What is the lowest justifiable ranking for Ali?

What is with the comparison you don't agree with?

 

It wouldn't be questions you'd ask per se.... more like questions you would no longer ask because you'd figure he's a complete imbecile, so why bother.

 

I have him at 4 behind Rocky Marciano, Jack Dempsey and Joe Louis, and Jack Johnson behind Ali at 5.

Where ever you rank Ali though, you have to remember that in his own day against his best opponents Ali was the underdog. So the common opinion in a number of his fights against his top opponents was that Ali was not the favourite to win so he wasn't considered the best of his era going into a few of his fights so I don't think it's a huge jump to not think he was the best of all time.

Obviously we have the hindsight of looking at Ali's career as a body of work now but it does have to be tempered slightly with the fact that people's thought on Ali are these days highly influenced by good PR.

I know various young people at my work who are currently big fight fans who have all said when asked who they think is the best heavyweight ever, things like well I've never really seen him fight but I suppose you would have to say probably Ali is the best ever but maybe Tyson after that - basically just accepting as if it must be given.

I just prefer to think a little outside the box and think for myself a little more and actually watch the fights and ignore the common universal conceptions on different fighters and just decide how I think certain guys would do against each other on face value from watching the fights.

I begrudge no one there opinion but I think it is just really short sighted just to flat out say it's ridiculous to even say Ali could conceivably be any lower than no.2 - Joe Frazier beat him pretty clearly when he was 29 so unless you're gunna rate Joe Frazier very high at least in the top 7 or 8 I don't see how you can give Ali such a different standing than Frazier personally? Thoughts (oh and can this not descend into ridiculous name calling? Just interested to see if people can take these things into account at all)

 

P4P he is one of the greatest of all time, but H2H not so competitive in the modern heavyweight division, it's like stepping up 3-4 natural weight classes... Just think about it...

 

Tyson coming back beating Bowe, Lewis, Holyfield etc that would be above and beyond what Ali did

 

No. There is artificial weight now that really only represents changes in training trends. Fighters today do what is necessary to be sucsessful now. And it is necessary. In most cases it's just the same sized guys just weighing more plus token giants.

Was Ali better heavier or lighter?

 

Good post. I've often wonder how many of Ali's opponents are routinely slaughtered on here yet take on mythical proportions when it suits Ali!

Joe Frazier is chinny and a one armed, one dimensional fighter with average power when matched with anyone else.

Cleveland Williams never beat anyone of note and couldn't take a punch.

Sonny Liston was slow and had no heart.

Ken Norton was really average with a shaky chin.

Quarry was an ordinary plodder.

And so on.

So why does Ali beating them impress people so much?

Of course I don't think that about these fighters but that's what you hear on this and other sites. Ali is untouched by their "****ness"!

 

To point out, I now realise what you said hits home on the fact Ali bossed his own era and beat fighters from eras before and after him, so I'm kind of rethinking this whole scenario. I think justifying Ali's ranking can only be seen in a positive way, whereas I went the other way with it. So Yer top 2 would be my answer, right criteria could see him go slightly South of that.

 

Perhaps, perhaps not. Beating Holy in 1996 probably wouldn't have done much for Tyson's legacy tbf, since Evander was basically seen as washed up at the time. It's rather that the losses to Holy hurts his legacy.

And let's say he loses to Bowe in the mid 1990's and then avenges it twice after Bowe had lost most of his aura in the Golota fights... That is quite comparable to the Ali-Frazier trilogy, I'd say. The deciding factor would be how well prepared and focussed Bowe would appear in the last two.

A win over Lewis in 1998 (before Rahman but after McCall) would be tremendous given what we now know, but if that happened it could have been downplayed as a win over a frontrunner given Lewis's blip against McCall. Lewis in 1998 didn't have nearly the formidable aura Foreman had in 1974. (Imo he was the better, more well-rounded fighter, though).

 

That blog is a train wreck.



Mormeck had won 6 cruiserweight championships, which during the era of Muhammad Ali would be considered "6 world heavyweight titles".

Mormeck would be heavyweight champ back then, and Ali's opponents like Joe Frazier would be probably nothing more than cruiserweight champs nowadays.

So what would a bout Mormeck vs Ali mean?

It would mean that Ali would have fought one of the best opponents he has ever faced. In fact Muhammad Ali never won against someone at real heavyweight 200×2 who had been a 6x championship winner and a unified champion.

Additionally Mormeck would have been one of the heaviest (heavier than Sonny Liston, Joe Frazier and Ken Norton, and only 1 lbs lighter than George Foreman's average fighting weight in the 1970s) and possibly the most athletic guy Muhammad Ali ever KO'ed.

Is Jean Marc Mormeck a better win for Wladimir Klitschko than George Foreman for Muhammad Ali?



Ali "never' beat a unified champion?

Ali never beat a six-time championship winner? Does he mean a guy who won six title fights?

Mormeck would've been one of Ali's "best" opponents?

Mormeck would've been a heavyweight champion back then?

Is Jean Marc Mormeck a better win for Wladimir Klitschko than George Foreman for Muhammad Ali?

Um, no.:hi:

 

Going back and forth over who would beat who from different era's becomes comical. "Experts " have enough trouble picking winners in actual fights never mind hopping into time machines. It's pretty hard to claim wasn't the biggest ever. Dempsey raised the sport's profile from borderline illegal to accepted past time. Louis just dominated an era. He might have to share but he is #1.

 

Dead right. And easily top 10 pound for pound.

 

A lot of this stuff is subjective, so I'm sure you could find people who weigh certain factors (being undefeated like Marciano, short periods of apparent head-to-head invincibility like Tyson, well-rounded powerhouses like Lewis, etc.) differently enough to rate Ali below #3. Head-to-head rankings might also get you this result if you have a slightly different estimate of various fighters' strengths and weaknesses than the norm.

Beyond that, the easiest way to downgrade Ali is to attack the 1960s-70s era, as some on this thread have pointed out. Could go either direction with this, really. You might argue, on one hand, that boxing's talent pool and level of skill had declined since the 30s/40s. Many people believe this. On the other hand, you could push the superiority of modern training methods and globalized competition. Also not an uncommon belief.

If you wanted to push the envelope further, and more controversially, you could combine one or more of the above with a few choice anecdotes about Ali's career -- fitting the questionable Liston fights into a broader pattern of boxing's supposed corruption in the early 60s, pointing out that Ali took a few years off without defending his title, arguing that he lost his comeback to Frazier while still in his athletic prime,* talking about the way that Ali had the deck stacked in his favor against Foreman (location, loose ropes, heat, social context, etc.), and how thereafter the mid/late 70s boxing establishment bent over backwards to accommodate Ali, etc. etc.


* EDIT: If you wanted to get really sneaky, you could use the "nine year rule" -- a statistical trend where fighters tend to exit their primes after nine years of professional competition, regardless of their initial ages -- to argue that Ali was in his prime for Frazier, but not for any subsequent fights. (Ali became a pro in 1960, but took three years off...I guess you could include everybody through Blin if you're generous) This has the simultaneous effect of hurting Ali's resume AND downgrading the mid/late 1970s as an era so awful that its contenders couldn't even take out a past-it Ali.

 

I assumed when I read this we are talking about HW.

I think Louis-Ali-Johnson are 1-3 and I dont think its crazy to have them in any order.