Is it safe to say Wladimir got the worst chin of the top 10 heavyweights?

Not to sound rude, but I think it's you who's missing the entire point of this thread. Whether Sanders would blitz Louis like he blitzed Wlad is beside the point, the general consensus opinion is if he landed those same shots on Louis he'd have accomplished much the same thing.

I doubt you'd find too many people thinking Conn could do the same to Wlad landing the same shots he landed on Louis. There just isn't a precedent for thinking it.

Neither man will ever win chin of the century, but comparing the fighters who hurt and dropped Louis to the fighters who hurt and dropped Wlad, there's a pretty clear difference in punching power in favour of the newer guys. Hence a better argument in favour of Wlad's durability over Louis.

 

There have always been big punchers in every era, but the 90s especially saw a real explosion of heavy hitters, and generally larger individuals than in the past. Whatever the reasons for this are can be argued till the cows come home, but a simple comparison between the heavy punchers of Lewis's era and Louis's era is like night and day. A puncher of Galento's crudeness and physical dimensions would not have the same impact with his shots against the giants of the 90s. This cannot be proven, but I think it can be quite obviously ascertained by comparing and analysing fight footage.

Yes, they were much smaller. A true heavyweight (by which I mean a man who's in good fighting shape at between 210-225) cannot get down to LHW unless he starves himself, in which case he's be better off coming into the ring obese. It's true that a lot of modern heavyweights carry too much weight for their frames, but you'd be hard pressed to find any natural LHWs or middleweights hiding amongst all that flab. A few natural cruiserweights perhaps (Povetkin, Jennings etc) but a ripped and ready cruiserweight is a real heavyweight in my book.

A fighter like Conn in the division would be analogous to someone like Sergio Martinez today, if you weighed him on the night. Can you imagine such a situation even being contemplated, let alone a sanctioned title fight against the heavyweight champion of the world?

I'm hardly making a merit of it. Sanders never lived up to his potential as a boxer and that can only be laid at his door. But if he was a "fat golfer", "part time boxer" etc doesn't that make his achievements even greater? He achieved success in two very different sports simultaneously, one of which he wasn't even that passionate about.

Considering how lazy he was (by many accounts) I'm surprised he got as far as he did. Sure, he got what he put in at the end of the day, but his natural bar was already set quite high.

The biggest decider for what he could have been can be seen in the Vitali fight, where he entered the ring fat and undertrained and proceeded to nearly knock Vitali out and give him sporadic fits throughout the course of the fight.

Even fat, relatively old and undertrained, his natural hand speed and explosiveness were already very evident. Unfortunately, his stamina (a trait generally obtained through hard conditioning) wasn't there.

 

Malik Scott can box, man.

I put Lennox at #6. I think he had a very significant reign as the best heavyweight on the planet, even in times where he wasn't necessarily THE champ, and I think he's h2h dynamite, which pushes him up a bit. I think his time as #1 defined his era, and he did what Tyson, who I have #8, didn't do: Avenged his shock loss suffered at the top of his game.

He doesn't have the resume of Ali, or the dominance of Louis and Holmes, and his losses to McCall are too damaging to make him top 3 ATG, in my opinion.

And, no, Wlad didn't freak. I don't think he freaks out when he's in control. It's why we saw him take shots in Peter II, Wach, and Haye, and ride through them without batting more than an eyelash. When his confidence is low, he feels endangered, and he's being pressured, that seems to be when he's susceptible to unraveling. Also, when he's utterly exhausted, as with Brewster and Purrity, but that has not happened once since.

 

He didn't take those those shots without batting an eyelash. He had to hold on for his life by fouling, clinching and elbowing his opponents to the floor, he gets away with it because he owns the ref. .......What if Somoger was there, he wouldn't have it? Do you think he could brush of those shots and battle back? Very doubtful...........

 

In Peter II, it was Peter who was doing the late hitting, the rabbit punching, et. al. Guys try to rough up Wlad as they think he is vulnerable to such.

Lately, they have just been getting their asses kicked for the trouble.

 

And Wlad was never buzzed by a middleweight.

He was a middleweight and he badly hurt a heavyweight in Louis on several occasions. I can't really make it any clearer than that.

I don't really care to argue Sanders's corner any longer. The man had great power. That's plainly evident.

 

Sanders hit freaking hard.

I know it's difficult, but some of y'alls understanding of the game is going to suffer a bit if you keep going pure historian on it. Fighter's who knock other fighters down tend to punch pretty hard. That's kind of a fact, not a theory or a myth, like "chin" or "power" or " Always punt on 4th down and short."

If a guy has a ton of ko's, he either generated a ton of impact, he's an incredibly SHARP hitter, or he has the skill to consistently land the right shot at the right time.

Could Corrie Sanders have beat Joe Louis? I sure as hell don't think so, Joe was too smart, too good, and too sharp. He was dangerous against the dangerous. If he got lazy with his head and his feet, and started simply eating left hands moving in to punch(Very un-Louis, but for the sake of argument), YES, he'd be in trouble. He was buzzed by Billy Conn, for freaks sake. He was human. If a tiny man on the move can buzz him with a great left on the chin, a bigger man moving forward into a great left can do it too.

 

Louis never fought in the sixties. He fought in an era where LHWs and SMWs were considered fair game for world heavyweight title fights.

A cruiserweight like Haye or Hyde would have outweighed Louis by ten pounds on fight night, and man who himself outweighed a good deal of his opponents.

Adamek was as big as Louis when he was still in the Cruisers. Byrd spent almost his entire career at heavyweight, and was hardly flabby or overmuscled. Both men would have dwarfed Conn. Even Carl Froch would have had a sizeable weight advantage over him.

Toney was a legit 200lber towards the end of his career. None of those examples really come close.

So you think if Sanders landed the same shots on Louis as he did on Wlad that Louis would survive? I'm not asking you for the likelihood of that happening, but merely how well Louis reacts to the damage being done to him.

 

Precisely.

I'll never understand why people insist on ranking a puncher on their wins, as though boxing were no more than "I hit you and you hit me and let's see who falls over first". Boxing doesn't work like that. A puncher is a puncher. It has relatively little bearing on their overall career success or failure.

There's too much of an emphasis on resumes in debates like this where a relatively simple trait is being discussed.

 

I've found the only people who do this just lack proper perspective on the athlete side of the sport.

If you've boxed, you know that a puncher is a puncher. The hardest puncher I have EVER experienced had a losing record. He was a freakish clubber, but couldn't box for chit.

Boxing is not, and never has been, "I has power, you no has chin, you fall down."

 

If you're going to mention those Louis was bigger than, you should mention those who were bigger than Louis. They typically did far worse, too.

Louis had little to no trouble beating Primo Carnera (6'5, 260lbs), Abe Simon (6'4, 255lbs), and Buddy Baer (6'6, 240-250lbs). They, Simon and Carnera in particular, were a solid 255-260lbs, too. Very little fat on them. Just huge, huge men.

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^well they weren't really that good either. That would be an issue.