The rest of the contenders offered a barren landscape at the time; Thad Spencer, Jimmy Ellis, Ernie Terrell (propping up the top ten) and, in-between, Oscar Bonavena, Karl Mildenberger, Floyd Patterson, and some Italian guy etc. None of these guys stood a chance against Ali in the late 60s. Ali had depleted the division and his troubles with the US government was a blessing to Frazier and the rest. In fact, Floyd has never ever come close to dominating a division in the way Ali dominated the heavyweight division by 1967. Lastly, with hypothetical matchups, what most boxing people miss, firstly, is that you cannot pit a boxer against another boxer if their respective body of work was at weight classes that historically meant they could never ever have been on a collision course at any time in history. The stars simply never aligned for those guys to face each other. The second thing people miss is the situation where a boxer fought in more than one division, because factors which weigh on whether such a boxer could have beaten others who similarly fought at multiple weights at any of those weights, are too imponderable. Having said that, I have to agree with Thomas Hearns, for example, when he says Floyd would have been too small for him. Guys like Bud Crawford (he’s my favourite fighter of the post 4 Kings era) who think Floyd could have beaten a guy like Hearns at 147 pounds simply do not understand boxing even if they were great fighters themselves. Floyd had incredible reach at 72 inches for a fighter his size and he used that to his advantage but Hearns had the reach almost of a heavyweight at 78 inches. I don’t know how Floyd gets around that. (the height, the speed and the power). These guys lose sight of the fact that, firstly, at 147 pounds, Hearns was beaten only by an ATG in SRL and, secondly, Hearns was sheer murder on guys the size of Floyd. To stand any kind of chance against Hearns, a fighter had to be 5:10 upwards because, on the eye test, Hearns is probably the greatest puncher in boxing history at punching down. And whereas Hearns began his career at 147 pounds and had murderous power and pinpoint accuracy in his freakish nearly 6:2 frame, Floyd began his career at 130 pounds and never really carried his power up to welterweight like Crawford did. If Marcos Maidana, who never began his career at 147 pounds, could knock Floyd’s tooth out at that weight, can guys like Bud Crawford imagine what Hearns’ power could do to Floyd?
