Resonable opinions and discussion, please. If you want to go "zomg lol huggy bear" take that **** to General.
I have to agree with Janitor. Ruiz does not have enough wins against signature opposition to really warrant being a top 30 heavyweight in my honest opinion. Sure, it looks good that he has a win over Holyfield, but Evander was well past it by that time, and it still took John 3 meetings before he finally got a W. That series was a tie anyway. He just didn't do enough.
He's on the bottom of my top 50 list. Holyfield, Johnson, Oquendo, Rahman, Golota are very nice scalps. But you have to take into account his losses too though, and those hurt him. Jones schooled him in his only HW fight, Toney also beat him up (it was a NC to be fair though)His 19 second KO loss to a rampaging young Tuaman is also downright embarassing but the Tua he fought was no joke and could of done that to almost anybody. Then he has those two losses to the giant Valuev, and the loss to Chagaev, although he was a bit past it for those 3. If you weigh Head to Head highly on your lists, Ruiz suffers and would lose to pretty much everyone in the top 40-50. But he has good wins and a placing around 50-60 isn't out of order, although 25-30 is too high no matter what criteria you use.
He has better wins than a lot of former champions, including the Klitsckos. To not rank him because of his unpleasing fighting style would not be answering the question correctly. In reality, he has some decent wins against some pretty decent fighters so I would say yes he is in the top 30.
That seems like a reasonable response to me. He obviously ranks somewhere and he's certainly remained at or near the top of the heavyweight divsion for a long time, but his fighting style is down right ugly and I can't see him winning against a list of fighters so long it would half an hour to write. So somewhere between 50-60 sounds about right.
True, but given that Valuev has a whole slew of decision wins that could have gone either way, I'm not so sure that it does him much good. I agree with muchmore that top 50 is probably fair. But, to make top 30, you have to have a little more going for you, than just a few decent wins or galant losing efforts here and there.
Here's 30 fighters I'd rank over Ruiz in a heartbeat Ali, Tyson, Louis, Liston, Lewis, Holmes, Marciano, Frazier, Foreman, Dempsey, Johnson, Wills, Langford, Walcott, Charles, Moore, Schmeling, Jeffries, Holyfield, Witherspoon, Bowe, Patterson, Wlad Klitschko, Vitali Klitschko, Fitz, Ingo, Norton, Jeanette, Tunney, Mcvea. That's just off the top of my head, then you have guys like Spoon, Sharkey, Baer etc. that deserve to be ranked above Johnny. Ruiz deserves a lot of credit though, he is one of the biggest over achievers in history.
I suppose we can ad Jimmy Young to that list, though he sort of had a similar career track in terms of not being able to impress judges as well as having a mixed bag of wins and losses. I think Chris Byrd and David Tua could also make that list.
OMG, Russell, I'm lmfao at this thread. jk jk jk I thought that you couldn't be serious at first, but then I realized that I'd never ranked the heavyweights all the way to 30. I'll try to think of 30 off the top of my head, in no particular order except ahead of John Ruiz. Ali Louis Holmes Johnson Lewis Marciano Foreman Frazier Holyfield Tyson Liston Bowe Schmelling Dempsey Wills Langford Quarry Norton Ibeabuchi Byrd V Klitschko W Klitschko Tua Tucker Page Thomas Douglas Dokes Ellis Jeffries I made it to 30 or so, but I'm starting to run out of fighters. I'm now starting to put fighters in that I think would take Ruiz, and not really picking fighters with better resumes.