Foreman said this about Frazier

The size and styles of both Foreman and Frazier suggest the same outcome, possibly later though. Foreman loves to flatter.

 

My heart says YES!!!!!

My head says no.


I would love to picture Joe beating Big George and think that Joe would fair MUCH better in hypothetical H2H match-ups than usually depicted.

I see George (and Liston) as very bad styles for Joe' and would cheer my butt off for him...but wouldn't bet a dime on it! I don't think the 2 years would change the outcome!

 

This.

 

Based on the premise that styles makes fights and what actually happened, Foreman will always be a bad matchup for Frazier. Pre FOTC to FOTC conditioned Frazier wouldn't have been as easy a target for George, making him miss with his head movement and landing his hooks to the body with both hands. Foreman is extremely dangerous in the early rounds and it's more than likely that he has Frazier on the mat a couple of times, regardless of condition. I don't think George keeps him there, and Frazier chances winning the fight increase as the fight goes on. Again, not saying Frazier stops George, but certainly he becomes the favourite in this matchup if he makes it past round five. Prime for prime, I think Joe would have survived Foreman's early power and unless he's stopped himself before George's lack of stamina becomes a factor, I'd bet on Frazier outworking Foreman in the later rounds en route to a UD or stopping George near round 10 or 11.

 

Yeah i'm not really getting at wether Foreman was lying or not about the 'fear', i was more getting at wether what he said about Frazier having a different fight with him would translate into a Frazier win. Not in my opinion. I agree with you that great fighters can turn negatives into positives, just look at Buster Douglas, with his mum dying before the Tyson fight.

 

Frazier would've given George a harder fight, though beating him may have been a different story.

 

With a younger Frazier it plausibly COULD haver been a different fight; throw in a referee who cuts out the showing, it plausibly would have been a different kind of fight.

 

It would indeed have been a different fight.

It would have been competitive.

I think that people are far too quick to assume that Foreman steamrolls any version of Joe Frazier or any other pressure fighter based on the first Frazier Foreman fight. There were a lot of variables at play apart from the stylistic dynamic.

Would Foreman still have won?

Yes he probably would, but when he flatters Frazier he is being a lot more realistic than most people on this forum. He probably was afraid of him, he probably did catch him at the right time, and it probably wasn't nearly as easy as it looked from ringside.

 

I support this.

 

Foreman says funny stuff sometimes, and he often says (or used to I havent heard him for a while) that Lennox Lewis is the greatest heavyweight ever, maybe he is, in terms of H2H rather than achievement.

Anyway be interesting to know if he believes this stuff, does he say anything else like that?

 

Foreman tends to say whatever will please the audience. One minute he'll say Lennox is the greatest, the next he will say Muhammad Ali is. It all depends on who he is trying to please.

 

I really agree with this. Plus Foreman never rally ate a left hook. What if Frazier got to Foreman first. Would that have been an entirely different fight altogether

 

Within his own mind, Smoke may be the only one who knows the true answer to this.

Let's say Ali never returns from exile. Foreman-Frazier I may have always favored George due to styles, but if Foreman did crush him in a similar manner to what happened in Kingston, Joe would not be left depleted afterward like he was following the FOTC, but fresh and fully intact, like Patterson was after losing to Ingo and Liston. In this scenario, a rematch could be a very interesting prospect. With no Ali as his rival, Foreman would have become the target of all his focus.

Considering that Frazier had both the FOTC and Manila behind him in his rematch with Foreman, was 32 years old and up to nearly 25 pounds over what he considered to be his best fighting weight, I think he did startlingly well against his 27 year old conqueror in Uniondale. If Joe was still in his late 20s, with no Manila and FOTC ring wear, in fighting trim under 205 pounds, battling to regain his lost heavyweight title, then he could well have maneuvered and survived his way into deeper water, where he may have been able to drown George. If Ali was able to stun him, then Joe certainly had the late round power necessary to take him down in the championship rounds.

Keep in mind that even without the FOTC, he still had a grueling 15 experience in the Bonavena rematch, and it was as a result of getting that marathon under his belt that I believe Joe finally vaulted over to ATG status.

 

What was the worst beating handed to a defending heavyweight champ on the other side of Liston-Patterson? Ingo crushed Floyd the first time too, and we'd surely be saying Patterson never could have handled him without those two rematches.

 

Frazier looked average at best against clubfighters such as Terry Daniels and Ron Stander after the fantastic performance against Ali which seemed to take something away from him, so I do think that Foreman caught Frazier at the right time. In fact Foreman himself said at the time, not now when his words aren't to be taken entirely seriously, that he got to Frazier when Frazier was on the downhill slide.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1086945/5/index.htm

Frazier set goals for himself, one at a time, the Olympic gold medal, unifying the heavyweight title again and the superfight with Ali, and he worked like a man possessed to meet those goals. Neither he nor his managers seemed to have any further plans post-Ali and were only holding out for a big money offer, which they got against Foreman. I'm sure Frazier prepared for the fight but not like he had prepared for fights in the past, and Frazier was all about his conditioning. Without his intensity in training and in the ring he would never have been great. The stage was in my opinion set for the challenger to dispose of the champion in devastating and decisive fashion.

Who could take anything away from George Foreman for it? He destroyed an all-time great heavyweight. They're still talking about the beating Dempsey gave to Jess Willard, but with all respect to Willard, he was no Joe Frazier. But I don't think this fight represents Frazier's peak fighting abilities.