Most fundamentally sound fighter..

Harold was a rather short light heavyweight though and did not have exceptional reach. To be as dominant as he was with the jab despite usually having disadvantages in height and reach is quite impressive to me.

 

Really need to see more of Gonzalez but I agree with the Roman shout, although he didn't really come to mind. You can mention Santos Laciar, too.

 

May 28, 1975, to be precise. (Interestingly, this was a major UPI story in my local paper. Ezz was not in any way obscure or forgotten when he passed, and the headline acknowledged him as a great gentleman, a fine and wholly appropriate accolade.)

Charles anecdotally claimed following his diagnosis that he "sensed" what eventually killed him even while at his peak. Finely tuned athletes are certainly more sensitive to bodily feedback than sedentary lay people, but yes, it must also be acknowledged that few opponents of Marciano's were able to fully recover from sustained beatings aside from Moore (and to a lesser extent, Layne, who had a good 1954 campaign, and Lowry, who went 4-1 in 1953). Ezz took an unmatched 23 rounds of punishment from Rocky. Who knows? Stephen Hawking has been afflicted with ALS for decades. It does surface in different forms, starting on Gehrig's upper body, and Charles's legs. Hawking's long survival has been attributed to him having a different strain of it, and also to his intense mental activity.

Recently, it has also been proposed that some neurological damage sustained from boxing can mimic ALS, but aside from LeDoux, no prominent boxer that I'm aware of has been diagnosed with ALS.

Ezz actually did engage in some arduous physical training following his diagnosis (a newspaper article profiling some of this is on-line, but I can't find it to recover at the moment), and fought like hell against it. Getting up from his wheelchair at the benefit where Marciano and Moore rushed to assist him was a powerful moment, especially since it was his legs which the disease attacked first.

More so than even Pep and SRR, I think we miss out on lacking footage of a peak, pre-Baroudi Charles. His final match before that tragedy was his knockout of Moore, a masterpiece according to all accounts. (Ezz himself jokingly said, "I think that's the last time anybody outsmarted Archie." )

 

Perhaps he's hinting at having feigned being more hurt than he actually was to get Moore to open up and at the same time expose himself to Charles's counter-attack which knocked Moore out.

 

You may be right about his height, but his reach was hardly a detriment on my eyes. He always had very sturdy physical dimensions. In his fight with Pastrano the 2 inch height difference was hardly a factor, as Johnson looked to have much longer arms in proportion to his body (Pastrano's arms always did look a tad stubby), and seemed more than capable of holding his own at the preferred range in the jabbing department because of this. Instead he made what is usually touted as a technical masterclass bout pretty ugly in parts by lunging after the constantly moving Pastrano and attempting to make it a scrappy in-fighting affair.

 

Vernon Forrest. He rarely made mistakes and I love how he fought I wouldn't mind fighting like him, Donald Curry, or Ezzard Charles. I'm a fan of all 3.

 

Yet some spectators thought that Charles was close to being knocked out. He must have put on some kind of act.

This takes away from him being a textbook fighter though... :good

I've seen Archie Moore use the trick a couple of times, once he failed miserably at it against Giolio Rinaldi, when the referee thought Moore had been hurt and gave him a standing eight count.

 

Essentially he was trying to pull an Archie Moore. I think he just didn't have the legs to chase Pastrano all night, but I felt he landed the best and most effective jabs of the bout.

Harold's reach was listed at 74 inches by the New York Times, which is neither short nor exceptionally long. He was hardly 6 feet tall Carlos Monzon fighting 5'7 opponents though.

 

Orlando Canizales
Bernard Hopkins
Alexis Arguello
Juan Manuel Marquez

 

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc0A_e8-DKI[/ame]

 

Eddie Futch used to pin up pictures of Billy Conn in action around the gym, for instructional purposes.

 

Joe Louis for me hands down