Why is Liston given credit for being a harder puncher than Joe Louis?

Missed this one. Didn't realize you'd typed a ton of other stuff. Haven't looked through it yet; but yes, if you think we're going in circles, I'll trust your judgment.

 

Baer too only lost one fight in his first 27 except a couple of DQ's which also seemed rather common back then.

But all good and again, great to see you putting yourself out there in direct debate. It's one of the best learning tools. I can't think of the last time I've been pushed to breaking the single post word limit hahahaha

 

Yeah as i was just typing, my reply added to your quoted material was too big to be contained in a single ESB post

 

Candidly, I've unfortunately lost a lot of my earlier interest in greatness list debates, and for that reason am quite lazy with the research.

To me, there's a sense of arbitrary unreality to them, like arguing over favorite painters, or whether Shakespeare was better than Euripedes, or (and here I'm just needling you ) whether Kirk was better than Picard.

In principle, at least the versus debates make progress. I think we learn a little more about how to understand and predict real fights as a result of playing around with those kinds of questions. It forces you to understand what produced the margin for victory in past real fights, and to back up your predictions (or your historical analysis) with data. It gets at the causes of things.

Greatness discussions are more exercises in list-making: lay out whatever criteria, match that criteria up with your group of guys, and you've got another list. Don't get me wrong. I understand the appeal of it as a hobby. I enjoyed making greatness lists myself at one point: the sense of creating something neat and orderly with a connection to the past, like a coin collection, or charting a family tree, or planting a medieval themed herb garden. But then, I don't know that people have heated arguments about who has an objectively better coin collection...

Anyway, I'm rambling, but I figured I'd mention it, since you were curious, and we talk about such things from time to time.