Nat Fleisher's Top 10 Heavyweights

Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston are locks.

Patterson, Walcott and Charles should have been featured instead of Schmeling, Tunney and Corbett.

And no argument can be made for Louis not being a clear cut #1 back then.

 

I have been around long enough to agree with this. I chatted with Nat many times up on 31st street down from the garden. Nat was amazing for recalling fights among the greats and gauged them against the current fighters of the day (which was the early 70's then)

From what I have seen its always 6 of one, half a dozen of another

but you said it correct Magoo:good truth be told

 

About 80 years from now, people will look at Lewis's defeat to McCall in much the same light that we now view Dempsey's loss to Fireman Flynn and say WTF???? Perception is everything.. And it changes with each generation.

 

Walcott said he thought Liston had slipped.

 

The problem is that the exaggerations and myth-making of guys like Fleisher take on such outsized importance due to the dearth of film footage and media coverage (relative to the modern era). Fight fans generations from now will have hundreds of rounds of Tyson, Holyfield, and Lennox Lewis fight footage (and thousands of rounds of their opponents' fight footage) and extensive media coverage of their careers from their amateur days to pore over in making their assessments.

 

Not sure why some are throwing their trollies out the pram. A defendable list, especially when you considered how each fighter performed against men on that list. Although Corbett for me, doesn't deserve to be above Langford, Schmelling or rocky, he did go undefeated against the best black and White fighter of his era. Sorry to bring race into it, but I feel Corbett is often overlooked, but for the lack of fights he had, he still boasts big names on his resume.

 

Funny thing is Liston wasn't that highly regarded by his contemporaries. It's only in more recent years that his standing has improved. Omitting him from a top ten list didn't make many waves. Fleischer did get some criticism for leaving Ali out, to the point where he penned a Ring article justifying his choice.

In 1968 there was only a pre-comeback Ali, a pre-peak Frazier, and no Foreman, Holmes, Tyson, Holyfield, Lewis or the Klitschkos, all guys considered in and around the top ten these days. As a list of pre-1968 heavies it's not that bad, though there are still plenty of holes to pick. Who knows, perhaps in 2062 a top ten list for 2015 will get the same treatment.

 

Nat Fleischer also called Oscar Bonavena the strongest fighter he ever saw.

The way Oscar got manhandled by Ali and even Ellis outmuscled him in their fight, I don't know where Fleischer got that.

Fleischer witnessed a lot, but he came up in the era when people just passed stories around and legends grew from that. Films are more accurate.

 

Really?

It was to my understanding that Liston was regarded as essentially unbeatable before the Ali fights? His stock couldn't have really dropped that much, with most people thinking that the fights were fixed anyway? :think

 

Fleischer never forgave Liston for the two Ali fights.

 

Fleischer saw all Jim Jacobs collection of films, he wrote articles about them.

 

Yes, as is leaving out Ali and Charles. Consider that in 1968, Ali (with nine successful defenses) and Charles (with eight) were the third and fourth most-successful defending heavyweight champions ever behind Joe Louis and Tommy Burns. And Ali was unbeaten and looked like he'd never fight again.

It's a terrible list if we're being honest.

 

Charles doesn't belong on a top ten heavyweight list.imo He wasn't ranked very highly during the 50's or 60's, his rep has grown comparatively recently, partly because he is a p4p atg

 

No he didn't. Jim Jacobs and Bill Cayton picked up a lot of films AFTER 1972 - when Fleischer died.

In fact, I have an article that talks about Jacobs showing the film of Corbett-Fitzsimmons to a group of boxing experts (including the reigning light heavyweight champ - so it would've been around 1965) in the mid 1960s and everyone was laughing because they didn't know who either boxer was. Jacobs didn't tell them first.

And the crowd laughed about how bad the two boxers were. And Jacobs had to explain to them that it was Corbett vs. Fitszimmons. And people thought he was joking, because they'd "read" about how great those two were. And they couldn't believe the guys in the film were them.

I don't know if Fleischer was there, I don't have the article in front of me. And that was only a few years before Fleischer died. And Fleischer was one of the primary people TELLING everyone for years how great those two guys were.

Most of the vintage films readily available on sites like YouTube had never been seen by anyone except the holders of those films until Jacobs started selling copies of them on reels in boxing magazines in the 1970s.