Sonny Liston was a malnourished, emaciated vagrant. Looked like he'd recently been liberated from a death camp.
I am sorry, but you don't get to arbitrarily decided that the best fighters of era A are all elite, and the best fighters of era B are somehow not. Also if you think that size gives modern fighters an advantage, they you can hardly fail to give Dempsey some acknowledgment, for the fact that he was stopping much larger contenders than Marciano. You don't get to use size as an argument when it suits you, and dismiss it when it doesn't.
It's proven fact that anyone with less than 21-inch upper arms cannot punch hard. It's simple physics. powerpuncher understands this.
Dempsey would be laughed out of any decent bodybuilding gym in my city, and most of them are quite welcoming of skinny beginners. But he's woefully underequipped to even lift the smallest dumbells on the rack. I know they say he did hard labour but I'm not buying it. Perhaps, but he was clearly on starvation rations. His muscle development is pitiful. But then, as mentioned, so was Lennox Lewis's .... 6'5 and only 245 pounds ! I doubt his arms are even 18 inches. :rofl Pathetic.
Musculature helps punching power, but comes second to technique. Dempsey had his technique down pat. Read his book Championship Fighting (iirc) and he describes it in fine detail. Between Marciano and Dempsey, who hits harder? That's like comparing a falling anvil and a falling engine block ... they will both squash you flat. Frankly they are comparable as punchers. If you put a gun to my head, I might say Dempsey had greater single punch punching power, without any confidence at all.
But then Bob Satterfield might have hit harder than either of them, and still would not be mentioned in the same context.
You don't measure biceps you measure arms and biceps don't contribute to punching power. Plus did I mention Dempsey was a skinny weakling? He was also the same weight as a modern day middleweight or light middleweight. 245lb technically superior, faster P4P superior boxer who was 60lbs heavier Beating up farmworkers when you hide behind lawyers to protect you from the number 1 contender........DOESN'T COUNT.
I appreciate that you are angry that Jack Dempsey never fought Harry Wills, but we still have to attempt an honest assessment of the people he did fight. The reality is, that he fought in an era where there were a lot of big men at the top of the division, and he absolutely destroyed them. No other heavyweight of his size, has ever displayed such destructive power, against heavyweights of that size, who were legitimately at the top of the division.
Get off your high horse, of course he did. The number of rounds he needed to stop people, the damage he inflicted on his opponents, the contemporary fighter testimony. If you think that he was crude while doing this, then you have to upgrade his power, to account for it.
