Who Would get Knocked Down First if prime liston vs prime tyson...........

[BKM-]

any fool knows he threw that fight, so don't try to use that as something to strengthen your argument.

I would've expected something else from you as an Ali lover lol. Liston was knocked out period. His mama said it too. Guess Liston didn't have that granite chin after all.

[Yogi]

chaaaaaarles "sonnnyyyyyyyyyyy" liiiiiistoooooooonn!!!!!!!!!

Yer just too friggin smart, Butterfly...Five points for you!

[supaduck]

My guess would have been James Douglas.

[butterfly1964]

I would've expected something else from you as an Ali lover lol. Liston was knocked out period. His mama said it too. Guess Liston didn't have that granite chin after all.

"sigh" i guess i'll repeat myself. cleveland williams punches alot harder than ali, and yet williams hit liston with his best shots and couldn't drop him, so what makes you think ali knocked liston out with one light punch? as a matter of fact, ali hit liston with much harder shots in that fight, and liston wasn't hurt, so liston threw the fight period!

[supaduck]

Liston made it waaay obvious he threw it. Ali was a good puncher, but he's not a top 30 of all time. And even if he was, that punch, at any rate doesn't look like it'd floor a welterweight.

[BKM-]

Sonny Liston was KO'd if you like it or not.

[butterfly1964]

Sonny Liston was KO'd if you like it or not.

so you actually think that punch was strong enough to send, let alone "keep" liston on the canvas?

[Brockton Lip]

I think he stayed down there from fear. He thought it was useless to get back up.

[supaduck]

lol, dude, this is Sonny Liston we're talking about. The man didn't fear anything.

[Brassangel]

Well, we all know that Mike stating that Charles "Sonny" Liston would have intimidated him was a contradiction of his beliefs. After all, Mike himself said that he was intimidated by every fighter he faced; it was just a matter of putting the gloves together and doing his job. Many fighters for that matter were intimidated and full of adrenaline before a fight. We can't say for them how they felt, we can only quote that they have ALL said it before; even Ali and Liston. Muhammad Ali said he was shaking like a leaf right before the first fight with Liston, because he didn't know what to expect. His motivation was the fact that he didn't want his brother to fight (get beat up, really) anymore, and he didn't want his parents to worry about money. So, after he coasted through the first two rounds, he took that nervous energy and turned it into confidence. Likewise, Liston himself said (to his wife) that he was terrified of Ali because, "...the boy seemed crazy. I never knew what to expect from someone who acted like that...". Joe Frazier said that he was usually intimidated until he took a few punches from an opponent. Then he grew confident because he knew what to expect from his adversaries. Intimidation will play a factor in any fight.

Now, while Roy Jones Jr. was a "true" middleweight as you put it, anyone with the slightest bit of health and diet knowledge knows that putting on weight makes you sluggish and diminishes your speed. That's a risk that fighters take when jumping up to heavyweight, instead of trimming down to a lower weight class. Also, your own power will be less than that of a fighter who is seasoned in said weight division. Furthermore, Jones was 36 years old when they tested him. Another commonplace is that speed decreases with age far quicker than power does. So not only do you have a man who added meat to his normally trim body which would slow him down, there was also a 13 year age difference between his testing and those of Ali. There's no excuse for this one; Ali wasn't the absolute fastest guy (per hand speed) in heavyweight history. It doesn't matter what weight class Jones started out as, it doesn't matter that he weighed 8 pounds less at testing, as he had to gain a bunch of weight beforehand. The results don't lie, and Jones even gave up 13 years of speed vs. The Greatest in this test. Muhammad Ali had an incredible left jab; the purest of it's kind. Muhammad Ali had amazing footwork and respitory conditioning, giving him beautiful fluidity. These things don't automatically conclude that he was the "fastest" in the raw sense of the word.

Now, back to the topic at hand (my apologies for jumping around): Liston would fall from Tyson's punches faster that Tyson would fall from Liston's. Liston himself said that Ali's right hand caught him completely off-guard after his head was already scrambled from continuously spinning clockwise around the ring. Muhammad Ali truly knocked Liston down. The fact that Sonny refused to get up isn't the issue; the punch actually floored him, he said so himself. Tyson, on the other hand, usually had to take consecutive rounds of unhindered punishment before he fell to the canvas. Tyson's shots were notorious for catching people off guard, plus they packed considerable power. Throw that into Liston's scrambled head from trying to figure out where Mike's attacking from and he'd probably go down first. Does that mean Tyson would win the fight? I don't know. But I do believe that Liston would get knocked down first.

P.S. Ali himself didn't start out a heavyweight in the olympics or in his first professional fights, so I guess that nullifies his speed credentials as well, doesn't it?