What do you think? Lou beat Tim Witherspoon, knocked out Buster Douglas, and beat the other Buster too, Mathis Jr. I'll admit, I've never watched the entire Foreman fight, but in spite of being a huge Foreman fan, the rounds I've seen looked to me like Lou was outscoring him, albeit not with hard punches. What do you think of the Savarese career?
Bingo.. He was good enough to be a lower echelon contender but not elite. Began his career 36-0, basically retired Buster Mathis and have old George a close fight. He's probably on a similar level to a guy like Pierre Coetzer.
Fringe contender is fair. Able to be very competitive with old Foreman. Who was basically done. Mathis, old Witherspoon, old Douglas. Lance Whitaker. Got wiped out by Tyson. Lost by KO to Izon. Big guy who stayed in shape was game but not overly talented and had suspect chin. Side note my cousins went to same highschool as him during same time.
I felt he performed better against foreman than Briggs even though Briggs was given the deciscion. Savarese was a bit of a stiff. Not world level but could feed on shot name fighters.
Journeyman at best, he's on a Joe Hipp, Joe Mesi level, what i remember about him the most was going all the way to Scotland only to be beaten to a pulp by Tyson in like 2 minutes many years ago:yep
You can be a journeyman and a contender. In fact, most contenders are journeymen. Savarese was a journeyman at best. I don't remember if he was even a serious contender but he would have at least been on the fringes of contention.
Interestingly, there's a story of Savarese knocking out Shannon Briggs in sparring. He had good wins over Whitaker (Savarese was on the verge of being knocked out, how Smoger let him continue after KD and a beatdown, don't know), old Douglas and old Witherspoon, and he stopped Mathis jr, but his record is mostly padded by d-level opponents. He was tough and has some skills but was slow, had far from best chin and he wasn't a hard hitter really.
I thought Savarese edged Foreman. Savarese was never a top ten guy, but he had enough size and power to give a better fighter something to think about. Fringe Contender type in a very talented era of heavyweight boxing. Big Lou would be in the top ten at some point if he were around today
a decent top 10-20 guy that was big but not great at any one thing. Not a stiff, just limited when compared to the top 5 guys.
