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A few Trinidad fights come to mind. He usually destroyed the guy once he got up.
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Thanks for your answer. This stuff is impossible to prove and comes down to opinion. All of your top 6 are murderous punchers for sure. I give Foreman the number 1 spot because he hit so hard with all the punches. Hooks, uppercuts and straight punches. Wilder and Shavers are mostly straight right hand bombers with their other punches being hard but not exceptional. Everything Foreman threw with either hand was very hard. As hard as Shavers hit I think Wilder's straight right is faster and harder than Shavers's straight right. Wilder's straight right when he throws it correctly is the hardest single punch I have seen. It's a lightning fast bomb with maximum weight behind it.Comment
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Morrison vs Rud**** was a corker.
Holmes vs snipes was another.
But yeah I would say shavers hit on Holmes was a monster shot and how he rose up from that still baffles me todayComment
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The old timey ones like Dempsey-Willard were pretty nasty
Burns knocked Palmer down 9 times in four rounds before KOing him. I don't think there is any video though.
Also, it's a knockout not a knockdown, but, when Walcott beat Charles in their third fight Charles went down hard as **** and got up pretty quickly actually. Then he stumbled over and the fight was called. I've always been impressed Ezzard even got up. It's a hell of a catch:
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Perfectly fair points my friend... like I said, it’s the eye test so without some sort of scientific measurement we will never know for sure.
I think it’s only fair to give you my reasoning here...
1. Shavers — it’s incredible to me how Shavers could generate so much power when he was only about my size, the size of an average American man (Id have to go back and check but I think he was around 6’1 or 6’2 and 220 lbs.) his punches, like someone said, reverberated. I know it’s been said several times he sometimes couldn’t put/keep elite guys down. But look at his fights, the guys he couldn’t put/keep down were a prime elite, arguably an ATG in Larry Holmes, a fading top-3 ATG with a proven granite chin in Ali, one of the toughest guys ever in Tex Cobb (who himself said Earnie’s punches were like getting hit by a flying bowling ball — unlike any other punch he’d ever felt), and as for the Quarry fight, he knew the dangers so he blitzed Shavers’ poor defense and got him out of there with his own decent power before he could really land the dynamite right hand. Let me clarify, however, a brief note on Wilder — if Wilder faces Ruiz, Kownacki, and Parker and brutally KO’s all of them, I will be willing to put Wilder #1. But until then, I just can’t rank Wilder ahead of Shavers (or Louis) BECAUSE OF THE LEVEL OF CHINS they’ve comparatively faced. IMO, Fury has a decent chin and incredible recovery and showed us capable of getting up from Wilder’s best shots, but he’s been put down relatively often for a HW — in other words he’s no Ali, McCall, or Cobb — and Wilder really hasn’t faced any granite chins in his career. So while I too agree Wilder has ATG power going by the eye test and the way his punches reverberate, I must go by the comparative competition when ranking power and I can’t put him at #1 or #2 just yet as I feel other guys have done more.
2. Joe Louis — I am most impressed how Louis could throw bombs from such a short distance. He didn’t need mid to long range space to hurt someone, like Wilder and Klitschko need(ed). Joe Louis, I think, is the most underrated power puncher in history.
3. Wilder — I like Wilder’s punch as one of the best all time, personally I think a lot of it’s effectiveness has to do with his pinpoint targeting and ability to land when an opponent is relatively defenseless (for example — in the Szpilka fight, he threw several full-force bombs on Szpilka’s head that he took and bounced off the ropes with, but Wilder found a way to lob that thing through Szpilka’s chin right when he was defenseless. There’s actually a video somewhere where Wilder talks about how he figured out mid-fight Szpilka’s weakness of moving a certain direction when dodging punches. So yes Wilder’s punches look amazing in terms of the power but a reason they’re so effective is his underrated ability to be accurate and his rhythm and timing. Frankly, Nikolai Valuev had the raw power to be an ATG power puncher (I literally saw the man send an opponent flying backwards four feet with a poorly-placed right hand to the shoulder/torso, and another time he scored a KD with a sloppy backhanded slapping punch) the man’s force when punching was amazing, but he was so poorly coordinated and his targeting and acceleration was so bad that it usually didn’t amount to anything. So, I think Wilder, a similarly large man, must get more credit for his incredible coordination, timing, and laser-guided accuracy.
You have a fair point also that Foreman may have been a better puncher than Wilder. He did have incredible power in all of his punches.
4. Foreman, for all the reasons you said he truly was a great puncher.
5. Mike Tyson — I was recently rewatching some of his KO’s, and the man was like a table saw the way he just ate in to his opponents. I think he would have given prime Wilder and Tyson Fury brutal KO’s but I’m not sure. I think Ali and others could have beaten him. But his real skill was he had amazing power for a smaller man and could quickly slip inside and do serious damage. He didn’t just throw dynamite one-two’s like Wilder or Klitschko, he threw barrages that took apart strong men. In my opinion that was unique at the HW level and something one usually sees at MW or WW (prime GGG comes to mind).
Wladimir Klitschko — to me he was accurately named the Steelhammer. His style was a lot like we see today in Wilder, which may be partly due to Wilder having been one of his favorite sparring partners and some of the style transferred to Wilder. Both throw one-two right hand with devastating effects, and Wlad’s KD of Joshua looks almost identical to Deontay’s KO of Ortiz in their rematch (punch lands on the side of the forehead/temple area, head jolts back at the same angle, a curtain of sweat goes flying back into the audience the same way). In my opinion Wlad didn’t have quite the one-shot power level of Wilder and others, but it was only half a step behind.Comment
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It's a nice KD, but doesn't really count as you noted. Almost everybody eventually gets up.
I wish people would take time to make the gif instead of youtube links. Even worse is having to imagine it or taking someone's word for it.
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I’m relatively young so I’m just talking when I’ve seen as it happened or some of the highlights from say my dad or older brother would have seen and showed me. I’m not saying this is an exhaustive list hence I’m asking others to lend their opinions. Just a list of my own favorite moments not necessarily saying that’s the best all time.Comment
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