Primo Carnera vs. Gerry Cooney

Perhaps you are making a good case that he should be on such a list.

 

I am more concerned by who he didn't beat.

He really needed to beat somebody of the Page, Weaver or Dokes class.

Even if he had won one and lost the return, I would be much more willing to back him in fantasy fights.

 

At the end of the day, head to head is speculation, while resume is history.

That is why I put much more emphasis on the latter.

In other words thee were high expectations of Cooney, which turned out to be unfounded, while there were low expectations of Douglas, which were dramatically proven wrong.

That is exactly why I place a high value on resume.

 

The reason Carnera isn't on any great punchers list is because he was fed a diet of fall down artists ,dive merchants, and no hopers and everyone with any knowledge of boxing knows very well this is the case.

 

Gee, do you think that some other people on the list might have been?

 

Name one on those lists who had verified fake fights as Carnera did?

 

Padded records are almost by definition fake.

If I am a journeyman paid to fight the up and coming Gerry Cooney, early in his career, then what exactly is my job?

To give him a bit of a test for a few rounds, assuming that i can, then lie down to avoid getting hurt too much.

The shenanigans were just a bit more organized in Carnera's day.

By the way we could find dirt on a lot of other champions of that era, if we accepted similarly loose evidence.

 

Cooney's best performance is part of his resume and, in turn, part of his history.

As I implied at the outset, Carnera thrived against a certain type of opposition. It was the type of opposition many heavyweights would have done well against. His longer history of doing so doesn't raise his ceiling.

This^ is a rather cynical twist on what I wrote and a seemingly deliberate shift from the point I was addressing. You'll be hard pushed to find as great an outlier than Tyson/Douglas - to the extent that a myriad of posts specify 'Tokyo' Douglas in speculative fantasy matchups involving him. And yet, you used it as an example of why we might as well not rely on the demonstrable peak performance of a fighter's career - as though Douglas' story was the norm.

The loss to Holmes does not mean those high expectations of Cooney were unfounded. It means Cooney lost to the better man on the night and an all-time great heavyweight. If anything, Cooney proved many of his doubters wrong and there were some writers who, on the strength of his performance, believed him to be the second best heavyweight in the world at that point. It didn't work out for him, but no one can take that performance and what came before it away from Cooney.

Placing a high value on historical mediocrity is your thing - especially where Carnera is concerned.
It isn't mine and it never will be.

 

Resume is most useful in ranking fighters. But what’s not on the resume isn’t something that can be calculated … if a fighter never fought a southpaw, we cannot assume he would never beat a southpaw. If a heavyweight never fought anyone taller than 6-4, we cannot assume he loses to everyone he might fight who is 6-5 or taller.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (of the ability to win any certain fight).

Simple example: Before Mike Tyson knocked out Trevor Berbick he had never fought a former heavyweight champion, whereas Trevor has beaten contenders. Freeze their resumes before the bell and you have a former champion who has beaten contenders vs. a contender has never beaten a former champion. Your logic would dictate that Trevor wins this fight.

Cooney having never fought Dokes or Page or Weaver or whoever doesn’t mean he cannot beat Carnera … who, by the way, never fought any of those guys either. It just means he never fought those guys.

At some point in every successful fighter’s career, he does something that is not on his resume before he does it — wins a fight by KO late when he’s behind, for instance, or outboxes a taller opponent or wins in a hostile environment. They hadn’t done it to that point but then they went and did it, so it proves one can do something one hasn’t done before.

That doesn’t mean Cooney beats Carnera — we’ll never know obviously, so we can speculate til the cows come home on either man winning — but it doesn’t mean he loses to him.

 

Patsy Perroni vs prime Mike Tyson...who you got?

 

What's a "dive merchant"?

 

Most people on this forum believe that Terry McGovern was the beneficiary of a fixed fight, and most world probably regard him as an all time puncher.

Likewise many on this forum take it as a given, that Sonny Lison took a dive in the second Ali fight.

 

You are right Carnera di thrive against a certain type of opposition, and it was a type that encompassed the kind of men that Cooney so conspicuously failed to prove himself against.

That is to say the other top contenders of the day.

The bottom line is that we needed to see Cooney beat somone like Weaver or Berbick, to even prove that he was one of the best of his era.

The loss to Holmes is not a substitute.

The problem is that there is nothing mediocre about Carnera's resume.

It was good.

 

Put the question another way.

How many times in your life, have you picked a fighter to beat somebody with a vastly superior resume, when your prediction was going to be tested tomorrow.

I mean excluding cases where the fighter with the vastly superior resume was washed up.