What if Larry Holmes had never been born?

Ali wouldn't have absorbed the beating he did from holmes and perhaps he would be in better health today. Although he was showing signs of illness a few years before that fight i believe that absorbing such a head beating at his advanced age certainly aggravated his condition.

 

- I am confident Earnie Shavers would be a world champion.

- The title changes hands several times, until Tyson.

- Excellent heavyweight boxing technique, which Holmes learned from Ali and became an all-time great master of, becomes a disappearing art, the province of old-time technicians such as Ali, Tunney and Johnson. With the advent of Tyson, punching power becomes an even more dominant heavyweight quality. Lennox Lewis is a tad less technically proficient, suffering a second kayo before the Rahman debacle and never attaining his eventual greatness.

- The heavyweight division would be deprived of one of its very classiest champions ever.