Rocky Marciano vs. Jim Jeffries

Actually, Bobo was known as a puncher as well- for example, here's a selection from Charley Burley's biography on the CBZ:
"A good measure of his gameness and ability is the fact that he was a regular sparing partner of the Pittsburgh heavyweight Harry Bobo, a contender for Joe Louis's title. Many people in Pittsburgh felt that Bobo could give Joe Louis a good fight yet didn't think he could beat Burley in the ring. He had kayoed Elmer 'Violent' Ray and 'Jersey' Joe Walcott in sparring sessions and forced middleweight champion Marcel Cerdan out of the gym, (Charley was supposed to be Cerdan's first opponent in America!)."

 

Peter's last 6 fights are the ones in which he has consistently faced mainly top 20 opposition. Obviously one can pick another streak in which he fought lesser opposition or take his entire career and get a different bean count; that's not the point. Since he began regularly fighting top 20 opponents, he has had only 1 stoppage win in 6 fights, which is even a much lower knockout average than Louis' going into the Marciano match (and his opposition has not been as strong as a comebacking Louis', either).

First off, this is rationalizing away from a principle; that is, I'm making a broad point that big punchers still often fail to score many stoppages against top-tier opponents and will have runs with very few stoppages when they're consistently fighting that level of opposition, rather than a specific point that one or two streaks are identical/perfectly comparable. Second, the arguments you use even in that sphere are largely slanted and are taking advantage of the misleading form of statistics which make modern fighters look superior to old-time fighters thanks to their far more protected careers.

Wladimir Klitschko has only been stopped three times in 52 fights, it's true; but Lee Savold had only been stopped once in his last 52 fights, and you won't stop slagging him as an unimpressive opponent to stop! Instead of accepting the fact that Savold had been stopped only once in his last 55 fights and 10 years before fighting Louis (and that was against Violent Ray) as a reasonable indication that he was a durable/hard-to-stop fighter, you go back to the formative years of his career when he was clearly performing at a much lower level and feed a statistically-deceptive interpretation of the facts. You see, when we make a relevant comparison of the data, we find that Savold was stopped significantly less often in his prime than Wladimir was; it's when we make an irrelevant comparison in which we stack up two careers compiled in a principally different fashion side-by-side as though they were directly analogous that we come to a deceptive conclusion like the one you're forwarding.

Your other statistical comparisons are also fallacious; for example, the "total number of stoppage losses among all the opponents" thing is obviously uninformative, since Peters' opponents are all still active and will almost certainly suffer more stoppage losses (particularly at the ends of their careers), whereas Louis' opponents careers all long since ran their courses- not to mention that Louis' opponents generally had far more fights, generally fought far more top opponents, and generally turned pro earlier and fought much less protected careers (much like I discussed in the comparison above).

Now, for relevant and directly comparable data, as opposed to the skewed kind seen above, 2 of Louis' final 10 fights were against linear world heavyweight champions, 6 were against current top 10 fighters, and 8 were against opponents who would have been seen as top 20. In Peters' last 6 fights, 1 was against an opponent who will (probably) eventually be seen as a linear heavyweight champion, 3 were against current top 10 fighters, and 4 were against fighters who were seen as top 20. In other words, they've fought a similar spread of opposition relative to their divisions, with Louis' being overall substantively better. And Louis had the significantly higher knockout average on the whole.

 

Harry Bobo was 6'4 220lb contender who could really punch. I once read a newspaper article that stated louis camp feared and tried there best to avoid a fight with harry bobo.


Savold was plenty durable, and looked alot better physical shape, much trimmer and faster vs louis than vs marciano.