Who Truly Was “The Greatest” Boxer?

By Ian “The Boxing Historian” Murphy

Among boxing fans and pundits, there appears to be a growing prevalence of revisionist history going on. You know, “everyone is an expert”. I do not consider myself an expert, but more like an educated and usually unbiased observer. Revisionist history is also often closely related to generational and cultural bias. You know, every old Italian man seems to look at Rocky Marciano as the greatest, and for people who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, it was Muhammad Ali. In the late 1980s, it was Mike Tyson. Nowadays, Wlad Klitschko is getting some press as the best, and Larry Holmes is deservedly getting proper recognition for how good he was. Now, any great fighter can be logically rated over another, as it truly pertains as to which criteria you decide to use.

Is your main point of measurement dominance? A long championship reign? Head to head match ups? Do you favor one era or the other? Unfortunately, most of the time, emotions and bias often take a solid discussion into the gutter. We all have favorites, naturally, but that approach tends to cloud objectivity. With the Heavyweights, popular opinion tends to favor Muhammad Ali or Joe Louis as the greatest of all time. It is not without reason, as good cases could be made for either man. To determine who truly is the Greatest, I’ve decided to use head to head style match ups as my primary rating standard. To further breakdown these style match ups, I’ve put together a generalized list of attributes in an attempt to somehow quantify and qualify the ratings.

These attributes include (in no particular order of importance):

Punching power
Speed of movement
Reaction and reflexes
Punch resistance (chin)
Ring IQ (which includes adaptability and strategy)
Heart (the ability to persevere under adverse conditions)
Conditioning
Mastery of fighting in multiple ranges
Improvisation and creativity

First off, we must realize there is no such thing as a “perfect” fighter. All have weaknesses and limitations in some form or another. Joe Louis, for example, was not particularly fast of foot, and admitted he had trouble when smothered. Even Muhammad Ali (contrary to modern revisionists) had some glaring weaknesses to go along with his massive strengths. Larry Holmes’ high reliance on his greatest weapon (his jab) also left him open for big right hand counters (vs Shavers, Snipes, and later, Tyson). Lennox Lewis and Wlad Klitschko, despite being very large men, were more than a little chinny, and both lost in their primes to ordinary competition. All this being said, perhaps the closest thing we’ve ever had to a perfect fighter (but not unbeatable, as ALL can be bested under a number of different circumstances) is Jack Dempsey.

Why Dempsey?

Dempsey (especially when you look how he rates according to the attributes), is the total package. From a purely physical perspective, he has big power, great speed, trip hammer reflexes and a good chin. Dempsey’s ring IQ was very high as well, and this is proven by him defeating a wide variety of styles during his career. He understood that he was vulnerable to slippery movers with good defense, but at his best, he was able to overcome this and defeat them. His fight with Tommy Gibbons illustrates this perfectly. He had to adjust his typical “search and destroy” plan and be more measured with his attack to overcome a tough style match up. Also, he was incredibly patient and was able to bide his time to wait for the right time to strike. In two fights with Gene Tunney, Dempsey was being soundly outboxed for sixteen and a half rounds. In round 7 of the second fight, Dempsey had his moment, and boy did he take it! He got Tunney moving backward with a right hand and lunging left hook. The right hand hit him clean, but it didn’t hurt Tunney that bad, but instead forced him to retreat. The problem was that Tunney ran out of room and got trapped on the ropes. Dempsey unleashed a barrage of punches, punctuated by a quick, snappy, and crushing left hook that floored Tunney for the only time in his career. We all know the story of the Long Count fight, but that sequence underscores how crafty Dempsey could be. The man was well past his best and still managed to pull it off!

Another thing to consider was that even some of our greatest Heavyweights don’t operate well in multiple ranges. Ali could run and gun with the best of them, but he could be neutralized (at least temporarily) when pressured into a corner or on the ropes (see the Frazier and Chuvalo fights). Marciano could not hit from long range due to his 68” reach. Joe Louis could be out-maneuvered. Dempsey? He could cream you from any range. Case in point is his fight with Luis Firpo in 1923. Firpo was a crude, but brutally strong and tough puncher, kind of a poor man’s George Foreman if you will. Firpo was able to hurt Dempsey due to his strength and perseverance, but he himself was dropped NINE TIMES in two rounds mostly by short, rapid fire body punches and shovel hooks. Yet, the finishing blow was a long overhand right. Dempsey was able to take out his opponent wherever the opportunities would arise.

When you look at the most important tools a fighter can have, Jack Dempsey has the greatest amount all put into one fighter. Yes, we know he was a tremendous athlete with incredible reflexes and coordination. That’s the base of his greatness. He could punch with anyone, but was small and light enough to not have his power go out the window late in a fight due to fatigue, which tends to plague big punchers (who also happen to be heavier in body weight). He was fast enough to keep up with the slicksters and his power and ability to hurt at any range is what helped him overcome his tougher style match ups like his fight with Gibbons. For the same reasons, he likely beats Tunney if they both met in their primes. He was able to reset his course mid-flight if his initial plan was not working. Even if some fighters might outscore the Mauler in certain attributes, they had bigger weaknesses also. Ali and Tunney were probably faster. Foreman and Marciano might have more one-shot KO power. Maybe Louis and Frazier could be classified as having a comparably effective left hook. However, NONE of these fighters put it all together like Dempsey.

Many fight fans (and so called “experts) would simply rate Dempsey lower solely due to the great passage of time since he fought. Surely boxing progressed like other sports since then, didn’t it? Yes, to a point. As the fight game continued to grow in popularity through the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, the general caliber of competitors grew with it, mostly due to the talent pool being tremendous. Baseball and Boxing were the sports that paid the most in those tough financial times, and if you were no good at baseball, you tried your hand at fighting. After perhaps 1960, the game gradually weakened from the bottom up. The top guys (Ali, Frazier, Foreman, etc) were all on par with the best of other eras, but the competition underneath rotted when you got below the top 5 or so contenders. The rest of the reasoning for boxing’s decline is beyond the scope of this article. Do the math for yourself and you’ll get the idea. Better yet, pick up Mike Silver’s Arc of Boxing…

Part of what confounds most undereducated boxing fans is the overall caliber of fighter that competed in Dempsey’s time. Their toughness, conditioning, the ability to pace themselves, and the adaptability to different styles was not solely attributed to Dempsey. All the top fighters of that era had that temperament. The other is the fact that just because YOU haven’t heard of them, or can’t understand why they don’t have a 44-0 record with 40 KOs, or why they didn’t have muscles coming out of their ears, it doesn’t mean that they weren’t tremendous fighters. Also, the proliferation of recorded fights in more recent times enables us to see good fighters build up impressive highlight reels on their way up. Look at Tyson’s HL reel. It’s very impressive, but it was racked up against mostly journeymen. Some were good fighters (like the belt holders he beat in 1986-1987), but most were ordinary. I’d wager that if we were able to watch Marciano knock out his first 15-20 opponents we might be more inclined to view him more objectively. Let’s take it a step further and look at Jack Dempsey on the way up to his championship match with Jess Willard in July 1919. In 1918 alone, Dempsey fought 21 times, lost one, and won 16 by knockout, most in the first few rounds. Imagine if we had that highlight reel?

Some of boxing’s most respected fighters and managers also favored Dempsey over all other Heavyweights that came before or after him. Two such men are Ray Arcel and Max Schmeling. Arcel is one of the sport’s all time great trainers, and his opinion was held in high regard. He saw Dempsey in person, and he saw Lennox Lewis. That is over seventy years of heavyweight champions and covers practically all the best, save for Jack Johnson. Arcel felt that Dempsey was the best he ever saw, and the next best wasn’t even close. Max Schmeling himself was a great fighter and former Heavyweight champion. He fought Joe Louis on two occasions, winning one and losing the other. His opinion of Louis, Ali, Marciano, etc.. is objective, and he rightfully praises them. However, he has a special reverence for Dempsey as the best of all. Now these two men lived through most of the twentieth century. Schmeling lived to be 99, dying in 2005. Arcel made it to about 95, passing away in 1994. These two men were not loudmouth fanboys, or wannabe “historians” who write about fighters on the internet. They knew what they were watching, and rated Dempsey as the greatest of the heavyweights.

I am fully aware that my rating and opinion of Jack Dempsey may be starkly different than the common consensus, which usually rates Muhammad Ali as the greatest. Maybe Ali was, but I think my relative youth actually helps me to be more objective. I was not alive when Ali was champion, so I was not influenced by his brand and salesmanship. The same could be said about other legit claimants of the top spot like Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano. A good case can be made for either of those fine champions as well, but I’ll leave you with this: if those guys were the best ever, why did Bruce Lee (who was meticulous if anything with his research and understood the kinetic potential of the human body as good as anyone) model the fist fighting aspect of Jeet Kune Do after that of Jack Dempsey and not after Ali, Marciano, or Louis?

*Note: Special thanks to Michael Blythe his tremendous knowledge and (in my opinion), proper perspective and understanding of Jack Dempsey. Blythe was a former pro fighter, so his insight is particularly revealing. Mike is also also an expert on Bruce Lee and martial arts in general.

[si-contact-form form=’2′]