apart from Louis stop Bob Pastor, a man who fought and beat most of the big punchers of that era.

Look at his record.

 

If you think that Schmeling was not known as a puncher, then you are following the wrong sport!

I would go as far as to say that the beating that Louis took from Schmeling, was probably worse than the beatings that Tyson took from Douglas and Holyfield.

Tyson was indeed harder to drop, but I am not seeing any evidence that he was harder to keep down!

 

What could you possible base such a claim upon, when nobody stopped Louis without a sustained beating over the course of a fight?

 

Just because Louis was never stopped early, it's not impossible that Tyson, with his speed and power, could do the trick.

 

It's not impossible, but if you don't have a precedent for somebody doing it, then you probably don't predict it lightly!

 

I used some dramatic embellishment to emphasize my point haha...