One of the factors regarding today's hwts is they are such poor fighters. So size has replaced great skill. Ali was 201 when he fought Liston. At 201 he would embarrass and destroy any hwt fighting today just as one example. Hwt boxing is so poor today the present generation thinks they are seeing great skills. Talk to the present generation and it's all height, reach, muscularity, and size. The reason? That's all they know and all they see. Instead what's important is the ability to fight. Unfortunately this has been lost in today's era of MMA and bodybuilder a posing as fighters.
By this logic Bobby Crabtree would present Ezzard Charles problems because Rocky Marciano did. Complete false equivalency. In Willard you are comparing a farmer who came very late to the game, gained only rudimentary skills and when he fought Dempsey had been dormant for the better part of 4 years. In Fulton, you have a poor man's Michael Grant, a complete bust in the division after early promise. Meanwhile, in Lewis, we are talking about the greatest super heavy, a guy with decades of grooming at the highest international ranks, a fighter with a complete ****nal of punches, who had speed and power and strength... and whose accomplishments absolutely dwarf those of Willard and Fulton. Styles make fights but quality makes champions.
The division is weak, but making snap judgements like this based upon the weakness of the current division is enormously flawed logic. Why can't the division just be weak? Lots of divisions are weak. Deducing that size has "replaced" great skill because the division is currently weak is not reasonable. But if you take the GOAT from any division and compare him to the current crop he will "destroy and embarrass" them. Again, it is not reasonable. Fighters were as big or almost as big between 1995 and 2000 when Lennox Lewis, Wladimir Klitschko, Evander Holyfield, Mike Tyson and Vitali Klitschko were all active. Certainly these fighters weren't lacking in skill.
I cannot find much common ground here. I can agree that Lewis was better than Willard and Fulton. So what if he was, he is an all time great. The least that you would expect of him, is that he would be better than somebody who was not an all time great. You talk about false equivalency, and then indirectly compare Jess Willard, to Bobby Crabtree. Jess Willard was a world champion when Dempsey fought him, and Fred Fulton had been the leading contender for years (comparing him to Michael Grant is an insult). If you want to find fighters to test how Dempsey might have done against a modern Lewis, these are as good as you are realistically going to get.
Why? Grant was the #3 contender at a time when Holyfield and Tyson were #1 and #2. Unless you are implying that there were fighters as good as these two before Dempsey bagged him, I disagree. I wouldn't expect the distance between the #1 and #3 contenders from given divisions to be that big anyway, but when the #3 is from an era with two ATGs ahead of him I would expect parity. That said, Fulton is clearly more accomplished, but I think "insult" is stretching it considerably.
At 201 Ali would embarrass any of the hwts you have mentioned. The weight difference would be meaningless. Any great trainer or fighter will tell you it's not the size of the fighter it's the desire and skill that makes all the difference.
Fulton occupied a position, as the assumed to be outstanding contender, for a long time. Grant for comparison, was a flash in the pan, although obviously he was a legitimate challenger. You do not have to go far into a list of "best heavyweights never to win the title", before Fulton gets discussed.
I don't know that a flash in the pan can last three years. Indeed, which is why I named him more accomplished. But, like Grant, he came up embarrassingly short when he had to share the ring with greatness. Meanwhile, there is no evidence at all on film that he is anything like as good as Grant. I think he was probably the better fighter, but naming their comparison an "insult" is excessive IMO.
At 201 he was fighting the likes of 100 year old Moore. At a higher weight he was damn near stopped by Cooper. There is no evidence to your statement... and please don't tell me about sparring sessions.
A 201lb Ali would not "embarrass" Holyfield and Tyson, that's ludicrous. And, again, if you compare the GOAT to any division, he'll tend to do extremely well regardless of size. Great trainers now try to make all heavyweights they manage, almost every one, bigger than they need to be by the rules when they move up to heavy. That is as pertinent as the fact that trainers prefer size and skill over just size.
Three. Fulton was clearly more accomplished. But an insulting comparison? I'm not making any comparison, really except to say I'd expect there to be some sort of parity, as in a series of fights between them would be well contested, for all that (allowing that some will disagree based upon cross-era comparisons) Fulton should be favoured. As you don't see the comparison, I don't see the insult.
Cheers. 98,99,00. He was #3 in 98 and 99. In a way Grant did have the Fulton title. Big, big things were expected of him by a biased press (biased to Americans in one case and white Americans in the other) before he was found out in devastating fashion. The difference is that Fulton did more before a real monster got their hands on him and then recovered better afterwards. Which is enough difference to put a class between them but no more than that I think.
But they are not realistically as good as you are going to get. Realistically Harry wills is. Because he was a much better big man than Willard and Fulton and he was around during dempseys era.
