Liston's resume and ranking

Yeah, that would be one of the intagibles which you could include late on what I was talking about. But those are only minor factors imho.

 

Less then two years not a few years. And as he said at his age the time off might be better then being active. Hell, he was inactive for over 3 years after Tyson and came back to win againts Mercer a good 4 years after Tyson, then going 12 with Holyfield (winning 4 in my book too) and damn nearly beat McCall (who was just comming of a big win againts LL) in 1995. I didnt see Holmes any worse in those fights than againts Tyson. Againts Tyson, Holmes simply had a stupid idea of wearing Tyson down to the later rounds, but he couldnt help himself and started doing his thing in the 4th round, popping the jab, showing off as usual, and he got nailed - no surprise there. Yes, Holmes was past his prime and in his older years but I think Tyson should be given more credit for a complete destruction of Holmes given that Holmes fought for 14 more years and never got close to being destroyed in the same fashion.

 

michael spinks would disagree

 

Or ...... something got in Clay's eyes.
Liston's efforts in the Clay/Ali fights were poor.

They were good fighters. I agree.

 

He may, he may not. What has this to do with ranking a fighter?

 

Well, I was a bit harsh and exagerated a bit but that was due to you exagerating it to the other side. The truth is somewhere in the middle I think.

 

I thought the first fight was a fair effort by Liston for 6 rounds but the ending obviously took away from that performance. The second fight was what it was.

This was a pretty good fight in my opinion:

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lp0RdiW8-bQ[/ame]


[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx41e6eQz9o[/ame]

 

I had Liston winning 3 of the 6 rounds.
But that's all the more reason to condemn him for the way he surrendered so lamely. Maybe he had a bad shoulder. Maybe there was some sort of "fix". Maybe he just hadn't trained for the fight. But none of those reasons save him from the due judgment that his effort was very poor, a pathetic "defence" of the championship, whatever way you slice it.

 

I don't know about that. Machen got a chance to show what he could do with Patterson and he let Patterson walk all over him. Machen and Folley were good, solid technicians, but overall they weren't anything spectacular IMO. They did enough to hang around the rankings for some time, but their performances were often rather unimpressive/uninspiring.

Also, they weren't really "the best" contenders of that era; Johansson was.

 

That was after Machen had already gone mental and threatened to kill himself.

I'm not saying Patterson couldn't have beaten them, I wouldn't favour any of them in a match-up against Floyd, but the fact is that he didn't fight them as the champ. He did find the time to fight the likes of Tom McNeeley, Pete Rademacher, Brian London, but not Zora Folley nor Eddie Machen (during his title reign).

Johansson didn't want any part of Liston. They were scheduled to fight in 1963, Johansson performed below expectations against London and retired.

 

fear factor.his fight with tyson:good

 

Yeah but what has this to do if we rank fighters? How do you compare the "fear factor" of different fighters? Too much speculation for me.

 

you said fear factor was only a minor factor and i said michael spinks would disagree.:goodi also disagree that it only plays a minor role.

 

What the hell is this "fear factor" you guys are going on about ??

 

Well, Tyson made Spinks "freeze". That´s what he meant I suppose.

Personally, I don´t think this should influence a ranking and if only very slightly because it´s too much speculation and can´t be compared.