Larry Holmes vs Frank Bruno in 1984

Larry was out of his prime and on a decline when facing these men, and still was able to pull out clean decisions on em. He got a TKO off of James Smith who by all accounts had a superior chin and stamina to Bruno, and Frank is even more liable to getting knocked out than Bonecrusher was.
Your all time great list must be some level of skewed if you really think that an on the decline champion still taking wins over top contenders and soon to be champions is really that bad.

 

Bruno was up on the cards in his defeats to Smith, Witherspoon and Lewis. An underrated boxer with ridiculously heavy hands and a cattle prod jab. In 1984 I would’ve had him level on the cards with Holmes before gassing out in the championship rounds and being stopped on his feet against the ropes.

 

If Holmes was "on the decline" by 1983, then he had a shorter prime than about any heavyweight in recent memory. And no one outside of Holmes' camp and family thought "he beat them both clean". General consensus was that Witherspoon edged him and that Williams won 9 or 10 rounds. But if you want to herald a heavyweight "champ" who chose more soft touches and non-threatening challengers than any one in history, you have a strange grading scale. Williams was picked because Holmes admitted he saw Tillis knock him down early in their fight and then turned the tape off and nobody thought Witherspoon was anything but a oudgy raw novice who barely could eke out a decision over Renaldo Snipes, which makes it even worse that both were judged to have been Holmes. You keep him in your ATG list. I'll save that for someone who didn't spend his career steering toward the Zanon's, Evangelista's, Rodriquez'z and LeDoux's as title defenses and managed to avoid as many tough fights as "Low Risk Larry" did.

 

exactly. His cleaned out the division the way Valuev did. sure do not hear that guy menioned often, do we? And just what do things look like if he was not awarded the IBF belt?

 

Holmes started his pro career in 1973, spent most of the time then training alongside Ali as his sparring partner, and still took fights during that time. Despite the busy schedule, he was still able to amas a good record of 26-0 before defeating Shavers, and then went unbeaten for the next 8 years as he went into his mid thirties. During this time, he chose to start taking easier fights after the Witherspoon match, because he wanted to coast for what he thought to be the end of his career, and he was still unable to be beaten by the top contenders at the time.
"General consensus" is also not the deciding factor of who wins a fight, you can watch and score what fights you want, how you want, but that does not determine the outcome. I'm a big Witherspoon fan, I'm a big Williams fan (He's a fellow man from Florida), but I believe that Holmes fully edged both men, and the official scorecards reflect that. (Of course, the Judge's views aren't always true, but what happens, happens.)
He had a shorter prime because he spent what would've been his prime years as part of Ali's camp.
The Zanon fight was directly after he won against Shavers and Weaver who would go on to be rated numbers 5 and 4 respectively at the end of the year, Rodriquez was directly after a run of Berbick, Spinks, Snipes, Cooney, and Cobb, and the LeDoux fight was directly before that streak.
You pick and choose fights near the end of his first career and fights against lesser opposition to try and put Holmes name down, as if he was going to fight top opposition every single fight, all the while choosing not to unify.
Would you prefer that he didn't make 20 title defenses?