Prime Muhammad Ali was hittable

Plenty do if you look at any Ali vs someone else thread

Now if only people today would acknowledge those weakness on these forums instead of treating Ali like some sort of invincible demigod.

Yep I agree with all of this and I have no issue acknowledging everything Ali accomplished my problem is more people who ignore his shortcomings but I respect that you acknowledge all of them so props for that!

 

How many of them were more than grazing shots?

 

By that logic not even Joe Louis has a good resume. multiple of his best opponents were as small as Patterson, Max schmeling wasn’t in his prime when Louis rematched him, Max Baer had broken hands, abe Simon probably wasn’t as good as anyone in that list.

 

Absolutely agree Swag. Even when pitting them against each other (Louis vs Ali) people often point to their lesser performances to give one man advantage over the other.

Both Louis and Ali also cop this treatment when pitched against other fighters in the fantasy realm.

The favourite go to in order to downgrade Louis is the Conn fight.

With Ali, among other things, people reach impracticality back to the first Cooper fight and KD when Ali was clearly pre prime and also fooling around too much as at the time.

You can’t transpose a fighter exactly from a single fight during his career against a given opponent in the fantasy realm.

That type of methodology fails to recognise specific stylistic meshes and how seriously or not seriously a fighter took their opponent.

For instance, after Cooper 1, while Ali had physically matured that bit more, he certainly wasn’t fooling around with Liston any which way in Miami.

Of course both Louis and Ali would bring in their A games against one another and I still think it would be a pick ‘em fight personally.

 

“That logic” I’m stating an unarguable fact here, Ali’s opposition in the 60s wasn’t that good and was very repeatable by many HWs he just looked really good beside them… so much so to this day people think the 60s version despite the Cooper fight was a magical aberration of a fighter, I guess his Hamed antics just satisfy the general public that much…?

 

I suppose another way of putting it in order to gauge Ali's relative tendency to take punches would be asking which heavyweight in his prime inarguably got hit less than Ali vs similar or better opposition than Ali faced. Cos that's a small to non-existent number imo, even if you do want to make the argument on a certain fighters behalf.

 

Lol. Of course it’s an arguable “fact”.

Cooper 1 was pre prime Ali and a poorly focused, goofing off Ali (fighting to prediction) at that. What exactly don’t you get about that? That fight is clearly your favourite, albeit highly impractical, go to.

But then you’ve also called in Ali’s performance against Bonavena to unjustly downplay Ali - JUST his second fight back in after 3.5 years exile, with JUST 3 rounds of actual fight time behind him otherwise, as if it was a best version of a second career Ali.

You have to be kidding, right? If a better match fit Ali had rematched Bonavena later in the piece, that fight would’ve been so much easier for Muhammad.

Who beats Liston and when IF Ali didn’t turn the trick in Miami?

Like it or not, Liston was still very much a formidable force in the HW Division as at Feb 1964 - plenty thought he was going to kill Ali.

You likely would’ve resolutely picked against Ali in Miami also - and you would’ve been proven to be dead wrong.

Quality of Opposition varies for a lot of HW Champions, before even going there, there are stand alone qualities of a Champion that can be assessed and measured in their own right to a certain extent.

Ali dominated during his first reign, fought everyone available and via a very busy schedule. They weren’t all “not good” fighters.

 

If you're talking with the guy who used one minute when Ali was playing around in the MacFoster fight to show that Ali was no good, then I think you're unlikely to get somewhere with him. To put it mildly.

That particular poster uses what must be 90% of his time here to **** on Liston, Ali and Foreman. Very peculiar obsession.

 

A poster who only talks about a certain fighter in terms of his worst performances are pretty much per definition a troll.

With Louis there were some who said that pretty much every technical boxer would beat him due to the problems he had with Schmeling, Conn, Walcott and Charles at very varying stages of his career. Ignoring rematches of course.

For Ali the equivalence is to say that he had problems with any half decent aggressive fighter and cite Jones, Cooper and Frazier. Again ignoring stages of his career and rematches.

For Tyson you can see that Tillis apparently provided the blueprint to beat him. Despite him only being beat once in that fashion and despite coming up in an era full of movers and jabbers.

For Lewis it used to be that anyone with a decent punch would sleep him. Because Ruddock, Morrison, Briggs, Grant, Tua etc were all feather fists of course.


For Louis and Lewis I haven't seen much of any of this for a long time. Concerning Tyson it still pops up now and then, but not frequently. Bringing up Jones and Cooper (first fight only) for Ali is still very much alive and well, though. Seems like there's always a new generation of posters more than willing to go there.

 

I applaud. I'd add it's not just trolls, some people are genuinely that silly.

With Liston (mostly chok but others too) out would come good old Marty Marshall. With Duran you may encounter the odd Laing comment. For Frazier some used to bust out Bonavena 1. It seems to be really enticing when it comes to Heavyweights. It's probably not as common of late (thank god) excepting the imbecile you've been referencing.

 

Ah, yeah. Marshall, Laing and Bonavena.... Forgot about those old nuggets.

I guess it actually has cleaned up. Back in the day you used to see some version of that most days, I think. Mendoza was probably responsible for at least a third, since he hated pretty much everyone except Jeffries.

 

Duran with the Laing comment,I never saw one of it but it's overall not a really good argument for his weakness imo,it was a competitive fight and while it really gave the style holes of Duran,he did show some improvements later on and actually shows some glimpses of adjusting to Laing in that fight.

 

I still wouldn't take that fight enough indicative of Duran flaws since I read somewhere he barely trained.

 

Lots of "experts" think he was...wrong! He really never leaned the finer points of boxing...he relied on his speed...and that showed in the 1970's when he became a punching bag!

 

When he knew the guy couldn't beat him he liked to show off and didn't mind if he got hit a bit. It's boxing, everybody gets hit a bit