I'll confess I've always been one of these reflexive Marciano aristarches, weighting for just how eager America is promote it's great white hopes, how small he is, how past prime his opponents were & so on. And the same childish contrariness that made me refuse to listen to the Beatles until I was 24. :: I was just watching highlights of the first Charles fight and the Walcott fight though and these are elite, elite level (cruiserweight) match ups. Fuck a duck the guy could fight. Hardly a keen observation, granted, but the guy was relentless to a degree I don't think I've ever seen. There's a passage in the first Charles fight where Ezzard seems to tire & he pot shots about 25 brutal, full fledged power punches in succession within about 50 seconds set up by body angle feints in a manner I've honestly never seen before. These are full on hail mary slugs, not combos, but there's no respite between them to get set to respond or neutralise them, they just keep coming and coming, every punch in the book unpredictably. His punch selection & set up, variety & accuracy are also quite overlooked And while he was certainly hittable, he was far from a plodding sitting duck, he smothered and parried shots effectively enough to facilitate his own attacks at least. Anyway....Im hard pressed to imagine many 190lb man beating him, Holyfield included. And that's what I think about that today. :mj:
I think Marciano is over-rated traditionally, but wow, do younger fans severely under-estimate this fella. There just isn't the credence given to Marciano's conditioning, commitment, & to some extent, sneakiness there should be --- not even close to it, in a lot of instances. To me, Marciano is a deserving legend (& I have long said people criticising his competition under-estimate the difficult in lasting nine years & forty-nine fights without a single hiccup. Very few champs, regardless of opposition, last a whole career unbeaten, & there're plenty of reasons for it), & his skill-set (both legal & illegal :: ) are probably over-looked. Now, I'm not a Marciano-lover by any means, & I have my criticisms of the man & his career, but he definitely warrants more respect than he is usually given. I remember seeing him reviewing footage (post-retirement) on a TV show with a presenter, who queried him on his use of suspect tactics, including elbows & his head. "This is Boxing, not Chess!" Marciano laughed. While I have never been a fan of dirty Boxing (quite the contrary), I respect where the drive to cheat comes from. It speaks, IMO, to a bitter & dogged determination for victory, irrespective of the cost. "If you're fighting fair, you're not fighting to win," as has been said in the past. Many of the more-limited greats of Boxing (& sorry for calling him something of a great fighter, Hut, but I'm writing this with Trinidad, among others, in mind) were dirty as a result of their conviction. A fight between Marciano & someone like Jeffries, or Frazier, would've been an instant classic, probably with several, "Bowe-Holyfield I, Round 10," moments or stanzas over a long fight.
One fight I'd love to see the coming cyber overlord load up for us is the Charles of say 3 years hence having a pop at him. The first fight was damn close and I think it's fair to surmise that Charles was already on the lisp of a very precipitous decline.
There is still a lot of debate out there about just how good Charles was when Marciano fought him. It was a precipitous decline for him (not long after meeting Marciano), & there shouldn't be any question he was already post-prime when they clashed. His record gets pretty spotty after the rematch. Some would say since a partly-faded Charles ran Marciano pretty close over fifteen in their first go-round, it stands to reason he'd have won an earlier meet. Logical, but not a given, IMO (look at the close fight an aged Holyfield gave Lewis in their rematch, yet I feel Lewis might --- might --- always have bested Holyfield, & certainly would've given him a great fight with both in their pomp). I would lean toward Charles, but not by a whole lot. He really is close to having it all as a fighter, at his absolute best. What a shame to think he was a man largely lambasted & ostracised by both the fight community & the Boxing press for so much of his career. Between the feel-good stories of Walcott & Marciano, & the long shadow of Louis, stood a brilliant fighter & a wonderful man, completely shunned --- & yet, pound-for-pound, Charles deserves a historical ranking above two of those rivals unquestionably, & maybe even Louis as well.
Imagining how good that guy was in his middleweight prime boggles my tiny little mind. I'd give more for footage of Charles against say Burley than I would for a full back catalogue of Robinson's fights at welter.
The man was an absolute beast... he's a tall order head to head for anybody under 210 pounds in history, and he beats the Lion's share
