Lyles record against taller fighters is an excellent 7-1 Garcia, ohalleran, bugner, middleton, ramos, pollard, mathis (5 ko) Loss to cooney when he was past his prime. Mathis and bugner were way ahead of carnera in terms of technique and skill. Considering this and the fact he got off the floor to win against the shorter but devastating puncher earnie shavers, the only way this could end is either lyle beats the dog crap out carnera for a ud or lyle knocks him within 8 rounds.
Quarry. Young. When Ali chose to box Lyle had no answer. In general it was understood that the best way to beat Lyle was to outbox him. Typical however when fighting a puncher. Certainly you did not want to go punch for punch with him as he could bang with his right.
Ali was down on2 cards and level on the third. That does not suggest that. " Lyle was pretty easy to outbox"
I watched that bout Live. The fight was close only because Ali chose to fight early on with his "new" gimmick....."the mirage". So many rounds he just let Lyle lean on him (and occasionally punch). Lyle announced prior to the fight his strategy was he was not going to try to beat Ali......in other words not be lulled into exhausting himself trying to KO Ali. In any event the rounds Ali chose to box Lyle could do little. Quarry easily outboxed him as did Young.....twice.
Lyle definitely could be outboxed (even though he was still pretty green when he met Quarry) but he had decent skills. I don't think Carnera had the power to keep Lyle at a safe distance, and I definitely don't see him doing it on skill alone.
He could be outboxed as Young proved, but not " easily" which was the statement by Perry I took issue with.
One can ask Bugner (who had good boxing skills for his size), how easy Lyle was to outbox. "Ron Lyle nearly killed me. I am not kidding, he nearly killed me. The fight was at twelve noon in Las Vegas (nearly all my fights were during midday in the USA to coincide with the television broadcast back in Europe.) To cut a long story short, Ron Lyle was an ex-jail bird and learned boxing in jail. When I met him he said, “You got no chance of beating me because I am going to kill you.” Here I was at 27 years in the hard world of boxing. The fight went the full twelve rounds. After the bout, I called my brother Bill and told him I could not breathe. I had blood coming out of me. He rang the doctor who called an ambulance and rushed me to the Las Vegas emergency Hospital and they discovered I was bleeding internally. They put me into an ice tank. It took me six months to recover from that fight. Ron Lyle was a punishing fighter and so fu**ing big. He was bigger than me. He kept telling me during the fight, “I am going kill you mother fu**er.” I sacked my manager after the fight after a ten year relationship. He wanted to go to a party after the fight rather than look after my welfare. I had paid him 25% of my purse." http://www.fightnews.com/Boxing/qa-joe-bugner-39521
