Who ranks higher as a heavyweight, Joe Frazier or Mike Tyson?

Let's put it this way.

Let's say in just 1 crazy round, wilder manages to drop Fury twice like he did in the 3rd fight. Fury is covered in bruises and badly hurt then goes to his corner.

2nd round, Fury comes out storming and drops wilder. He follows up with the same tactics he did originally, non stop pressure, leaning on him, sneaking in looping hooks and uppers, and drops wilder 3 more times. Wilder keeps getting up but is a complete mess and they eventually stop it just before the bell.

Basically imagine if all the major events of the original 3rs fight got condensed into 2 rounds. Now, keeping my new scenario in mind, would anyone be calling wilder pathetic, a weakling, or laughing at his performance? I don't think so. Can you imagine the chaos and pandemonium that would ensue if two fighters managed to drop each other SEVEN times in just two rounds? I'm sure the crowd would collectively lose their voices screaming in excitement.

People would compare it to Dempsey vs Firpo. Wilder still goes out on his shield whether it's TKO round 2 or TKO round 11. It's about the EFFORT. That's changes the whole perspective of a fight. If wilder drops fury badly then hangs on and continues getting off the canvas over and over trying to win despite being badly outclassed, people would respect him no matter how many rounds it takes fury to eventually keep him down.

I wasn't suggesting that it would make no difference if fury just easily crushed wilder with one hit in 2 rounds without getting hurt. Of course that would be embarrassing.

So back to Tyson vs Douglas, the ass whooping was so one sided i do not honestly think it would make much of a difference in terms of evaluating Tyson's overall historical ranking and the quality of his losses. Whether it's a KO in round 2 or 10, he still lost to a 42-1 underdog and wasn't competitive at all outside of one knockdown where Douglas got careless.

 

But indeed this is the closest scenario to what took place in the first Frazier v. Foreman. Smokin Joe was hurt from the start and the fight was stopped in the second. He didn't hurt Foreman or brought himself on top of the fight for a moment.

In the rest of your reply you were pointing out effort.
Don't you think it takes a tremendous amount of effort coming out every round into a fight you're losing ? If I'm not mistaken, Mike Tyson took about 250 punches in Tokyo. And certainly, Wilder had to get through this too. Both of these men gave everything they had to hurt their rival. Instead of an iteration of 'whooping', what about that dimension of effort ?

 

Everything counts when you evaluate career

This isn't how good he was in his prime or H2H ranking ... This is overall ranking which means everything counts in his career .... Nobody cares that he lost to Kevin McBride and nobody would make the argument that Tyson isn't an ATG or not that good H2H due to that loss .... But it matters when you are looking at his career ....

 

Tyson never looked like he was in the fight. He didn't look like he was doing everything he could to win.

Both in terms of body language and his lack of creativity and attempts to turn things around, Tyson looked lost and very docile at times.

This is the complete opposite of Frazier who kept banging his fists together as if to say "yeah, you got me good but I'm still here" and kept trying to implement his bobbing and weaving and swarming no matter how many times it got neutralized. You can criticize him for his lack of imagination, but Frazier was never some genius technician. He stuck to his guns and literally kept running into the same shots over and over and the ref had to save him from himself.

Tyson just...stood there getting blasted by jabs and right hands following Douglas around on many occasions. It was simply biology and a fraction of dignity that kept him up, and a tiny glimmer of hope that he could turn the fight around with one shot. To be fair, it almost happened, but he was facing a different beast in there. Tyson failed himself, failed his fans, but his trainers failed him too. They trained him to knock guys out, but they never trained him to pace himself for an all out war against someone who could get nailed and keep fighting.

Tyson showed flashes of effort here and there, and I give him credit for taking a tremendous beating, but he wasn't doing everything he could to win.

 

When you look at his career, you will see that he achieved more than Frazier, despite those losses.

 

I think the narrative you're pushing here is inconsistent with facts; both fights showed complacent champions on their 10th title defense against men they were both favored to beat. One got blown out early, the other got beat up and stopped late.

There is no discernible difference in effort between the two although Tyson did show more success against his conqueror than Frazer did in either fight so the whole "yeah, you got me good but I'm still here" was at least more applicable to Tyson who kept coming round in round out as opposed to Frazier who couldn't stay upright long enough to complete that sentence. So if you're gonna say Tyson failed himself and his fans, so did Frazier.

Frankly, the way in which Frazier lost to Foreman was much worse than the way Tyson lost to Douglas. The only thing that balances this loss is the fact that Foreman went on to be an ATG and Douglas became a one hit wonder but the net effect is still an KO Loss on both their records. To be fair, Tyson never got a second chance to correct that wrong. Frazier did, and he was stopped a second time.

 

Who are you to judge the scope of other people's effort ?
Especially when these people take paths that you youself never did nor even could.
Instead of constructing an argument in result by disapproving someone and awarding the other, one could simply pause. It's called decency.

 

What's being argued here? That Douglas is a less bad defeat because it wasn't the same blowout as Foreman-Frazier?

I think what we need to ask ourselves is what the second best KO Douglas had was. I really don't know. For Foreman it's probably Chuvalo, seeing how hard he was to KO. But Lyle wasn't easy either and even though Norton has gone down in history as china chinned, Foreman was the only one to stop a prime version. How many KO's besides Frazier do Foreman have that's better than Douglas's second best?

I think that's where we should look rather than who was stopped first.

 

Boxers literally get paid to be judged.

Literally.

The fans have every right to rate a boxer's effort and performance. As an athlete you don't get to be upset if you make a half assed effort showing up out of shape and people call you out for it. Especially if we're having a discussion about legacy and atg rating.

And for the record I have competed in combat sports so don't even go there. I always gave my best.

 

2nd best KO for Douglas? He knocked out the undefeated Dion Simpson, who went on to win the coveted mid American title...!

And...uh...

Basically nobody of note.

He fought a lot of big names like Page, McCall, Berbick, Cobb, etc. Good wins. However, all went the distance, zero knockouts. Not even a single knockdown. That's a red flag when you step up in class and produce absolutely no KOs, stoppages, or downs.

He simply wasn't a big puncher, period. Then for one night he delivers the ass whooping of the decade to Tyson.

I think it's safe to say getting KOd by Douglas is far worse. Can't believe this is a serious conversation.

I think koing Lyle, Chuvalo, Norton, ledoux, are better than all of Douglas other knockouts combined.

 

1) I didn't mention in any word that I would prioritize Tyson or Frazier in a ranking!

2) If you did this, you´d give Tyson next to no room for any comparison with Fraziers two round loss.
Of course people might have a problem with that. Why?

Because you simply have more opportunitys to get yourself into a better position to win a fight if its ten rounds, than if its a two round blowout loss.
For example, Tyson landed about 100 punches on Douglas and indeed got himself into a chance to win. The knockdown was too late in the round and the moment dissipated.
If Joe Frazier fought 10 rounds, shook Foreman up, but get stopped two rounds later, the perception would very well be different also.

If someone wanted to make a clear argument for Frazier, I think pointing out how their losses occured is superfluous.
You can just check binary (loss/win) and come up with "who" and the case is closed. Calling "how" makes the situation worse. Thats what confused me in the first place. There simply is no need to.

Evaluating who of them ranks higher is terribly difficult. To be honest, if I had to, I have no idea for a clear logical path to do so. I had the feeling that the debate went the way of trying to check for both their losses. Like it came up earlier in the thread:

 

Frazier faced a murderous puncher, arguably the hardest single hitter in history, who is also a great finisher.

Tyson faced a guy with very mediocre power who had no other noteworthy KOs and very few notable world level wins.

I think these are very significant factors contributing to why Frazier went out in 2 rounds and Tyson lasted 10...!

When you face a mediocre guy with mediocre power, it's not all that shocking that it takes a long time for you to get knocked out.

 

Good point.

I'd hazard a guess at Mike Williams being Douglas' second best KO victory.

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Williams had put in a really good effort here. Unfortunately for him, Douglas was in the mood to take it up a slight notch and was determined to have the win.

All of that said and putting Foreman's KO of Frazier aside, I'd rate the following KO Wins of Big George quite highly:

1. Chuvalo
2. Lyle
3. Norton
4. Moorer
5. Cooney
6. Peralta
7. Qawi
8. Rodrigues

I'm not too precious on the order, but I think you could argue that all of these are better than Douglas' KO of Williams.

 

I think most reasonable people acknowledge that there isn't a lot between them. This in itself perhaps makes the ordering difficult.

I'd also suggest that the problem isn't so much the lack of a clear logical path to rate them, but rather that there is more than one logical path to do so. Indeed, there are multiple, interconnected paths.

The one path we are discussing here is the nature of a loss, beyond the numbers alone.

One can call Frazier's loss to Foreman a calamity, but one can equally reason, in retrospect, that it was inevitable - given, amongst other things, what Foreman went on to prove. The quality of that Frazier loss took more than 20 years to fully mature.

Likewise, people can view Tyson's loss to Douglas as a disaster, but will find it difficult to reason beyond that. Most reasoning centers on Tyson himself, in order to mitigate such a poor performance in his prime - not so much on the nature of the challenge he faced in Douglas, since it was never demonstrated before or in the years that followed their match. Douglas simply wasn't supposed to win, but he did.

Now, one can make of that what they will. But it seems fairly obvious to some that these factors reflect a truth and make Tyson's loss to Douglas objectively worse than Frazier's loss to Foreman.

There's more to it than that since there's no accounting for individual interpretations and biases therein. However, the above is just an example of a reasoned path to an evaluation.

 

Foreman was awfully impressive in the way he took out Frazier. His power was only a part of it. It's one thing to Knock a guy like Frazier down. The most impressive part I think was Foreman's confidence and fearlessness in stepping forward and going for the finish.
Joe Frazier got up from the 1st KD hurt but fighting back hard. He was firing some missiles at George. Most guys in Foreman's shoes there may have realized they should take their time because Joe was still dangerous. George was impervious to that leather flying by his head and even connecting once or twice. Joe was still kinda dangerous for about 3 or those
He got him hurt, kept him hurt, IDK how many punches it took Foreman to get the stoppage. It took guts for Foreman to stand in there because alot if big punchers would have retreated.
A casual look makes it appear easy but that was an uncommon force in the ring George Foreman. A sad way for Frazier to lose his title being one sided, humiliating. Though he didn't lose any honor though. His courage. I don't think anyone would put a 10 count on Joe. He proved that in Jamacia. He was crazy too.