1. Joe Frazier: Sorry, Tyson fans. Tyson never put Muhammad Ali on his ass with his. As Buster Douglas and Evander Holyfield showed, Tyson's left hook could be neutralized. Every exchange you had with Frazier, the left hook was the defining punch.
2. Mike Tyson: When Mike Tyson had a solid head on his shoulders, he set up the left hook as beautifully as anyone in the history of boxing. Jab, right uppercut to the heart, long left hook as the other guy was pulling away. Or he'd simply wing away. The problem is that he didn't have anything else. When he winged away, he missed most of the time, but even when he didn't, he only had one way to set up that crushing left hook. Joe Frazier had a hundred.
3. Floyd Patterson: The credit for Patterson's "Gazelle" left hook should partially go to Cus D'amato, as he taught the same hook to Mike Tyson and Jose Torres. 99% of the power comes from your strong foot, the right foot.
4. Jim Jeffries: Before Floyd Patterson, Jim Jeffries threw the prototypical left hook, and he defined the left hook for three or four generations of fighters. Stories of his left hook have been passed down from trainer to pupil since the 1800s. But in a way, Jeffries's left hook was fundamentally flawed, as he was left-handed and left-footed. He got the power off the front foot instead of the back foot, and it wasn't until Cus D'amato that the purely back-footed left hook became a reality.
5. Joe Louis: You can't talk about any punch in boxing without talking about how Joe Louis threw it. The knowledge behind Louis's arsenal came from from the great Jack Blackburn, his trainer. Blackburn taught Louis to perfect every aspect of fighting, and the way he threw the left hook was simply perfect. Louis had a horrible habit of dropping his left hand, but he always kept his right hand by his chin. The hook might've been his most technically perfect punch.
6. Tommy Morrison: Tommy Morrison took that D'amato left hook and put it on a 6'2", 225-pound frame. He might have had the best pure hook boxing's ever seen, only his chin was weak, so he couldn't trade it with the best fighters out there. Give David Tua Morrison's left hook or Morrison Tua's chin, and you have a monster.
7. David Tua: For pure power, might be #1, but he didn't throw it often enough, and he didn't keep his right hand up the way Louis and Jeffries did, and he didn't have the range of Patterson, Tyson and Morrison. He was excellent at blocking the left hook, unless he happened to be throwing one himself. He threw the double- and triple-jab, but never doubled up to the body.
8. Cleveland Williams: Williams had a more traditional left hook, combined with murderous power and a murderous reach. It's interesting to watch his matches with Sonny Liston. Liston had more range on the jab, but Williams had more range on the hook.
9. Jack Dempsey: What made Demspey's hook so dangerous is the way he targeted different areas with it, the floating ribs, the point of the chin, the solar plexus, the temple, the jaw - even the groin. In combinations it was deadly, 190 pounds or no 190 pounds.
10. Sonny Liston: Sonny Liston was a simple man, and a simple fighter. As an amateur and early professional, he knocked people out with the jab. Then he learned the hook, and then he learned the right hand. No one knows if he was a lefty or a righty - no one saw him write - but most people assume he was left handed.
11. Wladimir Klitschko: "When was the last time you saw a heavyweight throw a double left hook to the body and then the head," was Jim Lampley's commentary. He also claimed that Klitschko was the only heavyweight he'd ever seen throw the triple left hook, even though David Tua'd been doing it for years. HBO hype aside, Wladimir Klitschko, with his 6'6", 240-pound frame, throws a mean left hook. His jab-left hook is a uniquely dangerous weapon in boxing today.
12. Razor Ruddock: It's really, really hard ranking a crushing left hook like Ruddock's below those of such smaller men, and while I'll admit ranking Patterson so highly is mostly out of historical value, I've yet to see any human being throw the hook like a 205-pound Joe Frazier. Watch how Morrison fought Ruddock. He didn't even as much as cock the left hook until late in the fight. The first hook he threw floored Ruddock, and led to 70 unanswered punches that ended the fight.
13. Gerry Cooney: Along with Ruddock, it's hard to rank Cooney's hook, because he only beat fighters who were past it. Sure, Cooney was big for the early 1980s, but what great fighter did he take down with it?
14. Henry Cooper: Like Cooney, Cooper didn't have much besides the left hook. He lacked the size of Cooney and other more recent fighters, but he hurt Ali with it. Don't buy that bullshit about the break between rounds being more than five seconds more than it should have been; it wasn't. But Cooper put Ali down, hard.
15. Lennox Lewis: What a lot of people forget about Lewis was how many weapons he had. He arguably had the best right hand ever, and his jab was painfully efficient at finding range and setting up other weapons. The hook might have even been his fourth-best punch after the uppercut, but he carried a lot of power and speed on it.
16. Muhammad Ali: Out of all the people on this list, he had the weakest left hook. But he also had the fastest. Ali would land this punch over and over again, almost at will. He ranks so low because he was badly open to the left hook counter.
17. Jersey Joe Walcott: Again, I'm hesitant about ranking sub-200-pound heavyweights as regards to punching power. As I've said before, it's hard to compare eras and weight classes. A lot of people don't talk about Walcott specifically. He beat Joe Louis, no matter what the judges said. He sent Louis to the canvas twice, and Marciano to the canvas once. Jack Dempsey once said that Rocky Marciano was the best heavyweight ever because he won the World Championship with one punch, but Walcott did it, too. Although Walcott was officially 194 and Charles 182, there were rumors flying that Charles was 168 leading up to the bout, and at fight time, he looked 20 or 30 pounds lighter than Walcott.
18. Rocky Marciano: For a 187-pound fighter who's best hand was the right, Marciano might not seem like the type to make this list, but the surgery done to Roland LaStarza's right arm says otherwise.
19. Tony Galento: A fat, balding, middle-aged man. Why do I relate to this man? Galento did nothing good and did nothing right, except for throw the left hook. He didn't have as solid an understanding of the fundamentals as even Butterbean did, or maybe he knew more than he let on, because that hook of his put a lot of people out. [/list]
- Honorable (pound-for-pound) Mention: Floyd Mayweather. I know it isn't popular to sing Floyd's praises, but there's some serious technical greatness behind Mayweather's success. He could throw a right cross faster than anyone could throw a jab, but the versatility of Mayweather's left hook was simply unreal. He could throw every left hook mentioned above and then some. Sure, he didn't fight everyone he could have but since Ali, who has? Heck, before Ali, who has?
He helped bring the lefthook to prominence.