Re: Don't start complaining! This is only a preliminary ske
Posted: 30 Jan 2007, 13:22
I'm disappointed that Chris Byrd failed to make your list -- again.Decagon wrote:Thanks. Frazier's low because I didn't want him, Foreman, Liston and Ali crowding the top five. For some, the scholastic study of boxing takes precedence over all, but I really wanted a list that would celebrate fighters of various eras. Do I think a drunken, 190-pound John L. Sullivan would scare Earnie Shavers? Of course not. When listing the top heavyweights of all time, I try to judge each fighter and his opponents on absolute terms, rather than on how they were compared to their respective eras. That being said, if a fighter completely dominates his weight class and cleans out the top ten, there's got to be something special about him. Here's a preliminary sketch of my top 10 most intimidating heavyweights who never won the true World Heavyweight Championship:
1. Sam Langford: Over and over again, I hear people talk about Jack Dempsey as if he was fearless. That simply wasn't true. Jack Dempsey was shit scared of Sam Langford, Frank Moran, Jess Willard and many other heavyweights. As Cus D'amato said, the only difference between a coward and a hero is what he does with his fears; they both have them. Years after Dempsey retired, he said, "Sam would've knocked me out." Langford had more knockouts than any other fighter, until Archie Moore, pushing 50, took on a professional wrestler with no boxing experience to break that record by one. Jack Johnson didn't want to fight Langford again; most fighters didn't. Langford was tiny for a heavyweight, but he had a huge reach. Nothing sucks more than fighting someone who has much longer arms than you have; he's nailing you with power shots, while you're too far away to land your jab.
2. Ike Ibeabuchi: Imagine a bigger, crazier Mike Tyson. That’s what Ibeabuchi’s presence was like. You could always tell that something was seriously wrong with him. Although he wasn’t the most talented boxer in the world, he had the punch output and the one-punch power to stop anyone. He did with one punch what it took the Klitschko brothers nearly 30 rounds, stopping Chris Byrd. One of the most popular highlights of his match with Byrd consists mostly of his ring entrance, where he looked like an animal barely contained in a human form. Leading up to that fight, he was facing charges of kidnapping and assault. After the fight, he was facing charges of assault and rape. He was simply uncontrollable, and people knew that.
3. Cleveland Williams: The Big Cat’s second bout with Sonny Liston might be the only fight between two evenly-matched, top-five heavyweights where the over/under was 5.5 rounds. In their first match, Williams put more punishment on Liston than anyone ever did, breaking Liston’s nose in the process. Liston won both bouts by knockout, but aside from Liston, no one beat Williams in his prime. Like many men who engaged in a brutal series of bouts together, Liston and Williams eventually became friends. After Liston had lost the title to Muhammad Ali, Williams was shot by a police officer, and Liston visited Williams in the hospital. Both men weren’t strangers to run-ins with the law. It was only after Williams had been shot and inactive for years that Muhammad Ali became the second man to beat a fully-matured Cleveland Williams. Williams was feared because he was a monster of a man who arguably hit harder than anyone after Rocky Marciano and before George Foreman.
4. Earnie Shavers:
5. Mitch “Blood” Green: While Mitch Green might not be the scariest boxer of all time, he might be the scariest person of all time. He was a decent amateur on the city- and state-level, and he did only marginally better on the pro circuit. But he was big, fearless and indestructible. In his long pro career which included a 10-round fight with Mike Tyson, not only was he never knocked down or out, but he was never even visibly hurt. A lot of that had to do with his style, however. Tyson wasn’t able to do much damage to Green because Green employed one of the most hated tactics in the ring, the one-two-clinch. Throughout his career, Tyson was always open to the clinch, and fighters like Buster Douglas, Evander Holyfield and Lennox Lewis took this to their advantage and scored wins. In a way, Green drew the groundwork of the blueprint to beat Mike Tyson. He showed the whole world that one of the most intimidating heavyweights of all time had a glaring weakness. The rest of his life follows myth and legend; Mitch Green was more known as a streetfighter than as a boxer, so much so that he was known as the King of New York. He did get into a streetfight with Mike Tyson, where Tyson, after being accosted by Green, attacked him. The myth is, of course, that Green got the better of the much smaller Tyson. But intimidation is more myth than reality to start with, and even today, nearly anyone would be scared shitless of the 50-year-old Green.
6. Fred Fulton: While “The bigger they are, the harder they fall” might be the most popular cliché about fighting a big man, a more truthful one would be, “They usually don’t hit as hard as you think they would, and they usually don’t fight tall.” Nicolai Valuev is an oak of a man, but he was unable to stop a 40-year-old Larry Donald, who once said that his career was ruined by a one-two combination he received at a press conference before his fight with Riddick Bowe. Primo Carnera struggled with old, light heavyweight, Tommy Loughran. Fulton, on the other hand, had crushing power.
7. Elmer Ray:
8. Harry Greb: 165 pounds? 5’8”? Nearly zero one-punch power? How could he be an intimidating heavyweight? Harry Greb had a dedication to winning that is almost singular in the history of professional boxing. Even when he was fighting someone 30 or 40 pounds heavier, his tactics never changed. He rushed forward, gave angles and attacked with every part of the body that he could possibly use. If he’d gotten a hard-on after knocking someone down, he’d probably have used his dick to poke the other guy’s eye out. One time, early in his career, he broke his arm and spent the rest of the round trying to knock his opponent out with his good arm. That was one of two knockout losses he suffered in his 400-bout career, the other also taking place early in his career. The great Gene Tunney left the ring after his first fight with Greb having lost a pint of blood and suffering from a punctured lung, reportedly. The only reason Tunney left that ring on his two feet in the first place was that he was drunk as hell. Harry Greb was the dirtiest fighter of a dirty era, and he didn’t care if either of you lost an eye that night. He eventually did have to fight with one glass eye, reportedly, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a fighter or two ended up the same way after a bout with Greb.
9. Roy Williams:
10. John Ruiz: “Everyone’s afraid to fight John Ruiz,” said Chris Byrd, one of the greatest heavyweights of the past 10 or 15 years. Most internet boxing fans really only see Ruiz through popular opinions, rarely watching his matches or the lead-ups to his matches. While on the internet, he didn’t quite live up to his nickname, “The Quietman,” in person, he did. It was Oscar de la Hoya who gave John Ruiz that nickname when they were on the 1992 U.S. Olympic Team, because Ruiz was a complete workman when it came to training. Although he didn’t go to Barcelona, his sole focus was on the bags and in the ring. If you walked up to him at the heavybag and said, “hey, how’s it going,” he’d ignore you and hit the bag even harder. In the Don King pay-per-view featuring his fight against Fres Oquendo, there was a parody of this attribute when one of the announcers tried to interview Ruiz on camera while Ruiz was skipping rope. Ruiz said nothing. But it wasn’t his just his quiet, mildly-menacing demeanor that made fighters like Lewis, Byrd and the Klitschkos stray away from him; Ruiz had an almost uncanny ability to punch fighters in the clinch without being hit himself. It was a style he developed in the years following his first-round drubbing at the hands of David Tua. Like many fighters with maddeningly boring styles, Ruiz called out everyone and took on everyone he could. Despite success after success, he couldn’t get a defining fight against one of the top fighters in the division.
I'll probably drop Ruiz; actually his profile was the first one I wrote. There simply doesn't seem to be enough room for him while leaving out George Godfrey, Roy Williams, David Tua, Elmer Ray, Harry Wills, Lou Firpo and Peter Jackson.
