What has Lennox Lewis gotta do to earn some respect round here?

Stop it already, please! This has gotten old in just a couple of days. The consensus in these parts is that Lennox is a top 10 ATG with most having him top 5! I personally rate him 4th.

There is no shortage of respect for Lewis in regards to resume and ranking. There is no shortage of respect for Lewis in regards to hypothetical prowess either with most considering his chances to be solid against many other ATG's spanning multiple eras.

 

Barry McGuigan left Lewis out when comparing Wlad K. (Who has just retired) to former heavyweight greats, Barry went on to say ay 6ft 7" and 17 stones+ Wlad might have been too big for many of the past heavy champs, if that is so surely Lewis at 6ft 5" and around 17 stones Lewis might have stood the best chance specifically when compared to the smaller heavies Barry mentioned like Joe Frazier who was blown away by Foreman!

 

The British secretly hate Lewis.

 

A prime , focused Lennox Lewis is a hell of a match up for anyone ..

 

Based on what?

 

I think there are a lot of fellow Brits who secretly hate Lewis. You gotta remember that Frank Bruno was the nation's sweetheart, everyone loved Bruno, he was constantly doing adverts, notably for HP sauce, pantomimes in the winter, always appearing on chat shows, with his booming laugh and his playful personality, the people loved him. Plus we love a loser sometimes more than we love a winner. At this point there was no detection of his mental problems, and there were no signs of arrogance or aloofness to turn people off.

Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, knew who he was.

When he faced Lennox Lewis in Cardiff, the crowd were virtually unanimously in favour of Bruno. But Lennox Lewis destroyed him in the 7th round. To some people, that is unforgivable to do that to a fellow Brit, the nation's sweetheart.

 

Plus there is plenty that have never accepted him as being truly British even though he was born there. There's the accent, the fact that he won gold for Canada at the Olympics and that he only came back to Britain to boost his pro career at the beginning. Even then you never actually saw in the country unless it was to promote his next fight.

 

Yes, I think this is a factor too. I gotta admit that Lennox didn't always help himself, when quite often he'd do an interview with British TV it would be by videolink, and there would be a nice, beautiful sunny backdrop behind him that quite obviously wasn't Britain.

 

For me though, if you aren't rating Lennox in the top 2 HWs of all time, you are severely underrating him and doing him a massive disservice.

Only Ali has beaten more greats. And only Marciano shares his record of never losing to a fellow great.

I mean the guys who are saying that Holyfield, Tyson, Bowe could have beaten him, and they find these convoluted reasons why, like if the temperature was exactly 23.1c, with a north westerly breeze of 2.3mph, and they'd fought at exactly 10.21pm on April 15th 1989... I just don't know what planet these guys are living on.

 

Louis greater than Ali IMHO! So that leaves Holmes and Lewis for my 3-4 slot. Not sure why that is a disservice? The greater disservice IMO is Louis not being considered 1 or 2.

Hypothetical H2H is not a science or system such as basing accomplishments or domination of eras. Everybody has an opinion and while we have all been wrong in real life we feel as though we never are in these hypotheticals. They are fun but not reality.

 

Yes, of course, good point!

 

We Canadian's like him a lot we know that he delayed going pro just to get another shot at winning gold. I always thought of the amateurs as being an apprentice in the trades. You end up being better over the long run. For whatever reason people call him slow but in his prime he was deadly quick as fellow Canadian Ruddock found out. Anyway l personally rank him in the 3-5 range for accomplishments. H2h he's anywhere from 1st to 5th. Who know who would win between him and Ali, Holmes, Foreman, Liston or Tyson. Others might throw in a few other fighters but H2h l see one of these fighters coming out on top.

 

You're thinking way too deep there, it's true Bruno was the fans favourite but it's not as though Lewis had just beat up Princess Diana.

 

I think the accent might have been part of it too, but then Greg Rusedski had a Canadian accent too, and every Brit who knew of him liked him. I think the point the other guy made about him hardly ever being in Britain is probably the killer. Even I used to think to myself when he was doing yet another interview by satellite "why the hell's he never here?".

If he was from the US though, he'd be a lot more highly regarded by the Americans, I'm sure of that, and if he'd embraced Britain a bit more, he'd be a lot more loved here.