I did one on Vitali yesterday, and thought it might be interesting to do a few thread polls on a number of great HW's and see where the people were. I'll use guys who are mostly consensus (excepting crazy haters etc) top 30 HW's, and use the same polling criteria for each one. I'm not going to do Ali or Louis, as they are basically the only consensus top 5 HW's, and nearly consensus top 2 hw's. I might do a wrap up thread posting the consensus opinion of the fighters at the end. For me, Bowe proved himself better H2H against Holyfield, but his resume apart from that is much worse. In the same way that I still rate Tyson better than Holyfield despite Holyfield being better H2H, I rate Holyfield better than Bowe (which is hard to do, you really need a much better resume for that when you lose to someone else definitively). But Bowe's best untarnished wins apart from Holyfield were probably Hide (who nearly ko'd him) or Donald. Very bad resume, and I'd probably only rate him as the 4th best HW of his era, behind Lewis, Tyson, and Holyfield. Still, since it was such a deep era, I'd rate him around #25, basically over about any other HW who was 4th best of his era.
He could have been right up there is he had the discipline and desire. It's a shame we never got to see him and Lewis go at it. Still, he went life and death with Golota twice, who was blown away by Tyson and Lewis.
Almost ko'd by Herbie Hide?:huh Hide ran for his life and still was dropped about 10 times. He was battered from beginning to end. He didn't come anywhere close to stopping Bowe. Bowe also has good wins against top undefeated prospects of the time -Jorge Luis González and Andrew Golota. Those guys were never the same after they shared the ring with Bowe. He beat Jesse Ferguson after he had just beaten Ray Mercer and took his position as #1 mandatory contender. After Bowe utterly destroyed Ferguson , Jesse fought Mercer again and beat him again only to get robbed. Bowe has a very respectable resume from arguably the second greatest HW era of all time. Virali's resume does not come close.
Definitely wouldn't call him an all-time great. He had a brief reign in the 90s and secured 2 very good wins over Holyfield, but besides that didn't really do anything of note. Didn't seem to have that true champion mentality.