This is Rummy's Corner.
Good evening boxing fans and welcome to Part 8 of the Boxing Survey Series.
This open Survey was conducted in the Classic Section of BoxingForum24.com and 24 volunteers
participated.
Each of them provided a Top 15 list for each of the traditional 8 weight classes.
Today we will be exploring the Heavyweight division.
I did not personally participate in the Survey, as I did not want my opinions to influence
the final outcome.
This was the scoring system.
100 points for a 1st place vote, and so on according to these point values.
With 24 participants, the most points any individual boxer can accumulate in any given
weight class is 2,400.
Let's quickly review the Top 10 results in the Heavyweight Survey.
#10 is Evander Holyfield.
The Real Deal scored 384 points and he appeared on an impressive 23 out of 24.
This is the 2nd highest score we have seen in the Survey for a 10th place finish.
#9 is Iron Mike Tyson.
Iron Mike just edged Holyfield out by a mere 10 points.
Tyson got 394 points, he appeared on a perfect 24 out of 24, and he also received one 1st
Place Vote.
Ironically, Tyson joins Roy Jones Jr as the lowest ranked Top 10 finisher to receive a
1st Place Vote.
#8 is Jack Johnson.
457 points for Johnson and he appeared on 22 out of 24.
So less mentions for Johnson than the two just behind him, but Johnson was held in higher
regard on the whole despite getting less mentions.
#7 is Smokin' Joe Frazier.
He received 479 points, and Smokin' Joe also finished on a perfect 24 out of 24.
So we're only at #7 and already we have just as many new members of the All 24 as we had
during the entire Light Heavyweight Survey.
#6 is Big George Foreman.
Big George scored a solid total of 727 points and he also appeared on a perfect 24 out of
24.
727 points is close to the average we have been seeing for finishing #6 in other weight
classes.
#5 is Rocky Marciano.
The Brockton Blockbuster tallied 781 points and he appeared on 23 out of 24 Survey lists.
So one less list than Foreman, but Rocky was consistently rated a little higher.
#4 is Lennox Lewis.
He earned 939 points and Lennox is another Heavyweight who finished with a perfect 24
out of 24.
Very respectable numbers here for Lewis, who was consistently held in high esteem.
#3 is Larry Holmes, The Easton Assassin.
With 1,295 points Holmes becomes the first Heavyweight to be revealed as a member of
the 1,000+ points club.
The Easton Assassin also received mention on a perfect 24 out of 24.
At #2 we have Joe Louis.
Powerhouse numbers for The Brown Bomber.
1,765 points for Louis, 23 out of 24 mentions, and Louis also received four 1st Place Votes.
So Louis was inexplicably missing from one list, but 1 out of 6 view him as the greatest
heavyweight.
That's a significant enough dissenting voice that it definitely deserves some attention.
And at #1 we have The Greatest himself, Muhammad Ali.
He basically ran away with this thing and wasn't especially close.
A staggering 2,245 points, a perfect 24 out of 24, and Ali received a whopping 19 out
of 24 1st Place Votes.
This represents a very strong consensus among those in the Survey.
So this is the entire Top 27 statistical breakdown for the Heavyweight Survey, and honestly,
I think this represents the strongest Top 10 list in the entire Survey for the traditional
8.
This just looks good to me across the board.
The Heavyweight results are only the second division where everyone in the Top 10 received
at least 20 mentions.
And here in the Heavyweight Survey, everyone received at least 2 mentions more than what
happened at Feather.
To me this represents a very strong consensus.
If you look at the Top 13 names - the large majority of Survey volunteers agreed on the
names listed here, usually with a slightly different ordering.
But the names were largely the same, and that's the important thing here.
We have never seen this type of thing happening in any other weight classes.
For me personally, I think the Top 7 is rock solid!
Even the ordering looks damn good to me.
If I had to nitpick a little here, I would probably swap Foreman and Marciano around.
I might have Jack Johnson and Jack Dempsey a little lower, and I might have Wladimir
and Liston a little higher.
These guys are all tight here, and the scores I believe reflect as much.
It's a perfect Top 4 as far as I am concerned.
I agree with that exact order - Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis, Larry Holmes, and Lennox Lewis.
That looks perfect to me.
Absolutely perfect!
This is a damn fine Heavyweight result.
On the right side of the list, we have some oddball selections over there that feel a
little bit out of place to me - and no disrespect to these guys, they were all oustanding Heavyweights.
But I'm not sure some of those names like Lyle, Mercer, and Ibeabuchi - I'm not sure
they really belong in this discussion.
And while I haven't overly emphasized this fact, the right side, especially the lower
half of the right side - these are just basically guys who received random mentions towards
the bottom of some lists.
This was never really meant to reflect a true Top 30, because the participants only submitted
a Top 15.
And that's true at every weight class, not just Heavyweight.
But even still, Jeffries, Walcott, Charles, Wills, Tunney, Patterson, Schmeling - these
guys do belong in this discussion.
And with Tyson Fury, well - I don't personally like ranking boxers when they're still in
the midst of carving out a legacy, but I can understand why some people gave Fury a shout.
A little premature for me, but the book is still open here.
Now some of you may be wondering why I'm only showing a Top 27 instead of a Top 30 like
the previous 7 weight classes, and the reason is that's all we got.
27 total boxers, which was the least amount of boxers mentioned in any of the 8 divisional
Surveys.
This, too, reflects a strong consensus among the members of the Survey.
And honestly, without some of those peculiar names included, it could have been even lower
than 27. So 3 new members of the 1,000+ points club.
This has been consistent throughout, 3 or 4, where surprisingly Flyweight was the lone
exception with 5 boxers scoring over 1,000.
6 new members of the All 24 is the most we've ever seen, and were it not for the strange
omission of Joe Louis on one list, this number could have easily been 7.
So in total we had exactly 29 members of the 1,000+ points club, well 27 technically, as
Robinson and Greb did it twice.
And there were a grand total of 30 unique members in the All 24.
So Muhammad Ali had the high score here, deservedly so, which comes as no surprise.
2,245 points for Ali represents the same exact type of consensus for the top spot we've seen in
every weight class, with the exceptions of Lightweight and Middleweight.
And Ali also had the most 1st Place Votes with 19.
So now that the divisional Survey rankings are complete, Sugar Ray Robinson proved to
be the King of the 1st Place Elite!
2,380 points and 23 1st Place Votes. Mighty impressive stuff.
Were it not for that one 2nd place vote Robinson received at Welter, he would have had a Perfect Score of 2,400.
So that is it for this one, and next up we have the All Time Best Survey.
Just as a quick reminder, that Survey is independent from the 8 we've already reviewed and it's
slightly different with a slightly different scoring system.
Basically the difference is, for the traditional 8 everyone submitted a Top 15 list.
But for the All Time Best Survey, it was a Top 25 list.
So I'll go over the scoring system when we get there, and I cannot wait to find out the
results in that one.
Very fired-up to see the final numbers.
Once again, a special thanks to the 24 participants who took the time and effort to create and
submit their Survey lists.
Without them this survey would not exist.
Please share your thoughts on the Heavyweight results in the comment section.
Thanks for watching everyone, I hope you enjoyed, and have a wonderful night.
This is Rummy's Corner.