Tua is fat but Dokes is chinny chin chin. Tua by come from behind late KO. Destruction and Mayhem has Spoken!!
I never ever thought this criticism of Dokes was accurate... He wasn't George Chuvalo, but he wasn't Tommy Morrison or Carl Williams either If you look at it, he was stopped three times in what could reasonably be considered his prime or close to prime years, at the very least USEFUL years... Once by Gerrie Coetzee, who was a monstrous hitter with the right hand, many years later in an absolute classic with Evander Holyfield, and finally in really his last fight where he still looked good on an out-of-nowhere monstrosity of a shot from Razor Ruddock that would have essentially knocked out 98% of heavyweights ever... Now, certainly being stopped thrice doesn't indicate a guy has necessarily a good chin, but there is more to it than that If Dokes were truly chinny, Morrison/Williams/Wlad/Heavyweight Bob Foster chinny, there is no way he absorbs what he did from Evander for 10 rounds, there is furthermore no way in hell he survives the brutal working over he sponged at times from Mike Weaver in their rematch... His chin wasn't BAD, certainly not bad enough to be considered "chinny" There's a flipside as well: Coetzee was reaonably skilled and threw a straight right on the button, quick and heavy, with regularity... Holyfield was a terrific counterpuncher and combination puncher and again, very skillful... Ruddock, though not particularly skillful, was a tall, long fighter... Tua, on the other hand, was very short, had very limited skills, seldom showed the ability to work around a really good opposing jab and threw a left hook that, while certainly very powerful, was somewhat slow and predictable in that it was what his offense was predicated on... he lacked Joe Frazier's (another guy married to his hook) skill at bobbing and weaving into range and using a rapid, two-fisted body attack to set up the hook, not to mention Frazier's single-minded tenacity to achieve that goal... I will concede that Tua has an outside, slim chance of landing a fight-altering shot, especially if Dokes becomes overconfident (which, to my eyes, seemed to be a little bit the case against Coetzee) but I would think 9 times out of 10, this is Dokes' fight... he is so much faster, his skills miles ahead and his tools are exactly the kind Tua had such difficulty with, that I can't see him losing except on the occassional freak shot
